Adult Conversion Ratios, 2000 - 2020

And where are these statistics coming from? I'm getting mostly 1:400-1:650 nowadays.

Experience. I should mention these are raws. It's going to vary (see the part about general traffic and niche rates). I'm at about 1:1400 overall but I do a lot of niche stuff.

You are doing very well. What were your ratios in 2000?

dude, you made those statistics up...
how do you figure 25? why not 35% or 50%?

lol there will be no affilates by 2020. none.

Using the previous ratio figures, here is the total traffic you would need to send to sponsors to make the same amount of money.

(1,000 raws / day is the baseline in 2000.)


2000- 1,000
2001- 1,250
2002- 1,562
2003- 1,953
2004- 2,441
2005- 3,052
2006- 3,814
2007- 4,768
2008- 5,960
2009- 7,450
2010- 9,313
2011- 11,642
2012- 14,552
2013- 18,190
2014- 22,737
2015- 28,422
2016- 35,527
2017- 44,409
2018- 55,511
2019- 69,389
2020- 86,736


Today you need 931% more traffic than you did in 2000.

In 2015 you will need 2,842% (this is correct there is no error) more traffic to make the same as you did in 2000 from the pay site model.

edited it to simplify it.

Because 25% seemed accurate at most historical points. If you were in business in 2000 you probably recall ratios somewhere around 1:200. Compare to today. It obviously isn't perfect but seems like a nice ballpark estimate.

Probably not that many pay sites either. And a ripple effect on supporting services such as hosting, design, traffic sales, and scripting as well. There will still be money to be made but not near as much and margins will decrease. That's the effect as the product itself becomes radically devalued.

It appears even if one group were to take over the entire online adult market completely in 2020 they will still not make near as much that year as they could have made in 2000 with only 33% of the market. Amazing.

and thats why we stick with SE traffic for the majority

people live in the adult bubble too much. affiliate and internet marketing is alive and well outside of it ...

I don't think that'll save you though. So maybe your ratios will be 33% (1/3rd) of these if you're lucky. That's still pretty bad. There doesn't seem to be any escape from the devaluation of the product itself besides either selling another product or raising enough traffic to overshadow the devaluation. But raising more traffic will become harder and harder because you'll need 25% of a greater number each year or you'll slip down. And everyone else is going to be desperate to do the same.

I agree with you. I don't see any escape from this for most people unless something radically changes to get conversion ratios to improve.

This is like using estibot to valu your domain and site....

please do you have some stats from 2810?

no
Also your ratio is in function of your sponsor.
New stuff= better
old stuff = worse

No sense to asume that ratios will grow by the same speed as till now, first because we had the huge influx of free porn which increased the ratios. I don't think we will see such free porn influx in the future, because its already 100% freely available.

Raw's do not mean much to me. Let's see what you get applying the same formula with uniques.

I don't know. I was thinking it could become more exponential rather than linear making it even worse. From 2000 - 2006 we did not have as many full scenes available freely on tubes and we still generally followed the +25% trend.

We're measuring the change in ratios between years though. Wouldn't it be safe to assume that the change is generally going to be the same with uniques as well?

That's true but there's also an overall trend which is clearly increasing.

1:9,999,999,999

right now 1:7000 is normal

yes, i can see it.
but it's like 1/800 in 2008 (raw), 1/1000 in 2009, 1/1200 in 2010 for the same sponsor.
With a new one, it would be 1/850-900 now, and because of the crisis not because it is possible to find the content for free.
Also even if you can find the content for free, what would you bother searching this content during hours if you have enough money to get it now.
For me your conversion ratio in 2000 is probably exagerated. 1/500 for a sponsor that converts now at 1/1500 ?
The one who answered that the content is still available for free and that it shouldn't affects our conversion ratios is probably right.

Or 95%. People hardly buy vinyl records these days, and they were 100% of the market at one point not so long ago. Technology is going to accelerate the rate of change.

I feel the old fashioned .htaccess style pay site has maybe a couple of years at most. In fact I would say the way people use the web with IE, Firefox etc. is on the way out now.

You got all that from numbers you pulled out of your ass? Amazing.

When more people start to leave this business the ratio will go up. Less competition.

2000 - 2010 matches my experiences in the industry. It also matches some of the old forum conversations if you look (although people tend to BS about their ratios). I have no clue about what the future ratios will be. All I did was take historical data and use it to predict the numbers based on the trend.

For reference see this thread from late 2004: http://www.gofuckyourself.com/showthread.php?t=397135

The numbers aren't too far off.

I hope you're right but I think the devaluation of the product itself will be a greater force.

I'd back those numbers up, they're obviously estimates but give or take a few hundred, this is pretty close to what I've experienced with targeted traffic over the last 10 years as well as what i've seen from the affiliate ratios i've looked at. I'd add a couple years:

1998: 1 in 30
1999: 1 in 60

I remember getting a dozen signups a day just off the hun


It's hard to predict the future but I'm thinking the scale might slow down a bit after 2017, there will always be some opportunities to convert people, your scale seems to fly off the charts after 2017

You aren't taking into account dozens (thousands) of factors that affect ratios. Also, people will not just quit buying stuff. Things will shift as they always have and those still sticking to 15 year old business models on the internet will be left in the dust as is happening right now.

The funny part is that because affiliates are so hung up on the fat PPS payouts the programs we have now are too scared to offer anything that would convert better but leave less to share. This is one of the main reasons that all but a few programs will phase out affiliates all together.

