And just before I forget.
Look at the traffic stats on the Tube sites and you see one trend. They are getting their traffic to stay. Their traffic is rising and rising. Now is this 100% free surfers or is it members traffic? Hard to tell because only the payment processors know for sure. It could be members going for VOD, PPV and trials instead of full memberships or just more sites sharing the same turn over. Payment processors know if revenue in the business is down, level or up. I don't know.
If full memberships are down, because of Tube sites. Then we as an industry have to face it the surfers prefer a shitty Tube site to a $30 for 30 day membership. If the traffic is going to other options then we as an industry need to adapt.
The real shame is the surfers are preferring a shit service, and they are shit, to what we are selling. I'm assuming the PORN industry is suffering from a decline in turn over. Is our product so good, our service so marvellous the surfer prefers a Tube site to us? On the DVD market the reason is simple, for years they went the "Give us more for less" then sold the customer crap for the same price. They offered producers less and less and loaded shelves with more and more titles.
Here we know more about what the affiliates want and willing to give it to them, and let the surfer pay the bill, than we know about what the surfers wants. And please don't tell me he wants it for free. He's just not willing to pay for what we are selling.
We might closed down the Tube sites, but do you think the only way we can get people to buy is by force? You might be surprised about that. If think the surfer is coming back to the 40 videos for $30 sites because he can't get it at a Tube site. You are living in a dream world. The tube sites will buy content, go 100% legal and charge 10 cents a download, OK maybe 50 cents. Remember they don't need to sell $30 memberships.
It's 2008 and we need to rethink our business model, the one we had in 1998 is not working. Throwing more traffic at it is not the solution, converting more is.