Do you think tube sites actually make money?
 

I dont think so. The question is : When will they fall down?

no...they are all born to burn bandwith

Well the big ones must be making at least enough to break even, I mean they're still there, day in day out

I will say for sure that tube sites must be one of the best things to happen to tube sites since well ever.

yes, they do.

not redtube! not today anyway!

They have to be making something. Not much, though.

:1orglaugh

When advertisers go back to cpa instead cpc because they are not get their moneys worth. They will have a very hard time.

They must but the profit margin is probably very slim.

As the former owner of VideoSlacker.com and the owner of the upcoming FightClubTube.com , I can tell you yes we do make money! When VideoSlacker.com had no porn on it, I made a couple thousand a month on google adsense. Then, when I added adult clips, I made money from affiliate and adult dating programs! It's really easy to make money with tube sites especially when there are so many porn sites that want to trade traffic with us! I'll be making money with FightClubTube.com in a couple of months promoting the dating on Loaded Cash.

I think they do well

I really hope they end up soon!!!

Interesting...but since you allow porn on your website, is your profit margin worse or better?

Yes they do make money, and an awful lot too.

They do. IMO .. and bandwidth is becoming cheaper with every passing day .. so, their ROI will increase with time. I don't see them dying for any reason, not soon not later.

They make plenty of money, once you break a certain traffic barrier....you have to be able to front the money to pay the bills until you get to a certain daily traffic number....cause of course, the more traffic the more you can charge, and once you get to a break even point everything else is profit. With bandwidth getting cheaper and cheaper not to mention other variables like better compression etc porn tubes aren't going to go anywhere. They will be the new TGP.....that is if they arent already considered one

They will never fall down, because they do not have legs to stand on, like us human beings. Websites are nothing more than a collection of binary data interpreted by your computer.

I think people who run tube sites do not run them only for direct profit. There are many other ways they can profit. Affiliate programs can steal the traffic from tgps and when tgps die they can start cashing in. They can use them for branding, and many other things.

The former owner of Shufuni was just breaking even.... He sold the site for 20K..

the new owner of Shufuni is a motherfucker who posts in this forum, and he doesn't make any money..

They definitly do.. think about it, it doesnt cost them money to produce the content and they are getting high amounts of traffic

Short answer = NO

Reasons: attracts the lowest form of surfer, most aren't monetized properly, the videos are so long that the user blows his wad, the bandwidth it through the roof.

99% of tubesites are being built for sale but will never be sold.

They gotta be making a profit, surfers are pretty worthless, burns a lot of bw, but still a profit is being made I would think...

The article below is about YouPorn.com (now ranked 35 on Alexa; ranked 51 when the article was written).

Revenue for it was $120,000 per month (I'd imagine the bandwidth expense eats up a huge chunk of that - maybe somebody here can do the approx calculations). These numbers quoted when trying to sell the tube site to Vivid for $20 million, so they're probably legit.

http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lif...nment-Profile#

Also from the article about pornotube:

"She explains that despite PornoTube’s 15 million monthly visitors, the website’s parent company, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, views it as a marketing expense, not a profit center."

I won't say who, but there is one poster in this thread that you ALL should be listening to. If says it makes money, then it does. I listened and made money on tube and then offered to sale TEVS at a discount to our affiliates.

I for one see it happening first hand. We've been offering TEVS at a discount and people have been buying it, opening tube sites and our sales have increased.

See Sig for the TEVS details.

as much as tgp's and blogs unless you have something very special!

I don't think they would sell many memberships but how about dating/cams/drugs etc. Free signups + incredibly cheap BW. Gotta be money in it especially for people already buying BW on a massive scale.

Gets me thinking...

Not even youtube is making any money.
Its all being paid for by the shareholders.
Once the shares are dropping, its bye bye youtube.

tube sites make huge coin

Tube sites are the way of the future of gallery pages...just in 1 big Tube site...every affiliate program will have 1 big tube site for all their sites combined....just understand your past and you'll know your future...think about it....every day programs build and build and build more and more and more pages of free promo vid pages ...how much more can everyone build? mmmmmm....work smarter not harder.....see you guys at xbiz Content is king panel wed 11am :-)

I have always said tube sites are a business model that is born to fail. It has got to be very hard to sell memberships to surfers when they can get hours of free porn updated daily right on your site. This limits the advertising and revenue options the sites have and I feel they will eventually stagnate. You can only sell dating sites to so many people. All the return visitors will ignore them and there with limited advertising opportunities it will kill you in the long run. If your surfers stop clicking ads for dating, cams and toys, then what?

It's no surprise that many of the big tube sites are for sale. They want to try to cash in while they can and not have to worry about making money or dealing with lawsuits or whatever 1,2 ,3 years or more down the line.

To me this is the biggest factor in why they will eventually fail. Over the weekend I was at a big annual superbowl party I go to. A friend of mine and I are talking and he was saying how he and the guys at his work will sit around at lunch and surf redtube almost every day. They look for crazy scenes and have a good laugh. he then says, " How are sites like that effecting your business?" I tell him I haven't personally seen any problems, but I can see trouble on the horizon. He then says, "me and four of the guys I work with all used to have memberships to different sites. We have all canceled and probably would never join again." That says it all. Every day people find those sites and cancel memberships. If they are canceling because they found your site for free, why would they then join another site that is advertising on your tube site? Eventually you run out of paying customers and advertising options and all you are left with is a nice big bandwidth bill and tons of freeloaders on your site.

Just my 2cents.

The bigger ones charge $1000 a day and more for their ads.
If companies like for example Southern-charms stopped buying those ads, I could imagine that they get in trouble.
I have never promoted dating sponsors, so I can't say how much they make from it.

I think there is a huge difference though between a tube site that offers small clips like you would find on a gallery or free site and the sites that offer 30-45 minute clips.

I just went to youporn and saw that there is 75 minutes worth of free porn movies right on the front page. A surfer just hit the mother load.

There IS a niche for tube sites: amateur uploads. They will be a tough competitor for the adult amateur porn communities that currently make their $$$ by charging their members to download videos.

If you click on the most views link on youporn you go to a page that has over 2 hours of video on it. Next to that they are advertising a site that offers unlimited DVD downloads. Why would I buy a membership to a DVD site when I can get between 75-120 minutes of free porn on this site everyday?

If you click on the most views link on youporn you go to a page that has over 2 hours of video on it. Next to that they are advertising a site that offers unlimited DVD downloads. Why would I buy a membership to a DVD site when I can get between 75-120 minutes of free porn on this site everyday?

I think this year we'll be seeing more and more tube site up. As for making money im not really sure but someone will eventually find a way to make money from it. And guess what? Everydody will start doing it.

Tanks for this interesting article. Let's do some maths:

~0,01 Mbps per user
500.000 users a day (accroding this article in mai 2006)

= 5000 Mbps of bandwidth

So over $24 per mbps they lose money.

Now all depends of how much they pay for 1 mbps of bandwidth but profit margin must be very slim.

That would me my guess too :thumbsup

On 5000 Mbps I think you could do better than $24. In fact on those figures the margin looks pretty healthy!