We're gonna see some popular programs out of the biz in the second part of this year.

Okay. I have to respectfully completely and totally disagree with you on that. It's a numbers game and that's been my real world experience. And I definitely don't think it's "kids" uploading. RemoveYourContent.Com could open your eyes in a quick hurry how massive the pirating is and who does it and how it spreads like wildfire across forums that are bigger than you would have ever thought just 2 years ago.

I guess when it comes to the big tube sites and the torrents I have a dual perspective from being in the traffic and tgp game for a long time AND being a content producer and paysite owner. I know how traffic works and how the numbers game will force the search engines to acknowledge you without much effort on your part because I did it. Hell, I didn't even notice it we were so big at one point.

These days more and more people use google for everything they go to. And when you type in "free porn" in google you are going to get those tube sites because they are the biggest in the world.

And I'd bet that search engine traffic they get is infinitesimal to their overall numbers. I'd also bet that it's nowhere near as valuable as you might think. Simply because it's people searching for free shit. Yeah, some of it will convert. Just saying not as much as other more valuable keywords and phrases will.

I'd much rather have the top spot for "milf" or "big tits" or "hardcore sex" or a hundred other keywords I can think of. Hell, look for "hardcore sex" and you'll see Worldsex there near the top.

Do you think Pierre is spending a lot of time working on SEO? I doubt it. It's numbers in that case.

I don't know if stolen, but dubious to say the least since nobody is selling that content and they don't have any link to sponsors that could provide it

http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/retro-savannah/79040/
http://www.tube8.com/fetish/jenna-jameson-sybian/70618/
http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/underwater/31986/
http://www.tube8.com/hardcore/celeste-in-shiver/22426/

I admit I did a search for obvious terms that would probably send stolen content results. I gotta admit tube8 is one of the cleanest tube sites as well. But at least when it started, I'd say they had at least 70% of stolen content, there were some huge heat with that site. And that's how they became big. And at the same time, they still provide full movies to the freeloaders (an arguable point for sure), which is Robbie's point as well.
See, Worldsex is big and legit. However, they became big after his previous owner (Mads) img src'd most of their trades in the times nobody knew that trick, so eveybody sent him legit hits in exchange of nothing. Now they're legit and with different owners, but it doesn't mean the site became big by his previous owner using crook techniques. There are a couple big playas here that started cheating, stealing and such and became legal afterwards. Hey, even motherfucking Hun delivered passes to members areas when it started! My point is that some sites can be really cool now, but it doesn't mean those sites didn't grow from stealing and that they didn't hurt someone in the meanwhile

"porn" shows over 5,000,000 searches a day in Google.
"sex" shows even more than 5,000,000 searches a day

do a search.. and whatddayaknow... there's pornhub.com and keezmovies.com in the top spots.

i fail to understand who one might rationalize that as being "small"

then you factor in all the other related targeted phrases they actively attack i.e. "porn movies" etc. and ancillary phrases they rank for incidentally, you have a very significant piece of total US search traffic being owned by a relatively few sites.

you however, seem to have a business model from 1997 and you are frustrated in 2009 at trying to grow it and blaming "piracy". that right there is something to think about. your business model (grampland.com) is perhaps the absolute worst for search engines in recent years... and this is why they are all sinking in search results in the last 2-3 years.

the nature of page rank itself is that its a zero sum system. someone has to lose for someone to win (discounting the creation of new pages - which also requires factoring in those that disappear). ultimately its a value that's distributed across all domains and their pages based on what links to what. if you don't eventually start winning, you will eventually start losing. that's just a simple exercise in mathematical probability. the numbers are recalculated and redistributed every few months and either you are building and linking well or you are not and will lose to those who are. the probability future success are against you if you don't. pirates won't cause your traffic to disappear and pirates wont cause you to drop out of the SERP's completely on one of the upcoming updates any more than pirates are causing pornhub.com and keezmovies.com to rank number 1 and number 2 for sex.

and while like the multitudes who start threads about getting fucked after an update others will still be working quietly and furiously to make sure that trend continues... and i promise you, Pierre will not be ranking for much of anything in the coming years.

funny you mentioned worldsex.com - same one from 10 years ago? search engines are no longer impressed with it and neither are users that can go straight to videos.

I have neither a 1997 business model nor am I frustrated. I'm just answering the questions here honestly and from experience. And the alexa charts show nothing more than the fact that a tgp can not compete with full length free vids. Again...the NUMBERS game. They have all the traffic because people flock to free full length porn vids. Then the search engines pick up on it, and the cycle becomes self fulfilling. The same way it once was with our tgps. Remember, "Success breeds success"

And no, I'm not "frustrated". I'm still making a fantastic living doing what I love. I'm just pointing out the facts. And yes, in 1997 I made a shitload of money. And yes, this year I'm going to make a shitload of money. Not frustrated at all. I WAS frustrated a year ago when everytime I put up an update it was all over the internet for free within a few hours. But not now.

