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When you see sites like Redtube, Pornhub, PornBB, PlanetSuzy, and massive media sharing torrent sites pulling into the millions of daily viewers, I think it's pretty obvious where that traffic is going, don't you? These sites have massive authority with the search engines, and dedicated user followings. Searching almost any adult term will turn one or more of these sites up with very high rankings in the SERPs. On top of that there are thousands and thousands of freehosted surfer ran sharing blogs, smaller forums, yahoo groups, etc etc.
Nobody wants to pay for this shit anymore. It's common knowledge you can find most digital content for free somewhere. Why pay for it? If I had a giant field of fresh fruit and veggies growing right out my backdoor, I wouldn't be going to the grocery store to buy produce. It's a changing landscape, and if someone wants to survive, well maybe they should look at finding a way to profit from that giant crop of readily available veggies.
What I see is content owners beginning to use this to their advantage. Starting their own tubes regaining their lost traffic and finding new ways to capitalize on it.. Take PornHub and their "Premium" memberships for example. I think the the tubesite model being merged with the paysite model is the wave of the future. Those who are cultivating this field right now, are the ones who are going to survive.
What this is doing bringing the traffic back in house for the content owners and networks. It's cutting out the middle man in order to maintain a profit margin, and while everyone in the industry is taking a loss, in the end it is going to be the average affiliate who dies out. Unless you've harnessed a massive traffic flow, you're not going to make it, and I can see the top dog affiliates doing the smart thing and buying their content to keep all their profits in house too. The average surfer has been conditioned to not trust the paysite model by all sorts of shady practices like cross sales, difficult canceling of recurring memberships and so on. They have grown to trust the tube model, and I'm sure will grow to trust even it's paid options more so than shelling over $30/month for a membership site...
It's my opinion that the adult affiliate is going to become a thing of the past more and more so over the next few years. What I see for the future is more mega tube-styled sites with their own licensed content, maintaining their own user bases and capitalizing on their own premium memberships. In order to maintain profitability the networks are going to have to work the middleman affiliate out of the equation, and I believe that they are making it happen now. Smart business by those who are leading the pack at the moment...
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