Libertine

THE VIRAL NETWORK

This post is about the mainstream network I already mentioned in another thread. If you're not interested, you probably want to stop reading now to avoid wasting your time. If you're only interested in the network itself, skip to the bottom.


THE STATE OF ADULT

The adult industry is changing. Tube sites are no longer an upcoming threat, they are a central part of the industry. Every day, thousands of new surfers discover tubes, torrents and filesharing forums. Many of these surfers will never pay for porn again. Moreover, at this very moment an entire generation of teens is growing up with the knowledge that porn can be gotten for free pretty much anywhere. Those teens are tomorrow's customers - and most of them ain't paying.

At the same time, there's a strong trend of consolidation in the adult industry. With that, barriers to entry for newcomers wanting to start programs are getting higher every day. Competing on quality and quantity with old high-quality sites is virtually impossible for newcomers, and would take enormous investments. Competing on tools and site diversity with the larger programs is extremely hard, and again very costly.

Next to that, many of the larger programs are experimenting with models that rely less on affiliates and more on in-house traffic generation. Especially for smaller webmasters, this is an extremely dangerous development, since they simply won't be able to compete with large tubes that have access to vast amounts of content.

Bluntly put, the future for many webmasters in adult looks bleak, especially for the smaller ones. While many people are still doing very well, it's an undeniable fact that margins across the industry are dropping overall. That's not a new development - those who were here before 2000 will still remember making 25 cents or more per click.

Of course, many people are still doing extremely well, and will continue to do extremely well. There is still plenty of growth potential in many niches which are underrepresented on the tubes, easy access to high quality content will remain a good reason for some surfers to join paysites, and things like dating and cams will remain popular paid services.


THE CASE FOR MAINSTREAM

Considering the above, branching into mainstream is a smart idea for any adult webmaster. Even if you might come out on top in adult, placing all your eggs in one basket is rarely a good idea in an environment which changes as quickly as the internet. If the tubes don't affect your income, the next wave of innovation which could happen at any time might just prove to be a danger to your business model.

Added to that, there are several fundamental problems with focusing on adult instead of mainstream, which I'll explain below.

A core problem with adult is that online, adult is a segregated niche. Using adult sites to feed non-adult projects is often quite hard and inefficient. Not only does traffic generation in mainstream follow different rules (more on that later), the degree of related interest is usually quite small. You can easily use a gossip site to promote your beauty site, which you can in turn use to promote your dating guide site, etc. Creating your own network of blogs which encompasses movies -> games -> computers -> gadgets -> gifts -> relationships is quite possible, for example, whereas in adult, it is far harder to branch out to entirely different industries.

Another problem is availability of advertisers. At first glance, this might seem an odd statement - you can promote paysites, vod sites, porn dvds, adult toys, adult dating, escorts, cams, and several other things. But while this might seem like a lot of choice, in comparison to the possibilities in mainstream, it isn't. Especially since many surfers don't pay for porn, and don't use any of the other things. By contrast, in mainstream, there are far more things to promote, many of which simply cannot be gotten for free (e.g. hardware). So in many cases, even if one market starts sinking, you can just switch around advertising and promote entirely different things.

There are other advantages to mainstream, of course. Businesses are usually easier to sell, advertising is often easier to buy, etc. Also, in many cases, surfers' choices are less exclusive. A surfer who orgasms while watching a video on pornhub probably won't come watching pictures on your old-school tgp right after. On the other hand, a surfer who laughs out loud while reading The Onion may find your mainstream blog right after, and laugh there, too.


CHALLENGES IN MAINSTREAM

It isn't all sunshine on the mainstream side, of course. For starters, content is a lot harder to come by. In adult, content is usually something that is relatively well-defined, and which you can get from obvious sources. By contrast, in most mainstream niches, you are responsible for creating your own content. That means writing articles, gathering interesting links, creating videos, etc. If you're lazy or lack creativity, that's a major problem.

Another problem in mainstream is that you're often competing with far more professional companies. For example, as a political blogger, you compete with virtually every newspaper out there, as well as online magazines like salon.com, and many high-quality semi-professional blogs. While the lower exclusivity I mentioned earlier helps you here, it still means the bar is set fairly high.

And finally, traffic flows and the spread of information are rather different in mainstream and adult. This means you have to adapt to a new system - a challenging task for those who originally come from adult. That's what the next section deals with.


FUNDAMENTALS OF VIRALITY

A note up front, for those who don't know what virality is: it's the spreading of content across the web by users. Examples are sending emails with a link, posting a link on message boards, sending it through IM, posting it on personal blogs, posting it on social bookmarking sites, etc.

It can actually be quantified, with a symbol (say "v") representing the number of other users the average user sends the link to. With v=1, this would mean slow but unlimited growth, v<1 meaning the spread coming to an end (and the site thus needing additional traffic to continue to grow), and v>1 meaning the spread is unlimited and fairly fast. Keep in mind that "average user" does not refer to single users. If out of every 1000 surfers, none send it on but one, who posts it on his blog with exactly 1000 readers, v will be exactly 1.

Of course, unlimited growth only works up until saturation and overlap. Once a particular social network has mostly seen the link in question, the spread will slow since a portion of links sent will be sent to old users, who will not send it on again. So a good viral will have v>1, as well as additional traffic achieved through various promotional methods.

In practice, that means most virals will start off slowly, then start gaining traffic exponentially, until they reach the point of saturation in social groups, at which point growth will slowly drop off.

Now, an important distinction between adult and mainstream is that mainstream, on the whole, relies far more on virality than adult.

Adult traditionally relies strongly on trading links and traffic, while relying relatively little on virality. The reason for that is quite simple: you just can't send your favorite porn gallery on to all your family members, link it on your favorite stamp collector's message board, or post it on your personal blog that your granny avidly follows. This has probably been a blessing for the industry - it has meant that a fair amount of people, especially somewhat older ones, have remained unaware of any free sources of porn they didn't find through search engines or links on other porn sites.

Many mainstream sites, especially blogs and such, rely strongly on virality, and less on link and traffic trades. A good tech blog, for example, might go mostly unnoticed for months, then get found through a search engine by someone who submits it to slashdot, after which other bloggers might respond and link to it, etc. With the new regular readers it gains, chances of it being submitted to digg, slashdot, etc. increase, as well as regular links from other blogs. This often causes a spikier, less predictable growth, with a slower start. Until the blog in question has truly become part of a network of friendly blogs, it will receive very little traffic. If it gets noticed, it might get a sudden avalanche of hits, which will add regular readers if the quality of the rest of the blog is high as well.

Essentially, the problem here is that (quality) mainstream sites rely more on organic ways of gaining traffic, while most adult ones rely more on artificial ways.


[CONT'D]

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