Thanks tootsie.

As I have said in other similar threads. HOW I make my nut has changed. It used to be majority memberships, and the rest was gravy. Now it is either shifted for the month, or balances out between clip store, membership, custom work, DVD, and so on. I make my money, but HOW I do it has significantly changed.

Also, traffic patterns have become very unstable and erratic. I typically do not buy traffic unless I am launching something new. So I am not referring to that kind of traffic sources.

Lastly, keep in mind that I have name recognition, and 11 years of brand and trust in my niche. So not only do I know foot fetish to the bone so to speak. I also am known and trusted to the point others are not. I have had members, and customers, for different foot sites, clip stores, etc. that have been with me the whole time! I have interacted with them on forums, or message boards, so they have a feeling they know me. I am easily accessible.

What I am getting at is. I do a lot of things different then some faceless online porn monolith or conglomerate.

:2 cents:

i like sales as much as i like poo

It ain't pretty out there, that's for sure. My situation is like many that posted before. I am working twice as hard as before for the money. My website sales are flat on transactions, but money is up because I raised prices. I try to launch a new income stream every month to help deversify the income and keep building things.

Thanks to XXJay for the real business thread and to the others that seem to have posted honest answers. Everyone hang in there. I believe like Robbie does, it will settle in a few months and the money will start to come back ... slowly ...

What a coincidence.. that's when shit started going downhill for me too

My conversion ratios are down, but my traffic is way up to compensate. Also I started my own paysites exactly a year ago which so far have been pretty good... So yeah 2008 was my biggest year in the last 5, and this year is looking to be better.

We're about 10-15% off where we should be... about 8% down in sales.. but our projected growth would've had us far higher than we are...


Second week in the month is RAPING us.. all other weeks in the month are banging.. and it's been like that since about October.. I think that's when cc statements go out...

and the same time the US went in a recession.

My site started at zero, so it could only improve. Sales have gone up each month, and it still has rebills from last March, when it launched.

As an affiliate, I mostly push webcams. Sales are down, but because of revshare, commissions are about the same.

There has been a huge drop, no doubt. Fortunately, I keep adding stuff to compensate, and it is working.

icicic....tough times.

Things were deteriorating all of last year, but then they got really bad in a hurry in the 4th quarter, and so far in the 1st.

Sales on the same traffic are down 50% or more. Alot of the places where I used to buy advertising dropped their prices substantially, as much as 50%, and I still can't make a profit on those ads.

Funny how it was till quite recent where you fucked the surfers over with hidden xsells and all that crap. You did basically anything you could to make sure they would never ever sign up for a paysite again. And now you're wondering why your sales are so bad :1orglaugh

Yeah, you sure know what you're doing :1orglaugh

But ofcourse like always you will be pointing fingers at others and blame everyone but yourself for shitty sales.

This thread is so amazing but unsurprising to me. In perfect honesty this has been a huge growth year for us, I suppose we're bucking the trend. It's harder for programs to adapt to the market though I think a lot of people are struggling because they've sort of lost touch with the consumer market. If it ain't broke don't fix it... but this being a time of hardship and change you have to be willing to take risks and really get a feel for the market again.

It's because surfers aren't using those methods anymore... Social networks, tube sites, TRUE Web 2.0 (which is a reference to interactive user-generated media) is taking over and everyone who THOUGHT they knew what web 2.0 was are in for a big surprise. Adult has been in our rut so long that we aren't really going out and seeing how people are interacting and demanding their products, so we are using the same old same old and wondering why things have changed. The demographic of the users of the internet is NOTHING like what it was 5 or even 10 years ago, and the kids that are now legal to buy porn and grew up with a lot of net savvy just aren't doing things the way their predecessors did.

Adult sales down 25% but haven't focused much time. Mostly running on autopilot, so not a bad drop.

Mainstream we are up 100% from this month last year.

That's part of it, sure, but alot of these sites I'm talking about still have the same amount of visitors, but those same visitors are not buying as much as they used to. It's not as though all of these surfers have moved on to other mediums and I'm still trying to use the old medium to attract them.

So while all of the stuff you mentioned is important, and is the future, it doesn't change the fact that the economic downturn has put a big dent in people's discretionary income, and that more than anything is what's hurting our sales right now. :2 cents:

I agree with that. When I send surfers to the tour of the site and it doesn't convert, I feel I did my part of the job. But the surfers just aren't buying at the moment.

It's sort of a perfect storm right now. Tubes that have all of a sites full length vids, torrents with the entire members areas ripped for free, and now the economy collapsing. It's probably a miracle I'm not in worse shape with my affiliate work.

For instance I read what Shap said about Twistys having an incredible January. Well, I didn't send a lot to Twistys in Jan. But what I did send was 1,043 hits and 653 of them were unique. Not a lot. And mostly just hits off of galleries in my archives as I just haven't seen much from Twistys saleswise over the last year so I'm a little slack with adding their stuff.

But still...Zero sales. And last year I was 1:2069 uniques with them.

I have real traffic. Not circle jerked or "skimmed" or any of that stuff. I don't do that. But that's what I see when I look at stats as an affiliate of programs. This combo of stolen content for free and the economy in shambles has driven sales down across the board.

It's not a matter of me getting surfers to the sites. I'm doing my job, irregardless of "web 2.0" or anything else. When I look at last year and see that with Naughty America I went 1:2,865 unique then it's obvious that I'm getting people to the tours, but for whatever reason it's just not converting. And it's not the fault of the sites content or design. Across the board those sites are looking better than ever with even hotter scenes and more content.