Not a fair comparison but I did 1:14 to Clickcash in 2001 and 1:30 in 2004. I forget the later years, quit caring so much.

It's only meant as an overall average and to show change over time. It will vary on many factor but overall the trend seems to be no fluke.

This isn't intended to be affiliate versus sponsor versus tube site. The change in conversions should affect everyone in the industry. More than likely similar trends will emerge for dating and cams as free alternatives and other factors emerge.

Thanks for the back up. I started in late 1998 too and believe those numbers. I wish I still had access to my old ccbill accounts or kept better records on stats but it seems close.

The numbers go crazy as they increase because it compounds. 25% of 15,000 versus 25% of 200, etc. I hope shit doesn't get this bad either. If it does I can't see most people staying past 2012 when things start to almost double again from where they are. Most of the industry can't handle that. No way.

You can not make accurate future predictions for past trends. Where would your chart be in 2100, 1 signup per 3 trillion raw? Even if your numbers were 100% accurate to this point it would mean next to nothing going forward. There are too many factors that are impossible to predict.

I'm pretty sad about this industry as a whole. There are self destructive companies all over online but I've never seen it with the same intensity as I do in adult. The constant shooting of ones self in the dick is pathetically sad but also hilarious.

Yeah, i would like to know that also

Trust me, your stats ain't reflecting what's happening right now.
It's going down wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too fast now.

By the way, mobile is the market that is in the process of booming. Promoted right it wouldn't be ridiculous to see conversions of 1:10 again. It just aint going to work on a 1997 style paysite with a $30 per month price tag.

Here's what I have on CCBill but almost all of my ccbill promotions are niche and I worked harder in 2010 than I did in 2009 to prune the bad converters and get better traffic

My CCBill ratios for the last few years (rounded to nearest 100) :

2010: ~ 1:1,600 (to october 1, 2010)
2009: ~ 1:1,800
2008: ~ 1:1,300
2007: ~ 1:1,300

I'd say overall my NATS/MPA3/custom programs are doing worse than CCBill. Verotel is slightly better than CCBill but I am doing more targeted niches which skew things. I couldn't provide good data for these without a lot of digging due to various glitches in the way stats are done.

For comparison one program I use posts their total stats monthly. They are at 1:3,300 and I don't question his honesty although I'm not sure if he is counting FHG raw hits (which I suspect). I won't name the program so as to not embarrass them.

If anyone (preferably affiliates with no conflict of interest) else wants to post their (honest) ratios for past years that would great. Perhaps it would help to get a handle on where things are going.

Don't worry we're all going to die in 2012.

depends on the sponsor

But there's still an overall trend.

Bump.

So almost one year later does it seem to be following the trend overall? I think it is. If not worse. What do you all say?

This model would suggest an average affiliate ratio somewhere around 1:2,500 raw at the moment.

wonder what the ccbill ratios are like on uploaded.to.

In this thread ill listen to Quiet RIP

That was sad about Quiet. I guess it goes to show that none of us know when our time will come. RIP

There will always be affiliates. No matter what, one company with unlimited resources can only do so much to get their product out there. However, ten thousand affiliates can do so much more.

You can't see that the consumer is increasingly rejecting the monthly paysite option for other alternatives? Affiliates will exist but them sending traffic to a failing paysite model won't.

The conversion ratio decreases as in the 2010 table but we have to remind that in 2000 there was no indian, egypt, chinese, turkish, brazil, russian traffic as today, instead 99% of clicks it was from HQ countries = north america + australia + west europe. Let's say today only 33% of traffic is from those HQ countries, this reduce of 1/3 the ratio automatically. It should be made a ratio calculation on same countries base clicks, for example filter US traffic only and say, from US traffic it was 1:X on 2000, 1:Y on 2010, and is 1:Z on 2012, I bet this make it look 2 to 3 times less the drop in ratio (to be even more precise, I can tell 20%+ of US traffic is proxies from iran or other countries whose ISPs censor adult, so I talk of real US traffic this is even less then geotarget reports).
Further, in 2000 there was not as many under 18 people online.. if you look at alexa or compete.com age stats on pornhub, it says 20% to 30% is under 18's (that's faults of their parents, not accusing sites of this), and these do not pay now as was not paying in 2000 if had internet.
So if you re-make the table considering only real US traffic of people who is over 18, I bet this make it look 3 to 5 times less the drop in ratio.
Last obvious thing to consider is the worldwide crisis after 2008, where most businesses reduced sales/ratio, so you find same drop out of adult and out of online biz, simply is everywhere and can't avoid it, what's recession % you can find on google or wikipedia.

Still there is a drop in ratio even after the above corrections, this includes the easy availability of unlimited quick warn content from tubes and collector hd content from torrent sites, both of which unstoppable as technically and legally doable in some countries at any time by any people.
It is even available free naked cam shows via myfreecams and its cloning trend sites.

What to do? Find how to get paid for traffic no matter anyone pays. I see advertising in big sites is sold prepaid per spot in bids, no more rev share really. Also programs paying for free user signups, leads, email verify. That should not drop ratio being free, issue is just program may not be able to pay much or forever this free way, see chaturbate switching $1 per lead to revshare on 10 April.
Also the cheaters in free signups are more then stolen card chargebacks in pay mode. We tried pay per free new program since a month at tubecamgirl.com and nearly half the affiliares are cheaters! Exotic countries kids will solve captcha with differet proxy per user, plus stay online hours to earn the minutes usage bonus we give, so it take quite some extra time to find and manage those cheaters every day, and time is money too.

So glad my ratios don't look like that...