How Successful Can a Paysite Become?
 

WITHOUT an affiliate program? It would be interesting to hear from paysite owners. Those with affiliate/PPS programs, and those without.

As sucessful as you make it.

I heard through the grapevine that Quiet just applied for welfare. :Graucho

:1orglaugh

Talk to Quiet about it, he's probably the most successful person who doesn't have an affiliate program I've seen around GFY.

WG

quiet's been around a long time as have the other people who run successful paysites without an affiliate program.

it would be very hard, not impossible, to repeat their successes starting out today. of course if you have some capital that will help. if u don't have much capital, you have alot of work ahead of you.

hire mexicans to submit galleries and make sites. cheaper and less work required than dealing with affiliates.

somehow i don't think quiet's gonna be a mentor to somebody he doesn't know from Adam.



:glugglug

We have been doing it for 7 years, it was a slow start and is lot's of work doing what others pay affiliates to do for them.

If you know what you are doing, it's not hard at all to be very successful without affiliates.

I started a paysite @ 1999 and it was my sole source of income by the end of the first month I was online.

But like some of the others have said, it's a different market today and I wouldn't try to do it now.

i have 0 affiliates i pull in a couple grand a month. my next marketing venture will turn it into a couple hundred grand a month. :)

Mark Tiarra spoke at a seminar in Montreal and discussed this exact question. He basically broke down all the figures, initial investment, monthly expenses, expected revenues.

It was very profitable if you followed the steps Mark set out in his plan.

DH

They will need cash and lots of it and even with the cash 95% they will fail.

I believe that's true for most businesses in general.
90% of new ventures fail in year 1 and 95% by year 3 I believe the stat was.

WG

I know several single amateur sites that dont have affilaite programs, and are highly successful for the niche.

Even those that have affiliate programs, the majority of our income comes from our own advertising. I would guess that less than 5% of my income comes from affiliates.

I heard a long while back, that there was this one guy...that was bringing in around $100(US) a month! Pretty big biz!

:1orglaugh

:Graucho

here is his book ..

http://www.lumyr.com/ebook/

I would imagine its as easy as promoting the sponsors once the site is done and updates are automated.

Just open doors to a paysite, send it TONS of traffic and keep tweaking until you see ratio drop.

use all profits to buy more traffic and content.

Having affiliates is just a way of avoiding buying TONS of hits. Not many people have the kind of traffic flowing as some of the bigger guys do.


Wanna know what advantage they have over you?

Imagine having MILLIONS of hits flowing at all times, all filtered by catagory, niche, country, etc. and a good portion of it is SE hits, type-in traffic, etc. .... and your able to send them wherever you want at the click of a button.

When your at that point, its not a question of IF you will be rich, its a matter of HOW rich!

There is some good info here

http://www.paysiteowners.com/articles/

Hey cool... a topic right up my alley and then someone goes and mentions my name. =]

In the long run an affiliate program is a great investment because it makes your dollars work for you instead of the other way around. But you can indeed build a decent sized program without affiliates... in fact in the early stages you will most likely have to do it that way since affiliates that are worth a darn are hard to come by unless you have deeper pockets. Sites like http://www.ultrawriedsex.com built quite nicely with no prgram.

So what do ya' need? Friends and angles. Friends to trade exits with, or get traffic from cuz they like you or maybe you do something in return like design. Also know how to play the TGP/MGP game. Email marketing (there I said it! - never do it but it works for many), newsgroups (if done right), build your own free sites to support, etc... You will have to be dilligent but it can be done.

Let's do a fantasy scenario that would be close to what would happen for most people:

Let's say you are on a tight budget and have to really cut deals and scrimp for content. Without heavy content you will have to consider going niche or you'll not have enough to keep people in the site. Even so it's a smaller start up and you're going to do lower numbers but not too bad as the nich saves you some. You spend maybe $5k on content, design it yourself and then budget only $1k per month for more content and feeds.

You might see conversions okay at like 1:600 (figuring dilution of quality from TGP traffic). Trial conversion will be rough at this level so 28% and retention at 70%. These numbers will come up DRASTICALLY if you immmedietaly invest in more content.

