The failing business of online porn - A slap in the face
 

The plain and simple truth is, if you're sales are down and you're loosing money. It's your own fault. Seriously.

It's so tiring to see the same old cliches spew out through threads day after day. Each the same old line, with the same old apocalyptic "the end is near" summary, or the same old backassward assault on an issue. I'm just going to finally make a thread and try to open some people's eyes. Although I have absolutely no expectation that my ideas will be heard. I fully expect the peanut gallery to chime in with their whole hearted attempts to disprove any points.

So, here we go;



1. The flooding of the market, and the dot com bubble

Your not original, and this market is flooded with newbies and people building the same site you have to sling a product. Every minute hundreds of kids in their parents basements, and dozens of jackasses with a deep pocket book are going out there and building websites.

This industry is literally drowning itself. Web technology has become so advanced and prevalent. It would only take your 80 year old grandmother ten minutes to have a website up promoting bigdickbob.com on a wordpress blog SEO'd for google images. You're not competing with a hundred other websites anymore. You're competing with millions of other websites, with a thousand new ones opening every day. What's that? You just opened up a mutant donkey scat site that only contains mules with three legs, brown fur, who take purple shits on midgets. Yeah, well join the club. My sister opened up ten of them last week. It's even worse for affiliate sites, every kid old enough to walk probably has at least ten TGPs/MGPs/Tube promoting the latest teen hitchhiker paysites.

The time of being able to build and open a website and have it instantly make money is gone. It was too easy, and it drew in a horde of people wanting easy money. The game is now filled to brim with amateurs and the market is saturated. If you want to stay in this business, you have a lot of competition, and a lot of saturation you need to stand out from. You have a lot of fucking work a head of you if you want to be one above the crowd.



2. Technology innovation has been flushed down the toilet

Remember when the adult industry was the one building the innovation? When porn was using the leading edge of technology and techniques. That has become a thing of the past. Porn has now become so far behind the curve it's not even funny. How long ago did youtube come out, and most of this industry probably doesn't have the slightest clue how streaming media delivery works.

""Email alert! We just updated SoSo's tour with a flash video!"" Wow, don't hurt yourself with that one there. But just so you know - My uncle does that every day, from his mobile phone. How could anyone expect their sales to not drop when their product still looks just like it did ten years ago. If you don't innovate your business, the only thing you should expect is for your sales to drop.

No longer can you sit around using technology from three years ago. If it's over a year old, you need to update your shit. Technology moves fast, real fast. Specially trends with the internet. If you want to be someone and sell something, do it with innovation. Use the best damn technology that is available and use techniques that are original and cutting edge.



3. Update your product

There's quite a few ways of creating and delivering your product. Really, there are a TON of new and creative ways. Instead, this industry relies on selling digital images and digital movies as it's product. You purchase access to a hidden area, where the images and videos exist to view or download. It's the same product system that the industry used in the mid-nineties. You know what else dates back that far? The cordless telephone. Yup, this industry is still using a product system that dates as far back to when the cordless telephone made it's break into households across the country.

Really, with all the features and functionality of website technology out there right now. Everyone is still mostly promoting a product that is so archaic Jesus had better options.



4. Pricing

For the record, I have three memberships to adult paysites. Paysites I could easily get a free membership to but simply decided to purchase one instead. Because these sites run off an intelligent cutting edge pricing plan. The most basic understanding of business model pricing would be when the economy tanks, your market is saturated, and the technology makes it easier for you to provide. Your price goes down. The complete opposite has happened through out the years though. Instead greed and idiocracy has taken over.

Porn is everywhere, the internet is just flooded with porn. Remember, we went over this earlier. Even a lot of micro-niches have more competition. This means your price should go down! The economy is also doing a lot worse. People still want and are willing to pay for porn though. However your price should go down, not up. Lastly, the technology for you to provide porn online has become better and more accessible which makes it cheaper. The cost of owning and running a website is getting cheaper and cheaper. Therefore it would only make sense for the prices of the product to reduce as well.

However in the industry, we've seen an increase in subscription price across the board. Instead of simple supply and demand, and competition taking over. Pure greed has taken over. We see one paysite selling their subscription for $25 and feel if they can charge that we can try for $30, someone see's that and tries $35, then $40, and so on. It's literally backwards. Specially when you consider most are still selling a product that runs on a system two decades old, and have no innovation to their website or business model.



5. Screwing your customer

Somewhere along the way profiteering really took a bad turn. At one point, the greed became so overwhelming. This industry turned into a back alley operation running the lines of legality.

Instead of making a unique site, with innovative technology, and a great product. It turned to credit card fraud, cross sales and hidden join forms. Skirting the edge of legality and credit card fraud. Hitting the consumer with $100+ charges when they signed up for a $20 website.

