who here still runs members sites here???

We do at www.payserve.com

Rebuilding our main flagship site atm www.clubseventeen.com

Numbers don't look like a few years ago but they hired me to get them back on track a bit and so far so good. We still are fairly big and have a fairly big pool of members to play with. The next year(s) will be interesting for sure.

Here's the thing.

If you talk to someone in the medical field they will tell you the sky is falling, The money is all gone, because now they only make a fraction of what they used to years ago. reality is that they are still making a lot of money, Just not what it once was.

Same goes for paysites

Summed up toe perfection.

I started with my membership-site a few years ago. Long after what some call the golden years of porn. Recently I launched a new site and will launch another one within a month.
That would be not possible without money coming in... or did you think my bank is funding my porn? Or did you think i'm sucking cock besides the freeway?

So... i don't know how it used to be; don't know how it is to see millions of dollars flying in; don't know how it is to run an office with 20 employees. It also means i never had to fire most of that 20 employees; never got paranoid/depressed from drasticly dropping moneyflow and seeying your bizz going to shit. I started in the "porn is dead" era... so... i started with nothing and only have bizz and opportunities to gain.

I'm not really concerned about people not willing to pay for porn!!!!!! I have great conversions... people still pay for porn. That said... i don't have that much traffic. So... i'm really more concerned about affiliates getting ass-fucked by google and dying out all over the place...

If i want to grow i need new traffic sources... and affiliates having trouble keeping traffic up and gaining new traffic themselfs. All i see are these "looking for ccbill sponsors" threads. It's really sad most affiliates nowadays need ccbill programs only because they send so little traffic they can't afford to have a few bucks sitting in EpochStats waiting till they reach minimum.

So are paysites trending up or down? For me it has everything to do with traffic. I have sales; i have good conversions so if traffic would grow for me the trend would be up!

I completely agree with you

It is hard to view the trend as upward, even though, at least for us, it is a steep growth trend right now, because the numbers still don't seem that big as compared to say 2005.

Basically, I would say strong upward trend, but from an unfortunate low.

One of the biggest issues for programs I think is that there are so many fewer affiliates making a living at this today.

I still run a membership site, because after porn fans get overdosed on Free porn from tube sites. They eventually begin to hunger for for exclusive content they've never seen before.

For 11 months now I've been directing free traffic to my flagship amateur porn website, and after getting paid on cpm from banners, ppl offers, and brokering traffic. My membership sells give me an incredible Return On Investment.

I think we started about the same time in this crazy paysite business (2008-2009), long after the "Golden Era" of which you speak. So tho I get attacked every so often about my (usually) bright and sunny outlooik about the health of the porn biz it's really because I, like you, do not remember "the good times". I only remember the last 5-6 years, where I also went from nothing to having a good, steady business.

We are in completely differant niches and genres I think so it's interesting we have some of the same issues. My conversions are excellent and I would compare them to many successful websites out there. But growing traffic without buying it is a challenge, a DAILY challenge, and harder now than ever. Having said that, I have raised my traffic about 20% in the last six months (and it was a bitch to do so) so I am seeing sales increase, therefore I am "growing". As easily and as quickly as I would have ten years ago? Most certainly not. But fuck, I wish The Beatles were still together, too. I'm sure 1968 was a much more thrilling and interesting year than 2013 was.

So the fuck WHAT? I live in the NOW, and my credit card bills and mortgage certainly does, so that's ALL I concern myself with. I'm sure there comes a point when an affiliate says to himself "Fuck this shit I can make more working al Wal-Mart" and leaves the Biz. Nothing I can do to help them stay, not really, so it's bye-bye Affiliate #238 or whatever. Let's focus on the ones we do have and try to find new ones...

It's a Struggle for Bucks, what can I say? LOL

Steady upward trend is what I'm seeing the past couple years.

I think a lot of the upheaval has been about the industry coming to terms (verrry slowly) with the fact that we've totally lost the customers who just want a quick wank. And this is the vast majority of males - quality isn't their highest priority, just give them sexy girls and a combination of penetration, T&A, money shots, etc, that meets their personal preferences, and they're good after 5-10 minutes. These are the people online porn got rich off of in the 1990s and early 2000s, when internet smut was this new amazing convenient way to get porn yet the good stuff was still behind paywalls. Now the tubes meet their standards just fine. They're gone forever, you can try staving off the end by throwing ever-increasing amounts of traffic at your sites, but it's a losing trend.