Pricing: $4.95 trial / $24.95 Mon / $59.95 Three Mon.

The next variable, traffic all depends on how good you are at playing the game. If all you can do is get 1000 people per day with those numbers than in the first year you will gross about $16,000 and be at about $2200 per month in that 12th month. The curve moves up slow hence only $16k that first year.

Say instead you are quite good and get 7500 people per day to the site. Then at year one end you gross about $130,000 (making $18k per month at month 12).

HUGE difference! And let me tell you if you did the reinvesting in content and got your retention up it would be much bigger. Do remember the nubers I gave you are GROSS income.

So what holds most people up?

1) They don't know how to build them well enough to get any decent numbers.

2) They don't have any idea just how much money they need to do #1 properly and so don't or do it too small and never get there/go broke trying.

3) Getting 1000 people per day isn't too hard. Getting 7500 takes a little bit of talent and ALOT of hard work. Most people think we're in a get rich quick biz, but we're not. Plan on working.

Mark, what do you mean by "Let's do a fantasy scenario that would be close to what would happen for most people"?

Specifically, your reference to MOST PEOPLE.

I'm not trying to knock you, but to suggest that the majority of people who start a paysite are grossing $130,000 at the end of year one is . . . well, ridiculous.

The majority of people who start A paysite shut it down before they ever get to year one, or if they don't shut it down they certainly aren't making a living off of it.

Again, please don't take this post the wrong way. I think you give some great advice on here - for free no less :winkwink:

So why are you teaching them Mark?
Most people that are extremely successful at what they do, keep quiet (no pun intended) and keep going without stopping to help competition. I don't understand but this does look to me a lot like very common 20 length single page 'Buy my how to get #1 on google' ebooks. :helpme

Okay that line should have read "...happens to most people who do things right."

Later I say:

"So what holds most people up?" And then list why most people go broke trying. So what you say is correct. Most people do go broke. Also most people don't have a clue what they are getting in to. You can still make money at this game if you take the time to gain some knowledge. I've been saying that for the past three years or more. I finally put all that shit in words in the last week so of course the topic ends up being topical for me but I would have said the same thing a month ago or a year ago.

As to the buy my book bit... see above. Ive been saying this all along, but yeah why the hell not buy my book or someone else's book (there's a guy running an ad for a book right here on GFY) or go to sites that have free tips. There is no shortage of information - there is a shortage of people willing to take the time to learn and plan.

As to why would I share this info? If you have to ask that, then I'm afraid you will be working harder than most to get where you get in this business. He with the most friends wins in this online world. Face it: porn is a "burn and churn" business. We don't compete for each other's clients nearly as much as you think. In fact taking the attitude that we need to share clients will get you much further because, no matter how awesome your product, the VAST majority of customers are gone in less than half a year. So if you got no friends to get new clients from and no friends to trade old clients to, you are going to compete yourself right out of the market.

Porn surfers don't comparison shop sites! They see something that gets them turned on and they finally pay to see more. When they get off enough they go to find something else.

You want to know what you are competing for?

Ad spots.

Hi Mark,

Is it your ebook?

http://www.lumyr.com/ebook/

all about traffic,
filter filter filter

Yeah that's me. There's also http://www.pornwealth.info/ out there and some free info at http://www.paysiteowners.com/articles/

My whole point here is not, "READ MY BOOK!" I'm trying to say that you CAN make money and plenty of it if you spend the time to educate yourself and work your ass off to make it happen.

I would like to get 100 of the people who say my numbers are too optimistic in a room and live webcast it. We could go through everything they are doing and aren't doing and I bet we could identify in every single case a list of things that has held them from making the larger dollars.

I remember a year ago a person you all know very well sitting in my tiny little office at my temp residence asking me if my numbers were possible. I kept saying yeah and he took a lil advice and mostly just worked his ass off on his own and now he makes way more than we ever talked about. I gotta ask him for his permission to say his name. Some of ya'll need to hear it from someone else but me saying you can make some dough!

have you made spacedog or lil2rich4u2 millionaires yet?