Mutt posed a good point. Is there an affordable solution to the decline ip paysite sales?
 

Shap was posting a good thread recently about ways to solve the decline of paysite sales. Let's not argue they're not declining because we all know otherwise.

He made some suggestions about improving the members area by increasing what we offered to members. Something I've been posting for years, because I've always believed if you want more sales you need to sell more, not just show the product to more people. Both need to be done.

And yet paysites haven't done enough of this. Just added bigger and more videos.

Mutt then came up with a very good reason why paysites have stuck to just being places to see recorded porn. Any way of increasing the lure and attractiveness of the members area and joining/staying simply wasn't affordable.

Some could afford to add a scene a day, or the big ones 3 a day. How many could afford to do more and how effective would it of been?

Think about it for a second and don't come back with the "Sites were making 1,000-10,000 joins a day." reply. That at the minimum level of 2 months is a 60,000 membership base. $60,000 x $5 = $300,000 profit. $10,000 a day.

Mutt was saying they couldn't afford $500 a day for a porn start to appear live.

Think about it positively and wonder why are 99.95 of paysites still trying to sell what others give away for free?

Who cares ......?

Ok, your missing the point where a small majority are club or solo model income. There for your statement-y quote is invalid.

Of course they can pay $500.00 per day if having a live pornstar on line increases sales enough to pay a live pornstar by that amount plus.

Using your figure of $5.00 per sale it would have to increase sales by 100 per day plus...and what evidence do you have to indicate that using a live pornstar would accomplish this? I do not see why it would.

Every single person owning paysites, sending them surfers and shooting for them. Plus a few more. Like designers and processors.

Even Tubes. Where will they get the free content to put on their sites if the paysites disappear to a level they can't get free content?

Surfers come to the Adult Internet for mainly one thing, to look at content of paysites. some from there sell them to dating ad cam sites. Will the Dating and Cam sites provide Tubes with the content.

Even the Mobile Phone side, can it afford to buy the content, or will the paysites shrink and shrink and leave all the free content online?

how are you not banned out of sheer lack of popularity?

Sorry I don't get your point, "a small majority" :upsidedow

If a site is getting 1,000 joins a day. The average retention is 2 months, profit $5 per month.

Then 60,000 members a month @ $5 profit = $300,000 profit.

Is that the norm, slightly better or a very few?

Because Mutt said, they couldn't afford $500 a day. And to me. That's only a slight increase in sales and retains. 5% increase.

On 100 joins a day, it's a problem. Unless a site run by a Ma & Pa operation or model running her own site. As 100 a day at $5 profit a day is $500, but I would imagine a smaller site would have less costs. So maybe $1,000 a day.

And Mutt and I know when it came to the product few had the kind of money to spend $500 a day to increase sales and retention. Far cheaper to pay affiliates after the sale was made.

If people were to vote honestly it would be great to have a poll into the number of sales made by paysites every month and a different one for affiliates.

An affiliates getting 100 joins a day, with little costs would been a very happy boy.

Posing questions no one can answer except with abuse is a reason for my lack of popularity?

Why didn't you let me look at the product your girls produce? Won't say anything about marketing, just the product and how to improve it. I made some good constructive points about one girl.

Can't do any harm.

Paul I said for $500 a day you could get a pornstar to do a chat show for a few hours with members.

NaughtyAmerica tried it on a much larger scale with a production studio set up with different sets just like a real TV studio and probably had 10 pornstars a day - MUCH more expensive than $500 a day, closer to $5000 a day and they obviously felt they weren't getting enough new sales from it or getting better retention from it to justify the costs and the headaches running it.

Live interaction isn't the panacea for what ails paysites.

Great unique content is much more important, and that's not easy to produce, whether it's amateur or professional. The problem now is that piracy/tubes has cut down the number of potential customers to a point where there's more risk to producing great unique content and much less potential reward.

Online has the same trend as retail.

For Generic products - customers to go in ever increases numbers to the best and biggest mega stores.

For specialized products they to well branded stores.

So as I said it wasn't bringing them the increase in sales.

Did NaughtyAmerica go over the top?

However if done right, by tying it into her getting shooting work, unless the model was working 5 days a week. Could she be got cheaper. Does it have to be 10 girls big studio and 24/7?

Yes I know a studio here that tried it on a full time basis and sunk. I'm thinking maybe like everything else it might work scaled down. Will need some other ways to monetize it as well. Like 1-1 and phone sex live chat.

