First off I own many pay sites and promote many others, I deal with a huge amount of quality traffic and between my own network of sites and the tons of sites I market its easy for me to spot trends etc.
In the past few weeks ive seen more posts about ?Recent signup drops? and more topics related to that than ive seen in a long time, expecting sponsors to chime in and say yes ?We have seen a drop? is silly simply because what program would want to admit to that.
Instead the replies from sponsors are usually ?We have been doing above average this past month? and from affiliates its usually ?sales are down big time you can thank the torrent and tube sites for this?.
When you see a drop in sales in any business the best thing to do is a) ask yourself what EXACTLY has changed and b) figure out how to work around that, get more creative etc.
So what has really changed? Well yes we know tube sites and torrent sites are everywhere but how about hard drive size? Not too long ago a computer that had a 20gig hard drive was great now any standard PC comes with a 200gig HD +, that means that consumers no longer have to delete anything off their drive and they can simply stock pile massive amounts of porn on their PC, and they sure as hell do ask any computer repair shop owner, imagine if a virus hits the net that wipes people wmv and mpg files off their HD clearing their porn stash, I think billing servers will crash that day.
What we also fail to realize is that there was a huge rapid change from most people using dialup to most people now having high speed connections, not to long ago we where all encoding videos for 56k modem members. And there is no doubt that faster connections = surfers being able to download your members area 100x quicker and it will have a effect on signups and rebills big time.
So the huge increase of consumers with high speed internet + huge hard drives is most likely more responsible for a sales drop then the tube and torrent site issue combined.
As much as I hate finding my stuff on free sites the fact is the tube sites that feature short promo clips and torrent site that only have parts of a movie with a watermark of a site on it send tons of signups daily, and those who run sites simply need guys like removeyourcontent.com etc to scan the web for full movie files and remove as much stolen stuff as possible, yes most tube sites will remove your movies with a simple letter to them.
As far as torrent / piracy sites go, I predict (and yes its hard to imagine this happening) that within 18-24 months extreme laws will be passed to stop this, well your thinking who the heck cares about people stealing porn, well laws wont be passed because of this industry but rather because the music industry and movie industry are hurting to a point where we will see major studios and record labels go bankrupt pretty soon thanks to those sites most studios already announced serious production cut backs for 2009.
Many in this business are convinced that as long as you have a 2257 link on your site you can simply screw the surfer with hidden and complex cross-sells etc. the prisons are full of those people who seriously and honestly didn?t notice that their billing practice will land them a nice long prison sentence, the sad part is that the average affiliate has no clue whats going on but should the govt. decide to turn this into a RICO case whereas the affiliates where part of a conspiracy to defraud millions of consumers we will see truckloads of people sent off to prison (yes even if obama wins).
Everyday crews of people get together to come up with a scheme similar to what others have already done and they convince each other that the only reason the others got caught is because of this or that and how their plan is better in some cases they convince each other that the way they are doing it is 100% legit and sure enough it does not take long before they get caught as well, although this applies to a select few in this business im hoping this wakes certain people up.
In the coming months more pay sites will realize that securing their content will be a must, may it be DRM or another method.
Allowing right click save as was good when hard drives where small and internet connections where slow and torrent and file sharing wasn?t as common as sliced bread.
Tons of pay sites will be gone within the next 12 months, by gone I don?t mean their page wont load, they simply will stop updating as many have already done.
In addition more and more people are losing their credit cards here is a article that was written today about the seriousness of the upcoming credit card crisis, more alternative payments are def. needed.
http://finance.yahoo.com/loans/artic...s-Credit-Cards
Its better to face reality now and make changes accordingly, people will continue to spend billions on porn a year its just a matter of keeping up with times and being ok with making drastic changes on how you do business.
Post your thoughts.