And as far as my Grampland.Com being "the absolute worst for search engines in recent years." You have literally and absolutely no idea of what you are talking about when it pertains to that site. My traffic on that site is pure gold, and I'd just about bet that I make more money per unique visit than any other free site you've ever been to. But that's where experience and knowledge come in.

By the way, just to clear up your misconceptions about Grampland and the search engines...this is from Google Analytics for Grampland.com:
# Referring Sites 99,978.00 (58.68%)
# Direct Traffic 36,495.00 (21.42%)
# Search Engines 33,895.00 (19.90%)

The absolute worst? Okay, if you say so.

By the way Pleasurepays, I know we're sparring a little here. But if you look at the combined info from our posts it makes for some pretty interesting reading.

Wow a biz related post!

Great discussions in this thread.

interesting read.
StariaDaniel:"affiliates are a pain in the ass for most program owners," I ment they cost money ( 40-70% ) and are demanding a lot of work for paysite owners, does that help/make sense?
and they are "helping" to spread free porn.

the whales thing I have to excuse myself about, not much whales left indeed, in this game.

all just pixels on a monitor

I enjoyed your convo atleast

all just pixels on a monitor

trying to relearn advanced algebra and some calculus while i work... so i don't have much time really dig into this and put together well laid out arguments. i honestly think that people in these discussions are missing the fact that these guys who are currently ranking number one, two, three etc are ranking for porns most competitive phrases because of their SEO efforts. i watch all the sites very closely. i know who is who, who links to what and what everyone is doing. whether or not viral traffic and the subsequent low quality, short lived links play a role or not.. its a minor one and they aren't the reason they rank number one for "sex", or "porn" or "free movies" ;)

you can trust me on viral traffic. having created many sites like felonspy dot com which has been all over national news, or medical adoptions dot com (which prompted calls from the FBI among other agencies) or revengecrabs.com where we launched a massive radio talk show campaign to promote it as real... and many many many more. i am well aware of what viral traffic is, how it works, where it typically comes from, the value of those links and how FAST they drop away.

pornhub.com claims to get 10,000,000 uniques a day. assuming that's true, and there's no reason not to believe it.. most likely at least 2-3 million of that is search hits. ... and that's just one site of several working together to take over THE most searched porn related phrases. there is a dozen sites that literally get over of 10,000,000 search engine hits a day combined. that didn't happen and isn't happening because of piracy

in fact, everyone keeps making this argument about piracy as THE unfair advantage they have... but i've yet to see someone actually prove a site like tube8.com or keezmovies.com isn't licensing full length videos and cutting them into scenes. whatever piracy does exist, if it does on those sites, is most likely very negligible.

everyone keeps arguing that "prepaid" cam ads are the single greatest reason they are in business and the top tube sites don't have cam ads. they have their own white labels. if its profitable (which it obviously is) that's not going to go away.. so its a moot point anyway.

and in these conversations:

everyone refuses to accept that tube sites convert traffic

everyone refuses to accept that tube sites with full length videos convert traffic

everyone refuses to accept that surfers just aren't interested in blogs, link lists, tgp's and mgp's

everyone refuses to accept the 100 other reasons their conversions are plummeting and willfully ignore those who say "hey, i've been sending XXXX hits a day to bangbus for 5 years and conversions have never changed for me"

everyone refused to accept how much of their traffic was being robbed by malware like zango and others

everyone refuses to consider how many people in the last 2 years just got fucked by everyone's "Free Pass" crap where they say $0.00 and then hit the card 4-5 times for $39.95 - all recurring - some of which is STILL going on in spite of looming prosecutions and civil suits.

everyone refuses to accept the sheer volume of surfers who have been fucked over, being sold a site that has shit for a members area

this list of reasons can go on and on and on and on as to what affects conversions and their cumulative effects today. there certainly isn't one single factor.

from my perspective, these conversations are not about an objective, reasonable, logical look at whats going on.. weighing all the facts and evidence, having a rigorous debate and then reaching a conclusion... these conversations are about people venting frustration and assigning blame and who don't want to hear anything other than what was already predetermined to be the "cause".

as link directories continue to plummet in the search results because of GOOGLE, people like Marc or Jay or others are lurching forward and backward, side to side trying to figure out what to do... and ignoring the fact that the most important plan that needs to be followed is public information, published at Stanford and remains just as relevant today as ever. Marc is adding dirty jokes to hoes.com. he could spend his time doing that, or he could spend his time building a large network of sites to slow the bleed of traffic and eventually start regaining it. he built a beautiful Ferrari... tuned it up, made it fast... then drove it right down a muddy hillside and is heading towards the bushes.

my single point in all this is that the "its piracy" argument is weak... if a factor at all, its one tiny factor of many many many. blaming a tube site for ranking number 1 for "porn movies" because of "piracy" leaves you with zero options unless you are going to change federal law. that's not a reasonable goal. no more reasonable than trying to change the rules of war while you are under attack. you regroup... you assess the situation, you identify all the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy. you devise a strategy to user their weaknesses against them... and you continue until there is parity and you can take them head on.

or... you can just let them, surfers and Google sort it out for you.

personally, i choose to be proactive and the "hows" and "why's" and "who's" are mostly irrelevant and at best, just details to overcome... not insurmountable obstacles, at the foot of which, you lie down and give up.

