Great post and needs repeating.
You are spot on right when you say
"It's just, they can't reliably deliver sales on that traffic any more." As traffic climbed over the last 8 years there has been a clear decline in conversions. But traffic increases hid these worsening ratios and we could find excuses for it and ignored it. Now traffic is falling along with ratios it's clear we need to change.
This obviously leads to the question of why is this business still pushing the subscription model at the join prices we have today?
I saw recently a thread from an affiliate, who I doubt is a whale as these guys don't have to post on GFY to get sponsors. Asking for $65 PPS per sign up. There were sponsors dropping in telling everyone they would pay $100 on joins of the level the affiliate was boasting. When I asked them to explain how they can afford the replies stopped.
The question is still why do we hang onto a system the customer is clearly not buying in the numbers they were?
Moving to Tubes does not fix the problem. Without paysites or VOD sites we can't all open Tube sites, Tubes don't pay for traffic. And if they did not the prices paysites do.
Would we be getting more joins if we had 1,000s of sites with 500 videos on each charging $10 a month, $5 for 10 days and and $2 for 1 day (you can adjust those prices and days accordingly) and limiting BW on a daily basis, unless the customer paid for a Premium Membership. Would we sign up the same numbers or more? Would we earn more or less?
Would affiliates still send traffic?
Thanks for an excellent post.