Can you even make a living as an affiliate anymore?

This is a problem, I've seen more and more micro-niche tubes pop up.

I agree with pr0.

I don't expect the adult biz to get back to what it was, but i agree with the part he said about working hard again and plan ahead to re-emerge in a year or two.

I think the problem a lot of us, who started in the gold days might be having is just that we have relaxed too much because the easy money we were making (well not that it was that easy, i worked up to 14 hours per day until i had my little network). Talking about myself that relaxation also came after a big tragedy when my little daughter died when being less than one month old. It affected me a lot and i barely worked for like a year, having my business on autopilot and luckily making good money, but not expanding as i should have been doing, besides a few sites i purchased and that have ended being good deals

I'm still making a good living as i have never been a big expender and also invested most of my profit on properties, but if i have kept the pace i had at first instead of relaxing, i would probably be rich right now like some other TGP guys who started when i did. Instead i'm starting to get worried not about the present or short term future, but about the long term.

So I have been thinking lately and after a long summer holidays i took, i have started to work as hard as i did in the past. Now that i'm used again to work a lot of hours (it's hard to get back on earth), i need to sit down and think, study the market, the competition, start to network again as i have over 400 contacts in icq i have not talked with for over a year, etc (btw guys, feel free to contact me again for biz if we haven't talked for a while). At least now i have cash to invest and a good source of traffic, so it's not like starting from zero like in the past.

I see other guys i know are posting here about also getting back to work hard as they did, so hopefully this will end on new ideas for the biz. Crockett, nice to read you are also back at full speed, i remember our talks like 3 or 4 years ago when the TGP biz still was alive.

The thing is that i'm motivated again, and that is a key in our business, specially if you work alone as i do. Without motivation, it's easy to get lazy and to waste hours not being productive.

Ok, enough time expended here with this self psychotherapy, now i'm back to work

iF YOU MAKE ONLY 100$ per day, what other people will make

I've been around since 1998 and it's definitely not as easy as it used to be. But there's STILL plenty of money to be made. As has been pointed out you just need to think outside the box, innovate and not stay stagnant.

One great way to find out what's selling it to take advantage of all the promo payouts everyone is having. Every program out there has $100 days. Make a schedule and promote each of those and I'm sure you're going to come across a great seller for your traffic.

Take our promo for example: Hotbox.com. We're paying $150 per sale this entire MONTH!
At $150 per sale you can't go wrong

Anyone promoting us is welcome to hit me up for some pointers.

I bet those self rebills feel good

I've been upselling other people's sites, in addition to my own, for around a decade now and I don't think I have ever made a sale on a high dollar promo day.

Well I can only speak from my own experiences, and I've made plenty of coin on bonus days. In fact I can think of a few times I was all ready promoting the sponsor and was pleasantly surprised to see my payout higher on those random days, LOL.

And in the case of FriendFinder Networks, our promos usually last a whole month which gives you plenty of chances.

yah, i'd say so. you guys are about as niched out as it gets.

been in the industry since 1998
made millions , saved millions.

emphasis on the saved.

Noticed this "hotness" of adult internet couldn't continue, so sold everything, went into investments, property, trading since 2005-2006.

Fast forward now 3 years:
adult industry is in shambles
I have 3-4 years of experience in investments, doing very well.... even during the crash.


tip #1: recognize when its not your skills , but just a hot market you are in, save the money, invest or train yourself in another long term market.
tip #2: Nothing lasts forever.
tip #3: predict the future,
tip #4: make the right choices now, the future will take care of itself.

tip #5 and most important.
make the wrong choices now, and you will be taking care of your sick future in due time.


Good luck. To everyone. Try your best, and don't squander $
cause $ = your freedom
squander it, and welcome to jailhouse #1 = being a brokeass.


-RME .
fked SE's for a fortune.

tip #6: You can't squeeze blood from stone

Most of you are trying to squeeeze money from nothing, there ain't much money to be squeezed now. Go back to school. Find something new to do.
If you haven't made money now, well , unless you are super innovative,hard working, you ain't gonna make shit in the future.



The REALITY must be said.

nice to hear some wisdom, Oldy

I believe if you target the right traffic for a specific niche affiliates will do extremely well.