The market segment we need to pursue are the collectors & connoisseurs. These people enjoy certain niches and fetishes beyond just beating off, many of them will both seek out "new" material they can't find for free and are even willing to support producers of this material. They care about quality and uniqueness and to some extent customer engagement - understanding the niche and your particular customer tendencies is essential. I see savvy paysites that fit these descriptions doing fine for the foreseeable future as long as they keep up with the developing markets & technology.

Some of the big challenges are mentioned above.
-Finding good affiliates, as there's just a tiny fraction of 5-10 years ago.
-A steady flow of quality traffic - Google is volatile and IMO will become a less & less friendly source for adult sites, yet becomes more and more ubiquitous among consumers - something's gotta give there. Also more and more surfer traffic gets tied up in aggregate sites, whether tubes or social networking or other proprietary platforms, so even creating your own traffic flow via a network of self-owned sites is more & more difficult. Because of this I think branding is more important than ever.

Thank you for this paragraph, it sparked a niche in my head and I searched around for it and couldn't find it.

Very true...

The profit is dropping out of every product and service in the world however the golden years of porn was the most frustrating time for the surfer as slow connections meant surfers had to make better choices or end up wasting time. The net is now faster and free sites galore. Surfers now pay for the upgrade to quality not just the ability to see anything. The free site operators are promoting the pay sites so it is all very much still alive.

We started in 2001, when you could put up just about any site and it would make money. Like most people, our sales are nowhere near as good as back then BUT (and dont ask me how or why) in the last 4 months our sales have gone up nearly 40% and traffic up around 50%. And it seems to be climbing month on month http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/tacamateurs.com

Just wish to god I could remember what the hell I did to make it happen. Nobody breath lol

started in 1997, 17 yrs now, seen several recessions, lots of sites come and go. As for trending, its never the same, you can be up and several years, then you can be down several years depending on the economy. Right now for us its holding stead, but who knows what next month will bring.

Maybe there will be less turmoil in the world, employment rate around the world will improve and things will be smoking..or maybe more countries will riot, their economies will collapse...

My revenue from p0rn allows me to live like a KING.

In rural Mongolia.

I do, and the sites aren't doing as well in the past few years, but are still profitable. Affiliates make money, so do I, so all in all, it's still revenue. ;-)

Well if you manage to get your content not stolen by tubes/file lockers you are golden.
And you could start consulting gig as a side business.

Sales are down compared with a few years back like most on here, the main reason for our program is that we don't have anywhere near as many active affiliates, we used to get on average 2-3 new affiliates per day at its peek, that is now per week with more than that disappearing. Affiliate sales used to account for around 45-50% of our overall sales, now it's closer to 15-20%, that's a big drop. On the flip side, direct sales are more profitable, it just takes a lot of brainstorming and work to figure out new ways to bring them in.

Exactly. Just as the dude said. If you can work your own traffic sources, there's still plenty to be made. Incidentally, drop me a line fella, I'm sure we could do some cross promos!

JoePusher.com still makes money.

That is probably the major issue at the moment.

It's not as easy as it once was, but the sites still pull in good money. I launched a new solo girl last week and she is converting great, i'm just finding that many of the affiliates who used to push great traffic have either left the industry or have a lot less traffic to send these days. I think it's changed in the way that program owners now have to work harder to get the traffic to their sites, and no longer rely on affiliate sales. It's a shame because it stops a lot of webmasters from being able to concentrate so much on creating great content and sites, as they have to spend more time generating traffic.

I closed 4 of mine and only work with the two that do the best.
Sales were down 5 years in a row but the last 3 years it was within 2% and now I am running them without affiliates so making more.
Avg member on my site spends over 100 dollars a year so it is not a normal pay site

I run cam programs, not member area photo sites; But, I can tell this trend: a few years ago I had a lot of US/UK/WestEuro affiliates doing $100+/day. Instead in 2014 most of the active affiliates (left, or signing up) do $10/day and they are from: Philippines, Romania, Russia, Georgia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or other countries where $10/day is nice enough. They ask weekly payouts for sums as low as $20.