Sponsors still haven't figured it out
 

Mainstream surfers are still on dial up connections! All that flash, and graphics on there sites takes forever to load on dial up. Hell there stats pages are the same way. Dial up access is booming in these tough times. Even ma bell is promoting dial up again. Until the price comes down on DSL, cable, or sat, the public will not switch to it. Its all over the tech news weekly. Why don't they get it?

still stuck in 94?

must be working for them

Why are Mainstream surfers going to the stats page?

theres only a dozen or so people using broadband in the world....
the rest are just pretending

$50 for cable internet per months is a high price? :eek7

Videos certainly would be tough to download if you had dialup. But, aol still have millions of members, so he has a point.

The thing I don't get, is if these surfers aren't willing to spend $39.99 a month for broadband (thats what I pay), why they're willing to spend that much, or more, on porn? *shrug*

Im currently on dial up after moving appartments.

Its a hell.

No way i would ever sign up for most paysites out there.

Just checking out the tour takes too long.

only about 7% of americans have broadband while 72% of koreans have it.

the sponsors are just trying to tap that lucrative korean market.

old gfy thread

ITU Broadband Usage Rates

Well, people who have trouble paying for high speed Internet access may also have trouble paying $30 a month for a porn site. Seems like the best option is to target the dial-up audience with a cheap monthly picture site...and the high speed audience with a slighty more expensive movie site.

webmasters are not on dial up...

Some of this is a valid point.

I dont think the issue is that they cant afford it though.

I know a lot of people who probably spend 1-5 hours a week online, and they can afford highspeed but dont USE the computer enough to justify the cost.

These same people probably sneak on a few times a month to see some porn also... and most of these new sites would be insanely slow.

I think theres plenty of money targeting the broadband users though. I promote webcams mostly and im just doing fine ;)

Really - paysite needs to have a splash page, with 2 different entry links, for broadband and dialup.

I use dial up when traveling. It takes forever to load stats. Its like they are trying to sell me, there affiliate something. Shit I just want my stats!

SBC DSL is 26.95 a month. It's coming down bigtime.

Ok. For those who think its no big deal, read. You might improve your sales.
http://www.leichtmanresearch.com/pre...003release.pdf

Saying dialup users don't have and spend money on porn is an insane and uneducated comment.

Even the old set top box surfer a couple of years back paid good money for porn. I used to do well redirecting them to a site designed for 640x480 with low colour depth. Bear in mind that not only would these people not pay broadband even had they the option, they were also too tight to buy a proper PC. They still had no trouble paying for porn though :)

ya but most, big installation costs and/or you have to pay for the modem, that's like 100$ enough for juno for a year almost, i think in arizona cox cable has "free modem if you order online" but you still have to pay for installation, most people's walls don't come with a cable cord by their pc's.. so they would have to buy wireless router or pay installation. .and for some one that just goes on at home to check mail or send family an email or lookup a few sites they want to check out.. they wouldn't spend that much money

Webtv is still alive and well afaik - I'm sure I saw somebody who wanted to build porn sites and all he had was webtv.

I have a stictly movie pay site. The demographics of a broadband user is just what I am looking for. They make more moiney and are much more willing to use their credit card for a purchase over the Internet.

And http://www.CrazyContent.com is a high quality video site costing only $7.99 to join. So, if I don't get so many dial-up users ( and I still do all the time) then that is fine with me.

I think that it is a safe bet to say that dial up users are not really watching video anyway so I don't even want them around using my bandwidth when I know they are not my target audience. Just my 2 cents.

:2 cents:

I still have dial up, not by choice.... there's no broadband in my area other than my crappy satellite. Most people are on dial up because they can't get broadband... but I agree some sites totally forgot about dial up users, which is still like 30-40% of the net.

what he said, but flash fucking sucks, makes a page look unprofessional and like a bad tv add.

What most sponsors probably realize is... Not 100% of their surfers are from the US. :eyecrazy For example, the average Canadian is on highspeed (and highspeed in canada starts at 1.5mbps). Prices range from $24.95/month to $39.95/month canadian. Times that by .8 to see the amount in American. Other countries are big on highspeed. The US is just slow at getting it.
ZoiNk

[Edit: The prices are with free install. Some with modem rental, some without]

January 2003, broadband users represented fully 53.6 percent of the Canadian online population, compared to just 33.8 percent of the US online population.

where im from you get 3 gb data transfer per month for $100, fucking rediculous, when its $20/month and unlimited, ill switch

i have only gotten DSL this past april, before that high speed wasn't available here. i agree that most paysites are missing out on the dial up ppl, and i wouldn't say ppl on dial up are poor but like someone pointed out, how do you jusitify spending 40 or so bucks a month on the net if they just use it for entertainment purposes. dial up users are mostly those who are not computer/internet savvy and are more easy to sell to in my opinion but don't always have the means to use what we are selling.