Before I decided to shoot porn, a friend told me about affiliate stuff. I gave it a shot and so far I made free money.
Oh wait I paid $9.95 to go daddy for my domain/affiliate page. lol
So I made that back thousand times over! ha ha ha

Over the past month I have just been letting my adult run on auto pilot. Most of my time now has been focused on a range of things. Things have been picking up very nicely in mainstream and a special cpa network I hooked up with. But every month is different in adult, sales fluctuate and that's the nature of the business. Work harder in different areas.

I'm doing better than I have in the past, but I'm not a full-time porn slinger by any means... I also have my hands in a few mainstream sites and an eBay store, I pretty much just am doing things that catch my interest. I enjoy the act of running websites, otherwise I probably wouldn't have even gotten started in adult.

I'm probably a normal small/part-time affiliate. According to StatsRemote:
-I average around $60/day
-My overall sales ratio is around 1:1000-1:1200 (it varies month to month but is always in that range)
-I don't have tons of traffic... around 100,000 raw hits a month according to SR.

My income has been steadily going up in adult over the past year, but I've been working less because I've been focused on other things. I chalk that up to pure luck, and now that I've got some of my mainstream stuff up and running and producing profits, I should probably get back to doing more than like... 5-6 galleries a month :X

There are some very good observations and advice in this thread. The bottom line is the cheese has moved over the last few years, dramatically over the last 10 years.

Everybody is now feeling the pinch of the bad economy and the explosion of free content.

Can you still make it as an affiliate? Sure, you can. But you need to work hard and think outside the box.

It is not all doom and gloom. The bad times are causing competitors to go bust, so get in there and sell, sell, sell !!

From 2k to 100 a day. I hope you invested some of that easy money.

I still make enough to live off from adult but sales have been on the decline for a long time. Most of my income comes from mainstream now, it's a lot harder to get started but the traffic is gold and i'm working in growing markets where you can't get things for free.

Things can only get worse in adult.

My money as an affiliate grew every year from 1996 to 2007. In 2008 it went sideways and I made the same as 2007. And in 2009 with the absolute explosion of piracy? It's cut in half.

So I wouldn't say it was in decline for a "long time"

But it's damn sure in a free fall now.

By long time I ment 18 months. Which in online time is a long time.

that's true. Internet years are like "doggie years"

I've always compared my work year by year. Always did revshare with every program that offered it. And of course as the years went by it grew and grew and grew.

But now even the rebills are gone. People find out they are paying for something that everybody else gets for free and they feel suckered and cancel.

Yep, I had the same pattern of earnings.

you mean moving into mainstream for good

I have done micro niche and 'real' fetish nearly the entire time I have been in this industry. The problem for most people is that they are not willing to properly research the niches and just throw whatever at it and hope it sticks.

Secretly, I love when they do this because it just makes my well researched approach more valuable to those really searching those terms.

It used to be but sales suck now.

Seriously, is the little pleasure you get from saying that all the time worth all the extra competition you create for yourself?

I think the problem a lot of us, who started in the gold days might be having is just that we have relaxed too much because the easy money we were making. Right.

As a program owner I see the same affiliates having to send more traffic over the months to maintain their earnings. The revenues are also more spreaded, more affiliates doing less money each. Here is an overview of our numbers a year appart:

August 2009
City Country Revenue Conv. ratio
1 Mountain View UNITED STATES $11019.99 1/49
2 Glenview UNITED STATES $9537.23 1/59
3 Wien AUSTRIA $6154.76 1/12
4 san francisco UNITED STATES $4160.42 1/74
5 LONDON UNITED KINGDOM $4053.89 1/677
6 Alkmaar NETHERLANDS $4013.82 1/148
7 Saint-Petersburg RUSSIA $3784.25 1/918
8 Brno CZECH REPUBLIC $3551.43 1/562
9 Houston TX UNITED STATES $3186.96 1/452
10 Ridgewood UNITED STATES $3044.81 1/199
11 San Francisco UNITED STATES $2988.31 1/29
12 Paris FRANCE $2552.18 1/73
13 Melbourne AUSTRALIA $2483.91 1/41
14 Laval CANADA $2320.74 1/222
15 Madrid SPAIN $2172.36 1/163
16 ***************** FRANCE $2107.13 1/270
17 Holic SLOVAKIA $1743.89 1/179
18 Beverly Hills UNITED STATES $1652.35 1/527
19 New York UNITED STATES $1579.00 1/160
20 London UNITED KINGDOM $1468.06 1/160