This is a good post with valid points. However, some of them are absolute and don't contemplate problems as a whole. Put in other words, you're doing the same you're complaining other people do: just take a single issue and make a generalization from it. Saying tubes didn't affect the business to everybody else is ridiculous and you're giving yourself the answer: if the pie is 100 and before tubes your slice was 30 and then comes someone which takes 90% of the whole pie, simple logic indicates that you'll be losing. I explained that more in detail before.

Comparing tube conversions (for what I know from many sources, EXTREMELY POOR) with other traffic sources like Robbie's or SE is downright non-sensical. Obviously, if you have 10,000,000 unique visitors a day there's a chance you'll be making money (enought to cover costs and get a decent gain after that? I don't know, don't have any info on the subject). However, if you convert 1:10,000 (and I've seen tube traffic conversions of 1:30,000, so I guess that's not a far number) and assuming for the sake of visualization an AMAZING CTR of 10%, you'll have 100 sales.

Now, a niche site that has 100,000 visits, with the same CTR (and believe me niche sites have way better CTR than any tube, general tgp or whatever) and converting 1:500 will have 20 sales. Yes, not as much as a tube site, but with 1/100 of the costs, and more important, enough to give the owner a really nice income. What I try to say here is any webmaster on this situation wouldn't care at all about tubes or not tubes or the business going to the trash.

So I don't refuse tubes converts traffic (since you went in absolute terms and say EVERYBODY IS REFUSING TO....). I'm just saying that they convert. Like crap.

I don't know your background and assume you're somehow related to a tube site. So this is what I can say for tubes. Now, for some of your points, I see they'r really valid or at least they deserve some deep discussion. Esp the following:

That's exactly how I think (you even called me a scammer because of that, lol), and as I said in this thread, people is petrified in horror and can't think clearly. There are many many MANY solutions you can use against or in conjunction with tube sites, yet nobody is using them. Either way, crying about tubes won't make them disappear, so people better adapt to the new rules of the game.

Hope at least this thread makes people think

There is quite a fair amount of intelligent commentary in this thread and it's nice to see. I just wanted to add a couple of my own observations as someone who has been in and around the business since 1996.

1) The doom and gloom scenario has been professed every time a significant change came over the industry: Top Lists, TGPs/MGPs, When AMEX shied away and now tube sites. While I agree that numbers are at an all time low, the demise of the industry is not something I see as possible. What I do see is what was professed above that many will go away, leaving chunks of market share for those who can survive. As for all the tube sites, they have to survive too so the cycle they've helped create whereby getting commission from a sale is less and less likely, will cut into their own revenues and kill some of them off as well. They may also see it become increasingly more difficult to have content to steal if the amount being produced goes down because of the state of things. Of course, all that will cycle people back into the game as problems correct themselves and then reappear. It's like a pulsating lung.

2) Someone up there mentioned how all surfers now are smarter and know where to get free content. While I do agree that the average surfer is much more informed and connected to content than ever before, I can't agree entirely because if this was true we would not see a difference in conversion from tube site traffic vs. other forms of traffic. If the guy coming from some link list site also visited XYZ tube site than he should be 1:30,000 likely to buy as well as the traffic from XYZ tube site. This doesn't happen.

3) Another topic often mentioned in this thread is the need to innovate. I'm not sure I agree in so much as it's about coming up with some crazy porn theme concept anyway. All the "reality" ideas long ago jumped the shark and I think a porn gimmick is about as viable for increasing sales as is any lame TV show for getting ratings. The vast majority of people buy porn quite simply to masturbate. They get plenty of free content to do that to these days but they will still pay to get it delivered to them in better ways or to get it more conveniently without the need to search all over the place to cater to their tastes. I've seen just about everything, I know where every freaking site out there more than I care to and I will still spend a few bucks here and there at HotMovies.com just because they flat out organize it better and I get what I want right when I want it.

So other than just those additional thoughts above I think that the people who will thrive are the ones who realize the real motivations behind money being spent on porn and go out of their way to cater to those. A VAST majority of the businesses online try to guess at what people want or just throw a ton of shit against the cyberwall to see what sticks. The sites that are built on the real psychology of their target market always do well (which is why it's usually best to build a site based on your own content tastes). To figure out what that psychology is, I suggest you simply take a look at your own habits with regard to being a consumer in this industry.

exactly, the big tubes in google on terms like "porn" or "sex" did maybe 10 minutes of optimalization and thats all. they are not some kind of smart SE gurus and their position is exactly because of their popularity (=natural backlinks and so on...)
I ranked for "porn" or "free porn" in the top ten results with my small TGP in the past too and it took me really a lot of work to beat big guys. If I were in their position (like Robbie´s tgps), it would be really easy to get there fast.
btw. great posts from you Robbie.