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Originally Posted by RawAlex
Rhino, saturation is always an issue, but only because it dillutes the profit potential for any single item. It doesn't, in my mind, mean that the total number of sales would drop from it, just that they are spread over more product points.
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My lord, this is beautiful. Let's talk about this some more.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(A) Convergence. We are very close to reaching the point where people will start (in numbers) to use things like windows media edition or other web connected appliances to download movies and tv shows to view Tivo style. The number of players in this field will be much smaller, and the overhead required to get in the door much higher than the current bar for opening a paysite.
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I've been telling everyone that full screen DVD quality videos are the way to go. Why should I watch porn on my computer montior when I can watch it on my sixty inch TV downstairs? IPTV look promising for a while but few companies can afford to pull it off. People are already hacking their game boxes to download movies off the Internet. Earlier today M$ announced they will begin selling movies via their X Box Live (
Yahoo News Link).
The cost to us as an industry will only be in bandwidth; The end user will have better equiptment and will begin watching movies (and thus porn) on their TV.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
(B) Programs and systems such as Zango, spyware, and such are whittling away sales from affiliates at a fairly alarming rate, such that the open affiliate model is actually currently at some risk of collapsing over time.
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And this will go on until a large company discovers their sales are dropping because of it, files a lawsuit, and it becomes front page news. It's ironic how the US Goverment seems so concerned about SPAM yet allows this crap to go on.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(C) keyword purchases, placement purchases, and other search engine pay per manipulations are making it nearly impossible for normal webmasters to acheive decent rankings for any period of time.
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This is already happening and I don't see this changing.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(D) P2P networks, file sharing, new group resellers, and similar are taking a big chunk out of the porn market these days.
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And opening themselves up to a huge lawsuit at the same time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
(E) the market overall is pretty much matured, and as such, overall growth in the market has slowed. Anything new is often just taking business from other existing sites (the dillution you mention). Very few items get a very long term buzz, even the Jordan Capri Honeymoon tape deal pretty much ran out of steam withing 45 days end to end (might come back for one more shot when the rest of the material is released in the next 10 days or so).
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As new programs open up, there is less and less of the pie to go around. Granted, there are new customers born every day, but these newbies are much smarter than before and the old ways of getting traffic will be forced to smarten up. Sometime in the future programs will be forced to have quality sites with original content.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(F) Most of the big money categories from the last couple of years, such as live chat and dating have pretty much run their course, mostly because these programs have bought and now own a large percentage of the possible customers already, and they aren't going to pay for them to signup again.
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I'm not going to comment on this much.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(F2) Most of the major programs have either "join 1 get all" or "mega pass" sites, which basically pay you for a buyer once, even if you could have resold them something else next month in the same program. Every sale these days pretty much makes that surfer "dead" for anywhere from 10 to up to 100 sites.
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This poses a problem for smaller programs, doesn't it? Again, quality of sites and original content - and lots of it - will go a long way.
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Originally Posted by RawAlex
(G) The expansion of the internet in the english marketplace has slowed dramatically, more and more surfers are "experienced", less likely to buy, and more than likely got burned by a scam, spyware, spam, or some other misdirection and are no longer intending to takeout their credit card online.
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Other languages will become much more important in the future. The Internet is in fact World Wide and it's possible our industry is missing a lot of business without knowing it. I think Spanish is going to be the next best thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by RawAlex
All of those things go together to form up a business that isn't going anywhere any time soon.
I wish any new webmaster the best of luck.
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It's not all doom and gloom; The sky is not fallng down. There will be room for new smart programs, but others will fall by the wayside. Programs who build their entire program on one main site sooner or later will fail.
Very good post!