GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - An open Letter to Eric and Ice...

Just my two cents but I have been in the business for some time now primarily as a traffic buyer. Honestly, I would value tube traffic at less than 1 cent a click on a cpc basis. What you are seeing is the evolution of the Tubes not necessary the entire industry. The Tubes were no longer getting sufficient interest in prepaid ads and the over saturation of dating and cams has dramatically lowered conversions on those to the point where the combination of dating, cams and prepaids no longer cover the costs. That is why they are selling their traffic. Think about it rationally for a moment would you rather deal with 1000s of small fish depositing a few bucks into their account at a time, or would you rather deal with a few prepaid ads from big fish and a couple of dating and cams programs?

I think the answer is obvious. The big fish weren?t seeing a positive ROI on their prepaid ads so they won?t buy anymore. As far as giving it away for free and then making money on the ads that particular business model has failed numerous times on the mainstream side of the internet and led to first dot.com bust. Adult is even more disadvantaged than mainstream when it comes to ad revenue. Anybody with a lick of sense at this point knows full video tubes that have ads to adult pay sites don?t achieve a positive ROI for the person paying for the ad except in the very rare case. So who is in the potential pool of advertisers for adult tube sites? No big mainstream company will place their ad on an adult tube site because they don?t want their product or service associated with porn. In fact that is what is often cited as the reason playboy is having problems. If something as soft as Playboy has trouble getting advertisers how can a tube with hardcore porn get them? So that leaves as your pool of advertisers as various get rich schemes, various supplements that make promises they don?t keep, online gambling and maybe a few more but basically the type of ads that can?t be placed in the traditional mainstream channels.

While perhaps it is possible to for an advertiser of say a get rich scheme to come up with a banner that gets a short term positive ROI once the pool of Tube Surfers has been exposed to that type of ad for so long it effectively kills the category of ad because the surfer has become skeptical of the ads much like adult dating a conversions have gone in the crapper because of this same skepticism. So the first guy that comes up with the get rich ad makes a little money, but everyone else after with their own get rich scheme doesn?t because the relatively few buyers ( % of the traffic wise)have already bought and know the scam, or they considered buying investigated and decided it was a scam and didn?t buy. So when the next guy buys an ad and attempts to promote a different type of get rich scheme the surfers have already been trained to tune the ad out.
As you mentioned bandwidth costs are low, but the other costs associated with a tube keep going up. Can you imagine the number of DMCAs these large tubes get in one day? The constant legal issues that arise and the law is evolving quickly in this are so what is legal one day isn?t necessarily the next. I note that You Tube as a result of their litigation with Viacom can?t place ads on videos until they have been screened by a Google an employee for copyright issues and the last article I read says Google only has ads on 20% of their Your Tube Videos because that. All it takes is for one of these big tubes is to piss off one of the really big fish in the industry one that won?t bat an eye at setting several millions of dollars aside just to go after their tube. You know who these big fish are because you never see their videos on the big tubes.

Are tubes going to be around long term? Yes, I think so, but I think you?re going to see something more along the lines of a lot of short clips with a few full length licensed videos bought in bulk to keep bookmakers ultimately maybe an 80/20 mix with a renewed emphasis on creating conversions/upsells to the paysites. It seems like red tube is moving in this direction.

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Originally Posted by FightThisPatent (Post 16355933)

on the most part, that isn't true as xxxjay said, but, the ones with deep pockets, can certainly do things the legal way by making a bulk buy from places like WWC as well as produce their own stuff.

Start off stealing stuff, then go legit by licensing. no different than ripping from usenet back in the days, making money, and then licensing content and shooting own content to go legit.

this all just proves the evolution of the "adult product" to go much like like .com space, give stuff away for free, and make money off of advertising (ie. google, etc).

free porn is the lure for eyeballs, and advertisers pay to be in front of the eyeballs.

for those that say that tube/free traffic doesn't convert, certainly don't know the realiity of things. Choker tried to explain it folks. Others have dabbled with tube traffic and has seen its value.

if you run a paysite or are an affiliate, the tube "phenomenon" should be very disturbing to you, not just from a copyright or 2257 issue, but for the fact, they are, like all product (*ie. p2p) trying to legitimize themselves.

how can you compete with free when the quality of content is equal?

as jay23 and WWC have said, bandwidth is getting to be so cheap, that a tube site can afford to burn through bandwidth and free content to get to the sale.. even if it is 1:10000 if you have a large number of visitors showing up, the conversion number can still turn a profit, along with advertisers who will pay for the click and for the branding exposure.

money can still be made, particularly in niche content, but just wait for niche tube sites (like ones that show recorded webcam content) to come out, or see the tube sites push the niches further in their category list, to include those niches (not just the vanilla straight niches that they have now).

Fight the enemy mine!