August 2008
City Country Revenue Conv. ratio
1 Mountain View UNITED STATES $11802.01 1/28
2 Glenview UNITED STATES $10969.44 1/49
3 Wien AUSTRIA $7502.22 1/6
4 Alkmaar NETHERLANDS $6402.39 1/133
5 Paris FRANCE $5753.62 1/2
6 san francisco UNITED STATES $4773.95 1/74
7 Ridgewood UNITED STATES $4376.53 1/155
8 Melbourne AUSTRALIA $4032.48 1/34
9 Beverly Hills UNITED STATES $3861.59 1/448
10 Madrid SPAIN $3496.18 1/59
11 Laval CANADA $3215.17 1/206
12 Wattle Park AUSTRALIA $2720.04 1/147
13 Bochum GERMANY $2599.39 1/97
14 Nove Mesto SLOVAKIA $2587.83 1/299
15 Wanchai HONG KONG $2491.11 1/160
16 Driebergen NETHERLANDS $2398.87 1/126
17 Tatabanya HUNGARY $2354.35 1/569
18 Flensburg GERMANY $2256.96 1/132
19 Tatabanya HUNGARY $2225.84 1/464
20 Birmingham UNITED STATES $2170.03 1/95

My take is there is still plenty of money to be made for affiliates, but it aint easy anymore, you need to be organised and know what you're doing.

once you learn how to exploit the new marketplace
content producers gt all the partner account money
and affiliates go back to the glory days of tgp/mgp.

there is more money for affiliates today then there was at any time in the past.

you guys are on the verge of a vcr type shift.

Paris FRANCE $5753.62 1/2
nice ratio

That's ourselves emailing old members, too bad we can't have that ratio everywhere ;)

Affiliates who promote www.felluciablow.com are earning upwards of $1200 per week in profits. Ka-ching people, ka-ching.

im not pushing my sites as much as I used to and honestly only bringing in about $2k or so a month. when i first got into the game it was easy to make $4-$6k a month in 2002, then has been slowly getting harder and harder. However now my focus is on the SEM agency I work for, so there is no need (or time) to push my sites to bring them back up to that level.

Running a free site or TGP site back then was not easy. The software was very limited and a lot was done manually. Submitting galleries was almost a full time job. Now a days, those tools are cheap and make your job extremely easy, hence is why we have such a surplus of content all over the net.

I think this trend is going to continue. Once there is an affordable "server" tube solution like there are for MGP/TGPs then we will see this 10x more than now.

Was a full-time gallerysubmitter between 2000 and 2008 and then I got out because sales dropped faster then Paris Hiltons panties. Just for the fun of it I gave it shot earlier this year and I made almost no money at all.

Sad really. All those old TGP sites are just fading away
I miss the good ol` days when you could submit a gallery to TheHun and make a shitload of money the next day.

Got all depressed now

well the end of september is here and i decided to find out how i was doing. i didnt do any work for september and still made 700. ive been uninterested with the whole thing since the summer slowdown. and plus i was playing wow for the past month. i usually do 1200 a month with an hour a day work. well gotta go check my email cause i havent checked it at all this week.

so the answer to your question is NO, i cannot make a living as an affiliate anymore

Yup... just got another gallery approved there a couple days ago, 0:951 unique (0:1622 raw) on day 1 and 0:177 unique on day 2.

Oh well... I think TheHun needs more hard core stuff, or microniche stuff I think... I'm promoting more softcore teen stuff, and I don't think it's going over too well. Live and learn I guess.

People used to network more, and answer emails much more. I have said it once, I will say it again. There was much more of a sense of community in the online adult industry than there is now. Great thread though

ohh yeah i will take his wisdom.. working part-time and my ass back to school..