jayeff

Out of choice? I'm not sure I would go that far, because there wasn't really much choice involved when the trend began.

If you go back to '96/'97, surfers were falling over themselves to buy pretty much anything. That eagerness didn't provide a whole lot of incentive to give them more than the bare minimum: an attitude which was reinforced by the cost of bandwith, the cost of content and the reality that there was little if any content around which, by today's standards, would be considered "quality".

Not surprizingly, while sales boomed, rebills sucked and I recall a lengthy thread on YNot from '97 on exactly that topic. My contribution to that thread was to comment that surely it was obvious why most members stayed only a month or two and that the solution - frequent updates of decent content - was equally obvious.

Who knows whether, had the market developed differently, we would still need to be having this discussion. But the next significant trend, inevitable since generally rebills were so poor, was that PPS became the dominant payout method. And payouts quickly climbed to unrealistic levels.

The consequence of all this was that cross-sells, up-sells, consoles, the whole raft of tricks needed to pull affiliates in and support those rates, became the primary focus of most sponsors. PPS also creates potential cashflow issues: another reason to put a lot of effort into sales and leave rebills to take care of themselves.

Which isn't to say people are happy about poor rebills, but apart from the difficulty and risk involved in trying to switch business models, there is also a lot of cynicism as to whether spending a lot of money on content would improve rebills enough to be worthwhile. This arises because although content is overall of a much higher standard than it was 10 years ago, rebill levels for many sponsors appear (from the regular threads about rebill ratios) to be largely unchanged.

In part that is because "quality" content is not the only factor bearing on rebills: member area ease of use and delivering closer to what sales pitches promise, are at least as important. And some of those "tricks" I mentioned earlier impact negatively on rebills, mopping up the positive effect of the generally improving content standards that we might otherwise see. Simple greed and shortsightedness are the other reasons why content is still a peripheral issue for so many sites.

Which is an awfully long-winded way to justify the observation I made earlier, that the most popular business model does not depend on rebills and therefore you will have a very hard time convincing those who use it successfully, that they are wrong.

I happen to agree with you. I think the reason that online porn is still very much the poor relation of the adult entertainment industry, is that we don't put near enough effort into keeping customers. I believe that our ability to sell billions of dollars of crap should strongly suggest how much more the market would be worth if we came closer to delivering what surfers actually want to see. And we all know, from the relatively few sites which use it, that a quality-based business model can be very successful.

But two major problems, one of which you brought up: namely the limited number of good photographers. Because of that, it isn't practically possible for more than a small fraction of the industry to obtain the kind of content which would let more sites operate like ATK, Alscan... or like Paul Markham.

And the second problem is affiliates. Thousands won't touch revshare, many of them even when it would earn them more money. And not unreasonably, even those who do like revshare will approach new sites/sponsors with caution. So a sponsor promoting revshare usually faces a longer, harder job attracting affiliates than a PPS sponsor does. If he doesn't have the patience and resources to accept that, he needs very deep pockets (and very strong nerves) if he decides to run with PPS and yet promote customer-friendly sites.