Great unique content is much more important.

Absoblooodylutely.

So why were so many shooting the same cheap cloned dull scenes, or could you shoot this for $500 a scene?

Yes a few were doing that and did find it worked very very well. The vast majority didn't. Explain why, when it obviously worked.

And yes agreed and said, today the traffic isn't buying enough. What ever the reason.

So you and I are on the same page with this. :winkwink:

So is there a panacea for what ails paysites?

How many sales a day EXTRA does posting on gfy all day about the same shit produce?

Answer: None

How many sales a day EXTRA does contacting every person you can, every day, non stop, working what you can with what you have, and following through with it, produce?

Answer: Sky is the limit

So what's the cure for paysites?

Answer: Not sitting on your ass waiting for someone else to do your job for you.


No special tricks, no special content, no live shows, no tour changes, no design changes.... but rather, sales, b2b contacts to produce b2c sales, none stop, 24/7, sales!

If you had ever done that in your life at any real scale, you would never question what the cure is.

Let me guess, in there somewhere paul has alluded to the "same old dull porn scenes"

Same mindless point in every thread he posts, yet for a man with all the answers he has nothing to show for his superior knowledge.

.

It has zero to do with better content, or more interactivity, or this or that. ZERO.

It comes down to one thing and one thing only - and this is coming from someone with 28 paysites and counting - and it's the #1 thing most adult industry peoplefail to grasp because they have their collective heads up their collective asses. LOL Living in a porn bubble will do that to ya.

Here it is:

MARKETING.

People in the porn business have to become better bullshitters. That's it. End of story. The better you are slinging the bullshit the more sales you will get. Period.

Evian vs. free tap water is the ONLY - and I mean ONLY - example anyone with a brain needs to find success.

But this is a long discussion so I will just give you all another clue, one to think about, another example of the way to do things and it comes from mainstream:

Ever hear those 30 second radio ads? You know, a used car ad spot or a weekend sale ad It's 25 seconds of the "deal" then 5 seconds of unintelliglble speed talking (the "legal disclaimer") that basically negates the previous 25 seconds. But people tune out at that point since they can't really understand the words anyway so they.....buy buy buy! Even though they are NOT getting the deal they just heard advertised. Go figure.

Ah well, believe me or not, think I'm full of shit or not, I care not. I'm doing fine and will continue to grow while the others who are stuck in pornland circa 2003 will see their businesses decline and wonder why all the way to the poor house.

To sum up: do a better job of SELLING. Stop creating porn sites that look like every other fucking porn site on the Web. There's a good place to start.

Interesting thread tho. :)

This is what I get for not reading this excellent spot-on post before posting mine. LOL

What he said. :thumbsup

well, since you ask the same question every time you see me on a thread, i will tell you.

its because i think you are an idiot..

Why does Paul try to look at everybody elses content when his own is so horrible?

Is he so against tubes that he won't even use them because he can't afford to buy memberships? They were invented for freeloaders like himself.

Always talking like things have to be professionally produced when amateur/self-shot is so hot. He has no concept of what works today.

The adult industry bullshitted with the best of them in the last 15 years. If you look at who's prospering these days, it's rarely the bullshitters with the cookie-cutter sites.

I think the better approach is to treat the customer with respect. Offer a high quality product and do it without ripping off the customer. In every industry there's consolidation but there's always room for boutique shops to survive even in the age of big box stores. You just have to do it right if you want something other than a quick short term hit and bullshitting isn't it.

I agree with you on almost anything you say.

Its not just marketing. This is a business where the vast majority of the old timers are gone. Those that aren't are just a small shadow of what they were in those early years. They are gone because they never understood their own business to begin with. A product was scarce, the market was young, the consumers inexperienced and immature... so they hastily threw something together and tossed it out there and online consumers ate it up. You couldn't get into a members area of any paysite in the early days without thinking "holy shit... this is all there is". Shitty plugin feeds, very little content relevant to the night the front end promoted and so on. Personally, i don't think i ever looked into a members area and thought "wow, i'd pay 39.95 a month for this" and from 98-05, I was inside almost all major paysites members areas.

As their business began to wither and die, they shifted their efforts from the usual hope of someone joining and forgetting to cancel or being embarrassed to charge back for 6 months to throwing huge parties and kissing ass to friends and trades between friends to scamming, shaving and carding. Why? Because they were never business people to begin with. They might have understood the product and that there was a demand for the product, but they had zero concept of how to market that product and how to conduct themselves like serious business people trying to build a loyal customer base. (those that did think like that are mostly still around today and have seen success that endured)

People in this business have always confused "conversions" and "joins" with great business sense. Those that measured their success in total unique hits per day are dead. But in the beginning, that's all that mattered. That's really all that people talked about.

