Name a mainstream affiliate that pays more than adult
 

I see it said a lot here that mainstream beats adult. Sure adult revenue is drying up or has already for most people, but when it comes down to hard numbers I'm not sure how many mainstream sites are paying more than adult.

Example:

Amazon 4% for affiliates, up to 8% if you refer tons of people. They sell a lot of products, but this percentage is so low that you have to push a lot of sales through their site to see anything significant.

FNCash pays 30% to affiliates, and their Fleshlight products cost around $50 on average. One Fleshlight sale gives you more money than $370 in sales through Amazon.

Another example:

Cams do great for me, even now. I can live on revenue from promoting cams even with decent traffic. Why? Because they give me 30% revshare for life. Someone spends $100 I get $30. What's a mainstream program that compares to that?

Promoting straight porn is much harder but I still make some money, possible because the programs give me 70% on sign ups or 50% revshare on recurring. Name a mainstream program that does that.

I'm happy to be wrong since I'd actually like to move further into mainstream. At the moment I have sites using Amazon affiliate and Google Adsense and the income is pathetic. I get much more from the same traffic on sites that promote cams.

did you try to promote gambling ???

Gambling back in the day was a great payer, I haven't been there for a few years, PPC was like $.12 per click, PPL also was a great payer.

You are looking at it wrong. It is easier to push $370 amazon products than one $50 adult sale.
Also mainstream is not only amazon, you can get 10% or 20% promoting many things. For starters look at commision junction, shareasale etc. They have plenty of offers.

Ok, I read that your EPC is higher with cams than with amazon/adsense. Well then you are doing really great there and no need to move because not only EPC is better for you, but also adult traffic is easier/cheaper to get.
For me - 1 mainstream visitor brings as much money as 20 adult visitors.

Yes, this is what I hear so often and why I started the thread. "One mainstream visitor gets me more than 20 adult visitors". This hasn't been the case with me at all and I'm wondering why. As far as I can figure it the reason is that I get lower income per visitor on my mainstream sites.

I've already explained why. I get a higher percentage per sale, and a higher percentage of conversions per 1000, with my adult traffic. With the same amount of traffic I'd need my mainstream traffic to convert 7 times more or spend 7 times more than my adult traffic.

If there are indeed mainstream programs that can offer similar payment per conversion I'd love to know about them.

I've tried Commission Junction and Shareasale but neither did much of anything for me. The companies that had products related to my sites only paid 3-6% on sales, which is about the same as Amazon, and they didn't even allow me to link directly to each product -- only to the general sites or sections of the sites (which is why I went to Amazon in the first place).

BTW, I've never paid for traffic in my life and all of my sites (adult and mainstream) get 90% + of their traffic organically from Google. I wouldn't say it was easier to get either form of traffic. Publishing lots of quality content works just as well for both in my experience.

I haven't tried online gambling and I wouldn't. It's illegal where I live. I'm looking for something 100% mainstream that I don't have to worry about being shut down in the future. Problem is the more reliable it is the less it seems to pay.

My ad$ense site make ~$88/5k uniques with 2,3-2,8% CTR
My adult tube makes ~$13/5k unique with pops and mobile redirect.

I give you that if you have targeted SE cam traffic you should do fine with cams,but not with "general porn" traffic

I don't really have general porn traffic. But I don't have general mainstream traffic either. I run websites with lots of specific content and information that people seek out via the search engines.

adsense .

Adsense nets me $2 per 1000. That's much lower than my adult sites. And the click rate is pretty low. I think a lot of people are getting wise to adsense ads and avoiding them.

I've been thinking something like that but I don't know if it's totally true. The cam sites will give me 30% for life, but like I said with Fleshlight I get $15 on a $50 sale which isn't bad either.

I don't know of any real non-tangibles in mainstream except cheapo stuff like Kindle ebooks or mp3s. These "new" technologies are already loosing overall sales numbers and the amount you get per sale is simply pathetic.

hey boy - let's go to the next old checkout and we will inherit

Then you are doing WAY better than most in adult. Many are doing WAY worse and that is why they advocate mainstream.

if you're going to move into the mainstream you need to host and post, take your a/b skills to another level, rely solely on your left brain and have tons of capital to burn for market research until you hit + roi and know where to dump your money, all the while keeping an eagle eye on ad decay

definitely big $ in mainstream if you're savvy enough, but not a lot are

I have been looking into mainstream as well and I am kind of in the same boat as you. LOL I am looking for a decent ROI and when I see the percentages and payouts in 'mainstream' I just shake my head and have decided to stick with adult.

Having said all that, books (not via Amazon) on blogs is still good (you can get 10-20% from a sale there) and looking into mainstream hosting promotion (you know, dedis and whatnot).

But in terms of finding another product other than adult to push I am still searching. I always say: if I can find something that will pay me as much (more) than the adult side of things I will jump all over it. Still searching.

Mainstream is way way too big to be described only as amazon affiliate program

Have a look at offervault.com

I do not use it but i check to see what my competition pays out.

"Mainstream" needs to be defined more explicitly to be able to make these comparisons.

Amazon makes you more than cams?

My EPC (in 2014, not some earlier better time) is 23 cents to $1.78 per click, depending on the program. My EPC for Amazon is so vanishingly close to zero that StatsRemote calculates it as $0.00.

I said mainstream (not amazon, I do not promote it) VS adult (not cams, I do not promote them).
And not only more, but 10 or 20 times more depending on how badly particular adult sponsor is doing.

Ps: you may question then - why do you promote adult if mainstream click bring that much more. Well, because it is difficult to get organic mainstream visitors (I basically struggle with where to get organic backlinks, not those methods of wheels and shit which google catches on). It is as easy to get 10 adult visitors as 1 mainstream visitor for me...
Some people say mainstream visitors is easier to get. If I was one of those I would be earning 10 times more... But I just struggle with mainstream backlinks...