Originally Posted by seanchai

As a company, whose done a fair bit advertising over the last few years in AVNOnline, Xbiz and Klixxx, in my opinion, it's not really the recession that caused us to cut back our advertising but a lack of relevance and reach.
We spent over a $160k in 2008 in print, shows and a few online forums in 2008 solely to reach the affiliates and to brand our product Groobybucks with "Selling Shemales". Due to articles and exposure in the last few years, we pretty much fulfilled what we set out to do and most people promoting shemales or in the TS online biz, know of us. While their are still newbies coming into the industry, I feel we can pick them up and present ourselves to them through less costly formats and we cut down our budget for advertising for affiliates in 2009 to under $70k and expect next year to be even more selective on shows and sporadic "reminder" advertising.

What have we done with that budget? We're spending it on direct marketing to potential members (through the same mediums of print, internet and shows) and we've also hired 2 people to work specifically on building traffic and ensured we have a dedicated affiliate manager to work directly with established and new affiliates to get them converting for us. I'm expecting a better ROI by these means.

As has been mentioned numerous times, this industry is constantly evolving ... you can be assured that if I'm thinking this way and taking this action, then a lot bigger players than us, with bigger budgets have also done the same.

I personally thought that AVNOnline was an excellent magazine and in the last 12 months took a much wider view of the industry and I'm sorry to see it go. I'm happy that Klixxx, which I also think is an excellent magazine has reduced to being published every 2 months as I think this should helps it's survival, it offers a lot of excellent tips to new members. Xbiz, although different to the above two, is also a mag that I hope will be around longer.

The heady days of wide boys throwing their money around to impress and get webmasters working for them, is also mainly over as affiliates become more fickle, smarter and have less committment to specific companies.