The business matured at what might literally be described as the speed of light. It was always clear that as internet connections got faster, as broadband became more prevalent that a dramatic shift was going to take place in content and how its delivered.

What was interesting was asking "what is going to happen when the product is no longer scarce and the market is more mature and the consumers more experienced" and watching that change over time.

Even as we watch this shift, you see the same people and the same old story about how their business is failing because content is free. Excuses are just that. Excuses. They ignore that content was always free. They ignore that tube sites convert traffic well. They ignore that surfers have ALWAYS been willing to pay for a high quality, unique product. They ignore that content is not as scarce as it was. They ignore that people are not going online ONLY for porn anymore. They ignore that people are quickly distracted by facebook and other online activities. They ignore that surfers are much more mature than they were. They ignore that many surfers have been burned. They willfully ignore the multitude of factors that contribute to less conversions.

EXAMPLE:
Mobile conversions are declining slightly right now overall with a few big sponsors.

WHY:
Because the vast majority of surfers have now been exposed to it, whereas before they weren't. Many have joined. It's not longer a novelty. It's no longer a scarce product. As that market grows, more competition will enter, its becomes even less scarce, people are more educated on whats out there and ratios will continue to decline.

THEN WHAT:
Mobile conversions will continue to decline over the years just like tgp conversions or anything else. And once again, it won't be because of tube sites, it will be because of the fluid nature of the market. A perfectly nature business cycle in a free market.

EXCUSES:
This will not stop people from once again making the same claims and excuses that some other factor is causing declining sales. That if only "that terrible and wrong thing" was removed from the equation, conversions would go through the roof again.



Shap said it best the other day... "10 years later, a paysite is still a paysite and still marketed in the same way."

Probably one of the more interesting and thought provoking comments i've read in a while on here... which so few will truly understand its significance. Business is business. Customer is a customer. Marketing is marketing. A product is a product. Service is service. Management is management. Advertising is advertising.

Yes,
this business is FULL of HORRIBLE marketing.

But,
that is because its full of horrible business people.

:2 cents:

it was never common.

I don't know how long you've been around but in 98, the common expression from webmasters was always "surfers are stupid"

That was a very clear heads up to where these people were going business wise.

We pay more for bottled water than we do for gas.....

We can get water for free, but we choose to pay out the ass for it.

You might just have a very valid point here.

I have no idea who you are, but you might have just pegged it right on the nose.

I honestly believe that a lot of people had zero business sense. They put up a few paysites with purchased content and made bank. Why? Because it was new. Ten years later anyone can open up a paysite and the customers are no longer interested.

I think only one company in our industry has marketing correctly - Girls Gone Wild. You walk into any party on a college campus and ask them who Naughty America is and they'll have no clue. But everyone knows Girls Gone Wild.

What we need to do is concentrate on becoming more mainstream....

"Never teach a pig to sing. It will waste your time and annoy the pig"

This business in general, always attracts a caliber of people that are innately horrible business people. Mainstream or not, they will still be horrible business people.

People are searching for porn. It's a product like any other. Produce a quality product and market it well and sales are there. As Misterpeabody is saying, people in this biz do a shitty job marketing. Not because they don't understand porn, but because they don't understand business and marketing.

Here is simple food for thought about how misguided people are in this biz. An old argument as an analogy...

People have often claimed that "ugly sites convert better"
But... pretty sites convert well too.
Ugly sites can convert bad.

A simple truth and one that any experienced, competent marketer should understand is that it has nothing to do with nice or ugly. Clarity, as first example. Is it clear at a glance where that user is. Is it clear at a glance, whats being offered. Is it clear at a glance, what the value of the offer is. Is it clear at a glance that offer is what the surfer is looking for. Is it clear at at glance what action the surfer needs to take and what the benefit is of doing so. Or... is it just a bunch of pretty graphics distracting from the the offer, the content and an ambiguous call to action. That's one small example.

Continuity - from ad/link -> landing page (and supporting image/text/graphics) -> tour pages (and supporting image/text/graphics) -> join process -> members area is often a problem for people.