I don't think i could switch back to dial up :( to slow for me

i get pissed if i download less than 40k

Damn In chicago you get DSL 165KB down 30KB up for 26.95 Hmmm what prices might you be talkin bout willis???:helpme

jeez, all your posts have to do with your site. Are you crazy? :Graucho

This is one of the best, most interresting, non "piss match" thread I've seen here in quite some time. My 2 cents would be to find a happy medium. Since there is definitely a large percentage of surfers still on dial up, sites need to be designed with that in mind. We all like nice looking flashy sites, yet you don't want to scare off potential sales with a slow loading site.:2 cents:

Someone on Netpond posted the below site with some neat info:
http://cyberatlas.internet.com/marke...,00.html#table

Those are interesting figures and they go a long way to dispel the myth that only the only people left on dial-up are hicks from Lower Butt Fuck.

Somebody earlier in the thread mentioned that the rest of the world was really into broadband. I would tend to dispute that. Korea might have a large population of broadband users but many western nations are still predominently on dial-up.

Too often webmasters forget that while the fastest connection and the biggest screen resolution with all the other bells and whistles are common-place to them most of our potential customers are just average users who don't spend every waking second surfing the net.

Those guys don't have or even see the need for the biggest, fastest etc when it comes to their computer and internet connection.

You're a little late with this topic. About 18,000 surfers responded to a poll on Ampland (http://www.ampland.com/poll/vote2.php?poll=31) recently and only about 20% replied that they were still on dialup.

Even if these results are skewed for some reason, there are certainly more broadband users around than 2 or 3 years ago. Yet apart from the addition of bangbros/TGP-style front ends, paysite design has barely changed in longer than that.

The speed issue is one of several in this business that have an appealing logic that isn't really born out by experience. Nor are paysites the only ones to prove it is at best a simplification. Some of the most popular TGPs run at over 150K. In fact before its recent redesign, Easypic was more than double that size.

If you were to point out that 2,000+ paysites between them have only two basic design styles (graphic or TGP), I would agree about the lack of imagination this represents. If you were to write that many are fairly competent photoshop jobs, but have little to do with selling, I would agree with that too.

I even agree with your basic premise to the extent that if whatever you are making the surfer wait for doesn't make the wait worthwhile, then it is self-destructive. And there are people out there with whom a non-/less-graphical approach would be more effective.

But I don't believe the bandwidth issue is the main one any more. Rather it is the way that all the sites tend to blur together after the first few. In respect of our approach to sales pages, it is remarkable how such a new industry, one that we often claim represents the leading edge on the 'Net, so quickly settled into a rut.

BTW (and slightly off topic) isn't it a sad comment - although about who? - that many sponsors seem to feel that the real heavyweight graphics and flash stuff is needed in their webmaster areas?

yes and this doesn't compute with me, why waste the money, hell i just want 2 look at my stats.
The one's that have an option to turn flash off I do.

sbc yahoo is advertising dsl for $26 a month here

...and $39 gets you a double-speed connection.

WebTV is still around, it's just called MSNTV these days.

I built my first sites with a WebTV (mainstream, not adult). This was before they got the upgrade that provided cut and paste, so all HTML had to be entered one character at a time. I had notebooks of carefully copied HTML that I would use as reference to find the one missing " that was messing a page up lol.
Side benefit was I actually learned HTML and today do all of my page editing in Notepad. I've tried HTML editors but don't currently have one installed on my PC.

webtv is still around. trust me.

i can't believe anybody would join a paysite these days with dialup - i couldn't - but I'm assuming many still do - those guys are used to spending lots of time downloading content - tho I really can't imagine anybody downloading a 100 MB Bangbus episode on dialup. Alternate simple tours for dialup would probably be a good thing but ya I know quite a few sites that are still basically circa 1996 in their layouts and they don't convert any better than the heavy graphical tours used by most today.

i conclude it's a non-issue but worth a shot doing your own experiment.