Quote:
Originally Posted by SecondFloor
I came into the adult marketing space as a web developer. Before starting my own affiliate sites, I'd been employed working on marketing websites for different industries. So while I didn't have adult marketing experience, I felt like I knew enough about online marketing in general to give it a shot.
However, It's been my experience that the adult marketing world operates very differently from that of mainstream businesses. In short, it seems like theres a way higher abundance of spammy and low-quality sites intent on amassing huge amounts of traffic. I don't see a lot of pushing the envelope with better design, engineering, and marketing content. I don't see a lot of sites trying to be valuable to consumers - I see a lot of sites trying to trick people.
I'm not trying to trash the industry as a whole. There are absolutely great sites out there. But for every one of these there are 300 spammy wordpress blogs with illegible content - and some of these amass a huge amount of organic traffic even though they seem low effort and low value. The link-trading is very transactional. There isn't a lot of honest guest-blogging. Sometimes it feels like the only practical way to build up a link profile is through trading with low-quality sites, or paying for a hardlink.
Is my impression of adult online marketing correct? Is this really the way it is? Or am I looking in the wrong places and missing opportunities?
|
FWIW in the last few years, pornhub/xvideos/xhamster have gobbled up *huge* portions of the available organic search traffic that they didn't used to have. So, things are changing--more of the traffic/money is going to the big players with valuable sites. But there's still lots of low-value sites ranking!
Sites like alohatube have just been around forever; they got big back when it was easy, and still have all the same direct visitors keeping them popular and keeping them ranking (google strongly values brand searches--if people are typing "alohatube" into google, alohatube will rank for many queries). Eventually these sites will probably die and in 2018 it's harder than ever to get a low-quality site like this to rank. (Though, alohatube has relatively high-quality search results; their visual design is stupid but they do the right things where it counts.)
I have a conjecture about why you see low-quality sites ranking so frequently in adult--it's based on nothing but my own observations and intuitions, but I think there's something to it: Because google strongly devalues adult backlinks and websites, spammy links end up being almost as valuable as good links, because a good, contextual backlink is still coming from an adult website, which google devalues. So you're able to rank a site with a spammy backlink profile (temporarily, anyway--eventually google will devalue your spam, and continue to value Pornhub's high-quality blog posts and massive, varied backlink profile) because when it comes to adult, google doesn't see a huge difference between a spammy link and a strong contextual one. Adult is all spam, as far as google is concerned.
I could be totally wrong about all this, but I really do think there's something to it. Google rates all porn as spam/low-value, so it's easy to short-term rank a site with bad backlink profiles. Of course in the long-term bad backlink profiles will be penalized, but you can make a LOT of money getting a site to rank for a year or so with spammy backlinks.
Just look at anybunny.mobi--they went from nothing to alexa 1k in less than a year with completely shitty backlinks, made a ton of money, and now 6 months after they hit alexa 1k they've been penalized and are making beer money. You get penalized eventually but spammy backlinks can pump you up to absurd traffic levels for short amounts of time.