Webcams.com for example of poor continuity, also one of the early, arrogant "ugly sites sell" proponents and later changed their poorly through through site and a cleaner design on a poorly thought through site... You can have a white label set up on www.yourdomain.com using the blue theme, set up for "free memberships" which leads to a gray/white theme webcams.com join page branded to them, which offers a "free membership" which then has a prechecked cross sale for 9.95 as well as a bizarre declaration that they might charge your card $1.00 from time to time to verify it (really an obvious device to skew CB ratios when needed) is a great example of shitty continuity and obvious charges that undermine "free" since its clearly not free as the surfer was told up to that point. Combine that with text heavy, poorly laid out join process with tons of random, distracting images and text and its pretty clear why you won't be doing too many "free" joins even when they are offering $25.00 ea. This site is a total mess, poorly thought through and poorly laid out.

Each model has multiple bio pages (her bio page, her photo galleries, her video galleries), its confusing as hell. AND BONUS, in what a blatant example of a completely and total innatention to basic heuristics and design/site element conventions, they are designed completely differently which is even weirder EX: Profile? or is this a profile? Why 2 different picture galleries with 2 different designs and 2 totally different look/feel that appear to be totally disconnected from each other? Why isn't it clear what to do/where to go from there?

Each page is such a mess in terms of the basic structure, that the entire site needs to be redone and cleaned up. If you click on a model and it goes to the page showing her currently in a private show... the page looks like a massive jumble of text with zero structure and no clear "this is whats going on, this is what i need to do" type flow to it. They send regular emails that are so pointless basically a single cam girls image - but poorly structured, with no clear organization and objective and which has what appears at a glance to be dozens of equally weighted links, - bio, pics, videos, join us etc etc as if they weren't really sure why they are sending me the email to begin with and are just hoping i'll click something.

Much of the adult industry is just like this. Done with the basic attitude of 'here's my shit, buy some'

No, they did it wrong.

Yes, they did the Naughty America Live. And it was "okay". In my opinion it was too professional and too scripted and too uptight. It needed more of the girl by herself talking to the fans and LESS of the employees of NA "interviewing" them, etc.

I couldn't sit through even one minute of the "interviewer" and that days generic porn girl giggling and just generally being UN-sexy the whole time.

The whole thing would have worked MUCH better if they had just let the girl interact with the fans like a webcam show does.

MEANWHILE...within 5 minutes of every new Naughty America filmed scene going up in the members areas...they were already being uploaded to file sharing sites, tube sites, and bit torrents while the people doing the stealing were all over the surfer forums posting the links.

In my humble opinion...they SHOULD have scaled up what we've been doing for the last few years. Live free cam shows in the members area (not 3rd party driven, but pure dedicated live cam shows from my own server) AND protected streaming of their filmed content coupled with Remove Your Content working for us.

If they had simply scaled that up on their actual existing paysites...just ONE girl on each paysite a week at a specific time (we do Wed. nights at 10 p.m. Eastern / 7 p.m. Pacific)...that alone would give the members area a giant leap forward in member retention and having something to sign up for in the first place.

And our members have a Private messaging AND facebook-style wall in the members area to interact all the time with Claudia Marie...Naugthy America could have the same thing in their members area and give all their models permanent access. The models would then be able to log in and talk to their fans.

Why would the girls bother to do that? Easy...it's called promotion. And TARGETED promotion for the girls that would be hard to find anywhere else. Comes in handy for their real money gigs: escorting, dancing schedule, paid cam show schedules, etc.

So in my experience...a big site like Naughty America that shoots it's own content could and should offer interaction (that doesn't cost them a lot of money), keep it on their existing paysites (not it's own dedicated different paysite & keep the employees off of it...no need for an interviewer to muck it all up), and hire RYC to start getting your shit off of every pirate site in the world.

This point is invalid because your view is limited to your own site's sales. If processors CCBill, Epoch and Segpay show a graph with a total of all sales they have processed for all adult sites in the past 10 years or so, we would then have a common frame of reference on which to base discussions like these on.

Whats the matter? You don't like a debate that begins with "Look, i'm 100% correct... so lets discuss that fact"?

HAHA :)

http://i.imgur.com/ANGYm.jpg

My paysite sales are not in decline, but I'm mobile only now...so that is probably why.

The surely IS affordable solution to help with the declining paysites sales:

www.removeyourcontent.com

If think anything else besides fighting piracy is going to make a REAL difference, you're fooling yourself.

