I get asked sometimes ten times a day why
http://www.sex.com is not a pay site or series of pay sites niches. Fair question. I likely would make more money in the short-term doing that. But I believe in the long-term and why should we as adult webmasters care about the long term? Here are some of the reasons (and feel free to comments on them):
Being a search engine allows us to grow beyond our type-in traffic base of
http://www.sex.com, http://www.sex.net and 200 other domain names. Because we have a lot of acceptable adult text and banner advertisers to the mainstream search engine, mainstream search engines like
http://www.google.de and
http://www.about.com want our PPC results. Mainstream search engines worry about liability of taking just any advertiser on (2257, child porn, rape clips, bestiality, teen modeling sites, etc.). We take care of that for them ? at least on one level. They also worry about sexual harassment charges by those who work on adult accounts. We also partially take care of that. We have over 50 search engines we exchange traffic with.
We also work with those who do mailing and need landing pages so that all the mail does not go to one sponsor and that international traffic is handled correctly. We work with over 50 dialer companies such as
http://www.GoodThinxx.Com and
http://www.ProfitPlantation.Com. We also actively manage advertisers accounts, put up paying search boxes on pay and free sites put our dynamic results on those sites and sell keyword and country specific to over 2,600 customers. We also do
http://www.GalaxySearch.Com, a non adult search engine.
Because 1) our customer renew; 2) we are interconnected to so many other sources and users of traffic; 3) we have something that the mainstream wants; 4) we have mainstream backgrounds (talk their talk) and could help their bottom line in an acceptable way, we could sell our customer base, retaining the sex.com name for something else (and have no plans to do so) - for a big multiple to income. You are lucky to sell a pay site for 1 times its income. If we are ½ as good as
http://www.AltaVista.Com (bought by
http:///www.Overture.Com),
http://www.Overture.com (bought by
http://www.Yahoo.Com) and
http://www.Espotting.Com (bought by
http://www.FindWhat.Com), we would sell at 20 times our income, not even taking into consideration that we are more profitable on a EBITDA % basis than all of these companies.
Make sense or is dumb?