The one true gem in this industry is the consumer, and it's our business to find the consumers out there who want to buy pornography. To find one of those consumers, and to simply burn them so bad as to possibly jade them from ever buying porn online again. It completely negates the purpose of selling porn, and it is the absolute most detrimental thing that could be done. Murdering people in the street might as well be a better business model if it gets you publicity. It might as well literally be better than burning your customer so bad with something like possible credit card fraud.



6. Not stepping up and solving your problems. Just blaming everyone else but yourself

When it comes down to it, it's just easier to blame the other guy. It's just easier to blame someone or something else for your shortcomings. Instead of taking the time to figure out a solution and come out on top. The majority will just sit on their ass and whine about it.

When piracy became big. Did you take the time to educate yourself on copyright infringement? Working in an industry who's sole product is digital media which is copyrighted, one of the first business models should be preparing and modeling the way to protect your copyright and take action against copyright infringement.

When tubes came out. Did you switch over to the greatest innovation in content delivery since the <img> tag? Did you not see it coming even when the all mighty Google bought YouTube? Where you living under a rock, or are you really just that dense?

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In conclusion. The real problem with this industry is that the majority of people will bitch about torrents instead of spending the time protecting their copyright, blaming tubes for the decline in their sales, while selling a product through a system two decades old, on an unimaginative website platform, in a market of millions of similar websites, with a price of $40, and hitting the customer's card five times for the sale.

Sales are down because you suck at the internet. :2 cents:

Yes, times of changes, change or tweak your business, adapt to new business or your out of business and onto another....

Some hard hitting damn good points towards paysite owners. Fact is some paysites are going to really never sell again. The guys selling are no longer mom and pop or even decent companies at one time. (with exceptions of course) There are guys going forward with great sites that WILL still sell but they have the resources to do it.

cliff notes?

idiot

...

We came, we saw, we gave out to much shit, we got lazy, we got competition, we broke.

Cliff notes

Basicly that (some)paysite owners did not evolve or create new sites as changes went along and thus a lot of older style sites no longer sell as well. And also that they are priced too high and that their content sytems are outdated.

Don't shoot me I'm just the interpreter. :)

I admit tho that I only scanned it. Please noone will read a lecture. :)

It's all kind of acedemic. Fact is certain sites will always no longer sell and new ones will. You can't beat up on the guy at the corner store who can no longer compete with Walmart.

Anyhow I appreciate the effort put forth to make this post. It's all good.

Thanks for informative thread, potter.

100% agree with OP.

Better cliff notes

Yeah, thing is to be successful as a paysite op now days.. it is no longer amateur night.

I know my place. I could have built as good a paysite as many years ago, but my html 1.0 skills :) are better suited as an affil than to go for the golden ring now days for sure. Plus you have to have way more than that of course to run and successfully sell paysites now days.

A lot of paysite ops can/will not step up that big step to compete anymore. And that's their call.

decent thread, some seriously good points made

100% agree man

Ya some things i dont agree on also.....

Good points and well made.

We're so lucky to have all these experts popping up to explain everything to us. We should definitely ignore that they've never made any real money themselves.

Unfortunately the major site owners won't hear your sermons, because they don't post here anymore, since it's degenerated from a business forum into a place where poor people argue the semantics of stealing.

good thread:)

Pure glory! :1orglaugh

:2 cents:

This is the best OP I've seen all year on GFY.

Good points but I doubt that the majority of paysite owners will read this thread

It's not just for paysite owners, go peep http://wickedfire.com the shit going down in mainstream is way harder core than adult. We are like fish in a barrel.. . easy shooting.

I don't agree with 100% of his views, but Potter is far from a idiot. He has some very valid points, and the ones I don't agree with... he's not far off the mark.

The irony of it all is: people asking for cliffsnotes.

Sad but true

But! Will Grandma be willing to give up baking cookies for a year and live at GFY 24/7 to learn the ropes? huh? huh? :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Competition is no problem anymore. There are only 79 active affiliates left in adult and I'm sticking to that.

The problem is like 12 of them control 99.99% of the traffic. Nothing new. :)

But seriously I don't see alot of activity at the traffic watering holes or other things one might see if there was so many people looking to get rich in adult.

A mere 10,000 impressions a day will put you right up there in say the top 200 sites in adult I do believe.

1000's of grandmas come and go all the time. No biggie. :)

Bump for a good thread idiots will not read.

you've never had anything to do woth online porn than made a couple designs. sorry but why should anyone listen to you?

Doesn't this thread get created at least once a week? :disgust

OP is just a big wordy version of "UR DOIN IT RONG". Doesn't take a genius to spot that.

