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?