You'd have thought one of the many content removal companies would have done a case study or white paper to prove that theory by now. I wonder why no one has?

x was having problem with declining sales so paid y 1500 bucks a month
y sent out take down notices and stuff
x saw an increase in revenue of 1500 + z before

funny was just looking at webcams.com. the pricing structure is so confusing and not defined it's amazing anyone takes out their credit card for it.

They have always been a disorganized mess. But you can see where their head is in all the text and how they present themselves. Trying to tell you again and again to promote webcams.com as a recognized/trusted brand... then their own retarded sales process undermines that completely. Lot of ego and misguided/misplaced confidence and little self question or doubt. Clearly no real plan in anything, no clear business objectives when it comes to implementing anything other than "hey, lets change some shit, let me know when its done".

Join for $4.95! Oh... hope you, the surfer notices the tiny text saying you'll be billed for $39.95 per month. No justification for it at all. Just a random charge and random financial obligation for zero reason and no known benefit.

There is very little logic in that site, its design and its processes.

It's totally insane that we can be this many years into adult and someone with this much money can be run a site like that with such incredibly poor execution.

:2 cents:

Sorry I stopped at the word marketing.

If we were any good at it sales would be increasing. They're not so it means we're shit at marketing.

Can we even market without giving the product away in ever increasing amounts?

Well if you've no other straws to clutch then this word "marketing" is the only one left.

When someone hits a site today all the marketing doesn't mean jack shit if the content isn't up to it. Of course these marketing experts were lucky to convert 1-200. So the power of their words mean 199 thought the site wasn't worth it. Someone was boasting he only loses 799, so not a great marketing man. If 799 weren't convinced by his marketing. :1orglaugh

When the surfer turns into a member, marketing means jack shit. If the site isn't worth a second month, any promise made by marketing people is seen as a lie. Then the join was worth a few dollars. :Oh crap

Your retarded "thinking" assumes that 799 were qualified prospects looking exactly for what you offer and wanting to buy. That's not the case in any business, online or off. Just because someone walks in and looks around, doesn't mean they were planning to buy what you're selling.

Dipshit.

This is like business 101 shit. Not even 101. I mean, its like .101.

You say this kind of stupid shit again and again which only screams "hey man, i have no fucking clue what i'm talking about and have little to no experience in the matter"

God you're such a fucking retard I cant believe you were allowed by some pussy ass European government to reproduce.

Quoted for the truth.

This was the industry I saw when I came to online.

I feel like kissing you. :thumbsup

What truth Paul?

The simple truth is that porn conversions were ALWAYS destined to decline as the market matures. These are just a fundamental law of business and free market economics. As demand increases, supply increases as supply increases, pressure on existing business increases, as the customer becomes more aware of choices, they become more selective, they develop preferences and they shop around more and so on and so on.

Declining conversions happen for a large range of factors and you've continually blamed it on one single factor and drone on and on about it, which is absurd.

You're no different. You suck just as bad.

http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/tour2/

...Lets see...
- home page graphics that are so poor, they scream "you can't trust me because I don't care"

- no clear sales logic and flow on the page - "this is what we are, this is who we are, this is why we are what you need, this is the benefit to joining our site, this is what you need to do next etc etc" It's just a random jumble of shit.

THIS is what people like you and others don't understand. You're not simply putting something on display, you are guiding an user through a process. Your site does not guide them through the process. Again, basic sales and marketing 101.

- http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/tour...gnes_rm&sample
oops! i need to download windows media player. Nah. Not gonna do it!

- clearly outdated content featuring teen models that are some of the older and the most saturated online - already a non-starter to begin with.

- http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/tour...dle_banner.gif
stuff like this on the page - but still you have yet to make the case for why anyone should join the site. "Just do it" isn't good enough for them, anymore than it is for you.

- http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/tour2/updates.php
disorganized pages with no content/element alignment
watermarks on the thumbs for no reason at all - shitty judgement outside is going to imply shitting judgement inside the members area - and its obnoxious red on top of that

- http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/memb....php?aCategory[]=8&aCategory[]=15&orderby=7
again, radically disorganized look/feel. random/different watermarks on all the videos. If you can't be consistent... the surfer can't trust you.

I could go on and on and on. Zero continuity - each page is inconsistent with the next in terms of layout/look feel and styling elements, etc. That in itself, is a game ender for conversions.

I mean this site is so poorly done from start to finish, that you can't possibly expect sales from it.

How about you show us something that demonstrates you know what you're talking about?