But it's just very difficult as an affiliate to fight the fact that you can find all their stuff for free and then add in 600,000 people a month losing their jobs :(

Shap, what is selling the best for you right now? The original Twistys or some of the new hardcore stuff? Point me in the right direction to promote so we can make some money together. What I've been doing is grabbing the galleries for the girl of the month each month, though I skipped the last two months. Should I be concentrating on one of the other sites instead?

From looking at the list of shows this year I cant belive the market is bad...their is one show every month (heck Feb has 3 i think and its the shortest month of the year)

from a year ago
traffic is down 10%
sales are down 40%

ive had to cancel my porn memberships and stopped buying porn dvds.
the only dvd i bought in 2008 was Pirates2.

if you take a look at the alexa for gfy.com theres a huge drop in traffic around july with a slight bounce back. but half the traffic from a year ago. why?
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/tr...etails/gfy.com

Less surfers? They shouldn't be here anyway. :2 cents: This is supposed to be an industry board. It shouldn't even register on Alexa's top 100,000 if it was just the actual people who work in online adult.

Good thread Jay,

It is a lot harder then ever before,Our traffic site are getting stronger but requiring a huge effort to keep them that way. Paysites have seen a big shift in traffic sources with a few of the big guys dropping off and a few news ones picking up.

I think 2009 is a time to improve your sites and give webmasters whatever they need to keep the ball rolling and sales coming in!

I'm big into SEO and I send highly targeted SE traffic to top quality sponsors and I'm down about 15% since last year. Which means I am really down more like 25% because I usually grow my business around 10% a year.

I see it as a good thing in the long run since it gave me the motivation to get my ass back working everyday like clockwork. I was getting a bit lazy there for a few years.:)

It's time's like these I like reading the following quote:

"I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered into this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins, I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. I will persist until I succeed."

Good luck everyone:thumbsup

Bullshit aside - we're making significantly more in the past six months than the previous six month period.

Male bondage sales are way up - the female stuff has increased only slightly, though.

This year it's definitely worse than last january, around -25% for me. Micro niches are still going pretty strong as usual, but the mainstream teen/big boobs/anal/pornstars stuff doesn't do very well here...no matter what program.

It's not less signups for me, but rebills are going down at a pretty high rate.

I'm really happy that my mainstream stuff is still stable, even growing a bit.

Interesting. One thing that this poll doesn't factor, is if you have a year's more experience, your profit should be going up anyways.

tough times do not last...
TOUGH PEOPLE DO.

SB

All those people saying they are making more money are full of it

:2 cents:

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh Mine are 25% off...

Sales are up for us but not for all types of traffic. Tgp sales and ratios have been dropping steadily. I did substantial research and they all started to drop at the same time. I think it was January 06. Interestingly enough tgps started a rapid decline right when Myspace and Facebook took off. Before tubes. I believe a new source of online entertainment hurt tgps as opposed to tubes.

Regarding our sales tgp sales are definitely down. But we've made up for it by being better in other areas.

Definitely not the other sites. Some of the other sites are doing ok but most of them have been doing absolute shit. I'll hit you up and work with you this week on it. I'll let you know what's working :winkwink:

Would you like to put some money on that? Just because you aren't doing better doesn't mean the rest of us aren't.:winkwink:

Amen, bro, Amen. Now is the time to focus on efficiencies and also diversification. If anyone needs help with mainstream diversification, hit me up!

TGP traffic is definitely down, linklist are pretty much dead, and tubes just give away everything you are trying to sell. I know you guy buy a lot of ads on illegal tubes sites - what do you think you are acomplishing?

I say, cut their finding and let the drown in their bandwidth bills.

I have no reason to lie. Especially when my affiliate managers also post here and could very easily say if I were lying or not.

Last month I sent over 13,813 dating joins on a system running on autopilot. January of last year, I only sent 4797. If you think that sending over 9000 more joins in a month doesnt make more money today than a year ago, then you're living in denial.

I think Roger V is speaking strictly from the "Paysite Owner" perspective and not from the affiliate perspective.

You're right. My dating, VOD, and cam sales are all steady. That's the shit that can't be stolen on torrents and tubes.

But my affiliate work for paysite sales is HORRENDOUS

That makes alot of sense. Alot of free T & A pictures there plus the ability to interact and possibly even hook up with the girls.

I will say my sales are way down, my sole source of income is from online adult(I am in the process of changing
that--working on some mainstream projects)
but I have to say, the reason seams obvious to me... when I started doing the adult website thing on the side
from my real job...adult was the web innovator...all the best innovations came from adult...now it's the exact
opposite(well maybe not exact)
what's working now?...
micro-payments-these are small payments(not 29.99 per month--maybe 2.99 per month or 1.00 per purchase)...the game community has already figured this out
constant updating --- this is the reason the so called web 2.0 sites have succeeded, people have become accustomed to constantly updated material...I have seen countless friends stare at their facebook account just waiting for something new to happen...to put this to adult, instead of taking an hour of video or 80 pics of a model in 1 outfit..take 10 pics or 10 mins of video in one outfit and then switch the outfit and background...turn 1 update into 6
I have to also say again...and I have mentioned this before but it seems to be always ignored...when I did research before starting my own tube site,
I noticed that if you look at the big adult tubes...there is no correlation between the length of video and the amount of views...NONE
but, there is a definite correlation between the length of videos and the amount of traffic.
What do I make of this...people really want constant updates AND the "cred" of having the real porn (i.e. full length videos)... but they're not actually watching the full vid...they just want the "cred" that it's there...