How to do it right? That's the business challenge, and OP has apparently got nothing useful to offer there. So, I call waste of pixels.

Some people need the slap.

OP is pretty spot on.

Good god Brian, I hate you, but you speak the truth, nice post.

Don't be so fucking lazy, jesus christ you're on the internet, a message board, where 99% of the stuff you do here is read, do you need someone to make pictures for you so it's easier? Wan't me to make you some jello and put on Spongebob afterwords?

And that is why you're bankrupt.

NPO begins here.

Yeah, and if they're too lazy to read his whole post...

no cliff, just notes :pimp

I won't be as "hard" as you but... :disgust I'm not very far from your point of view :1orglaugh
Anyways.


I'm tired of the "adapt or die" fucking bullshit !

I've been adpating myself for more 12 years now :321GFY and that is just to stay above water :mad:

Price is the only thing keeping this business together, once paysites start offering lower prices it will all fall apart. Not only everyone will have to compete with tube sites that offer stuff for free, they will have to compete with idiots who sell it for cheap. If you start competing based on price, in a few years price will drop to dirt cheap, and everyone will be scratching their heads trying to work out how the profits dropped from $100/member to $5/member... :2 cents:

more crying

In all these years I have orgnized my stuff to make the surfer to "Pay to See the Flop"
If you want to survive today and keep making $$$ you have to build something with the following elements:
1. Offer something the tubes dont
2. Have something the surfer can't resist to wait or he can't finds somewhere else (so you get an impulsive buy)
3. Have a design that makes him only horny but not satisfied. You want satisfaction? Then there is a price.
4. Forget about free stuff in your site, let the thumbnails to fuel his imagination... "is she nuddie or she's wearing a thong? Man, I need to see the larger pic to find out... ok I got to pay for that" ( pay to see the flop)
You ARE NOT selling satisfaction these days. You are selling EXPECTATIONS and you must charge high for that and only one time (forget about recurrings, thats bullshit today). Call it "aggresive marketing" but thats what works today in Porn. Some of you might have values and morality (...ok Im kidding with this) and will not agree on this, but thats the true reality in Porn. Otherwise do what the url of this board says and start selling cakes in the neighborhood.

For sure there is a market for the "I Pay to see the Flop" customer (I tell you this as experience). Good luck all in 2010.

cliff notes of what's going on there? :)

While you could be right, and I might be wrong. The sites I know of with competitive pricing are doubling or tripling their member base each year. The sites sing the old methodology are pretty stagnant.

Nothing is also always going to be an absolute. Even if I was right, it wouldn't hold true in every case every time. In some cases, some of the time, the old methodology would work.

Point is, either way. The only sites out there right now which don't appear to be seeing a drop in sales like everyone else. Are the ones who aren't using the archaic system in place from the mid nineties. They're setting their own standard and not using any pre-formed pricing mold. You need ingenuity in all aspects of your business.

Plus, it's not always that the prices is necessarily just too high. I'm on two websites which are free to use, but I donate to them each year. Because they aren't for-profit websites and I enjoy their use. I don't need to donate, but I do because I value the resource.

When you look at the porn industry. I'm not saying you cannot get surfers to spend loads of money on a website. Otherwise we wouldn't be facing "declining sales", we'd be facing "absolutely no sales". What encompasses price is the products value. Online porn doesn't have a very high value to most consumers. To most consumers, the online porn they encounter is free. There needs to be incentive to spend money. Most sites don't provide that type of incentive.

Each point I made encompasses the rest of them, just as price does. If you want to offer a very high price, you need to provide enough incentives to do so in all the rest of the areas. You cannot just continue to provide the same basic product from the mid nineties and expect sales to increase with higher prices. Pricing can simply not increase if the product and delivery do not as well.

The sites I see out there doing well. Are the ones providing a cutting edge product, with innovative features and user interaction. They are doing so while lowering the bar on price.

B-

you write well and that was well-written. you make some valid points and not so valid ones.

fact is, there are some very original websites going and getting going these days. while there is a flood of generic product, it's not as easy as you suggest for grandma to build an adult site and start getting some of this traffic.

tech innovation is current with the example you provide, flash/streaming, so while we didn't beat youtube, the industry is current, proof is the traffic grab tubes did with flash.

same with updating your product eh, fact is, the cordless phone in my home, my office, my garage, bedroom, etc works flawlessy.

I agree with you on pricing, although a lower pricing structure is not as easy as simply lowering your product's price.

totally agree about screwing the customer, but fact is, some customers want to be screwed, dating sites are a great example. but with digital pr0n, i think you would agree that the ones that last run a tight ship.

i think what is also true is that some people will step up and solve their problem, some won't ever.

so yeah, eh, sales suck for some cause they suck at the internet.

