jayeff

Technically true, but there are a number of ways to dilute chargebacks...

There are two ways to approach this business. You can see a demand for something you can easily provide and set out to satisfy it, or you can see a bunch of marks (surfers and/or webmasters) begging to be ripped off. You can make money either way, so the choice isn't dictated by business considerations: it's a reflection of the person making that choice.

Since I am an affiliate, that is the first thing which steers me away from those who opt for the second approach. People who make poor ethical choices are not generally fussy about exactly who gets the pointed stick in the eye and I'm not big on gambling that sponsors who jerk surfers around will treat their affiliates honestly. An equally pragmatic consideration is that, by and large, the programs which set out to make their customers happy are also the best when it comes to providing affiliates with support and the tools to do their job.

We are entering an interesting phase of online porn's development. Although someone can still sit down at his PC and call himself a webmaster, it is becoming harder and takes longer to develop any worthwhile income. The ceiling (for most webmasters) is also much lower than in the past. That must impact on the big-payout, win-a-Hummer, troll-GFY-for-newbies programs, because a lot of their sellers come from among startup webmasters.

Affiliates can work long-term with unethical programs, but in my experience it is much easier in the long run to make money with the ethical ones. I can focus on steadily building traffic streams, knowing that I'm not burning my visitors each time I send them to a sponsor. That is an ethical issue (for me) but it is also a practical one: it is much easier to keep visitors than rely solely on finding new ones and after a few years you get a nice stream of repeat sales to people who were happy the first time you sold them something. Add rebills into the picture too...

The alternative is a constant hunt for new traffic and always having to be swapping out burned out destinations for new ones. Obviously that model works too, but just keeping on top of what is hot is more work than my health would have allowed me to do in the last few years. If I had gone this route, I would have been out of the business long ago.

It is also interesting to see how little correlation there is between the top sponsors and the biggest customer sites. Although some big sponsors boast popular sites, many of the biggest don't have even one site that is well-known. All things being equal, can it really be logical to believe it is easier to sell unpopular sites than popular ones?

Okay, I know there are many other factors involved and back in the day I soaked up Andy Dunn's "Trix" as enthusiastically as anyone. But how many years can you work in a business, treating it as a short-term thing, before smart becomes stupid? Our environment has changed dramatically over the past 10 years: most of our traffic pool is now experienced surfers who have been burned at least once by an adult site; payment processing has tougher rules; legislators will not be leaving us alone any time soon. All of these are reasons to approach online porn as a legitimate business and not like a street-corner shell game.

And those who stubbornly hang on to yesterday's business model are no longer able to say it's the only way to make money. Plenty of people are out there now showing that up for the bullsh*t it is.