I agree with that. When I send surfers to the tour of the site and it doesn't convert, I feel I did my part of the job. But the surfers just aren't buying at the moment.
It's sort of a perfect storm right now. Tubes that have all of a sites full length vids, torrents with the entire members areas ripped for free, and now the economy collapsing. It's probably a miracle I'm not in worse shape with my affiliate work.
For instance I read what Shap said about Twistys having an incredible January. Well, I didn't send a lot to Twistys in Jan. But what I did send was 1,043 hits and 653 of them were unique. Not a lot. And mostly just hits off of galleries in my archives as I just haven't seen much from Twistys saleswise over the last year so I'm a little slack with adding their stuff.
But still...Zero sales. And last year I was 1:2069 uniques with them.
I have real traffic. Not circle jerked or "skimmed" or any of that stuff. I don't do that. But that's what I see when I look at stats as an affiliate of programs. This combo of stolen content for free and the economy in shambles has driven sales down across the board.
It's not a matter of me getting surfers to the sites. I'm doing my job, irregardless of "web 2.0" or anything else. When I look at last year and see that with Naughty America I went 1:2,865 unique then it's obvious that I'm getting people to the tours, but for whatever reason it's just not converting. And it's not the fault of the sites content or design. Across the board those sites are looking better than ever with even hotter scenes and more content.
But it's just very difficult as an affiliate to fight the fact that you can find all their stuff for free and then add in 600,000 people a month losing their jobs