:-)

thats it in a nutshell

:pimp :2 cents: :(

Can't argue with you there!

Hence my reply.

I do not mind. The problem is still there, there are no answers yet to the issue. Each person who posts it each week gives different insight and that often spurs different answers in the thread. I see it as an ongoing dialog to try to understand and adapt to the problems we face today.

Great post by the way, I agree with that.


As a paysite owner myself (yes I read the thread) I do appreciate such threads. Even if the majority of people responding to them are not site owners themselves. I do trust in the overall intelligence of a large collective with at least some experience in the business. I know others read them as well and just may not post.
Just like I know many site owners who are either afraid of posting or just do not want to jinx themselves because their sites have not taken a hit and are still doing well or better than well. Perhaps they just do not want more competition or people rushing in and doing what they do just all wrong.

It is hard out there. Hell my shit is down too with most areas. We all know there is no magic wand nor no time machine. We are not in denial. We just do not want to rush into changing or adapting to quickly when that may not of been the right thing to do.

Peanut Gallery reporting in !!

Its not that everyone has a mutant donkey scat site - its that everyone makes a FREE mutant donkey scat site to sell ads to a dating site - and once the mutant donkey scat content is all FREE everywhere - you can't sell a membership to a mutant donkey scat paysite.

Unless you are the premier mutant donkey scat producer in the world - then you can sell one membership to a pirate who will spam it all over torrents/tubes/fileshare for FREE while selling ads for dating sites.

lol - 'mutant donkey scat website' - I LOVE that

Lets review these massive fast changing technological advances that move fast, real fast...

(beginning of the Internet) BBS single connection file downloading
(most of the rest of the Internet) GUI (functional website with members area and clickable links and a tour)
(Current Internet) Flash (preview or not - with or without encryption)

did I miss anything? (gee, that WAS fast)

why don't you add some of these "new best damn cutting edge technologies and techniques" that obviously none of us know about?


you almost had a real point on this one - except you went back to the 'new and exciting cutting edge technology and techniques' song and dance - updating your product should have been about continually adding content - with a sidebar about 'know the niche you are shooting or gtfo'


Shoot with some production standards (as they relate to the niche you are shooting) - KNOW THE NICHE that you are shooting for - basic marketing 101 - make the product that someone actually WANTS - they will pay for it - whatever it costs.

well, until a pirate grabs your stuff and spams it everywhere for FREE in an effort to sell dating site memberships. Then you are fuxxored.

lol 'cutting edge pricing plan' - lets see - that would be somewhere between 1$ and $50 - just like its always been. real cutting edge thinking there Bro :thumbsup

Bang on with this one - I gives you :thumbsup :thumbsup for your innovative and astute observation

I agree that Tubestyle delivery taking over a tour to a paysite - giving out only 30sec to 1min TEASER previews would have been brilliant. FUCKING BRILLIANT - but of course the idiots had to take that ball and turn it into full length FREE video delivery with lots of stolen content on some - in an effort to sell dating memberships. The idiots always ruin a brilliant idea. I will give you one :thumbsup for almost getting this point right.

... cont


So Mr. brilliant - educate us on how this content protection can take place? because at the moment only Robbie and Stickyfingers seem to have a handle on that and they aren't revealing the 'how-to' details (nuthin but mad props to you two)

removeyourcontent and similar sites may be starting to make a dent, but they sure as hell aren't stopping the 10,000+ uploads of stolen content that are happening every single day (again - nothing but mad props to the efforts of these services - keep it up :thumbsup )

So.. In conclusion - I give you a 1 1/2 out of 6 on your post effort.

nice try.

If a producer shoots MY niche and actually focuses on what I want to see instead of trying to 'generally' cover 10 niches in one video, to grab a bigger market share, then I WILL BUY A MEMBERSHIP.

To me - website look and feel means nothing, delivery method means nothing, how much 'cutting edge technology' they have purchased means nothing, the actual price means nothing to me if they are delivering what I WANT. Who really gives a flying fuck if their website looks like it was designed 7 years ago? ALSSCAN is a great example (though they did recently upgraded the tour) its their CONTENT that I buy - not the fucking tour!

The fact that they focus on my desired niche and give me more than 4 minutes of it per video means EVERYTHING.

I got more to say on the subject but fuck it, you would never listen anyways.

.

Employing cutting edge technology cuts a big hole into your wallet as well.
Take video streaming, for example. I would have opened my site long-ago, if only there were entry-level options available.
More people would be actively changing their business model if they did not have to pay their hosting, NATS licenses and additionally pay their bills from it.