Originally Posted by signupdamnit

With a legal tube (ran by old school affiliates and not crooks) we put up your videos (usually under two minutes) for the sake of actually making sales with your program. We would in some cases have two clickable banners for your site next to the video with a total of four links going through the affiliate code to your site. We did everything in our power to make sales with you. The goal wasn't to sell traffic, sell cams, sell dating. It was to partner with you and make sales. We pushed you as hard as we possibly could. We would sometimes get great positions at the top of Google for great terms and we would send as much of this traffic as possible to you (again not you, but sponsors in general). It was a partnership and we both benefited.

Enter the pirate tubes. Enter the rise of the content partner programs and 7 to 15 minute clips. Now Google gives our old ranks to these pirates and the people you supply with 12 minute videos because google likes their time on site more due to the long videos. Now we get 1/10th the traffic and the traffic goes to these sites. They make sales at 5-10 times worse ctr+ratio metrics than we did. Now the surfer sees so much content on page one from pirates and the CPPs that they don't buy paysite memberships. So now the traffic we still do get doesn't make sales anymore and it's "Adapt or die" and we have to consider things as we go check out the affiliate section of the sponsor which mentions "epassporte" and has only seven year old 30 second clips for us to promote as we see 20 minute videos from the same sponsor on Pornhub. Now we get to see sponsors kiss the ass of these tubes while saying "adapt or die" to us on the forums. And now you're (not you but the average paysite owner) sitting here wondering where all your revenue went over the years and why you are broke because "only idiots pay for porn" while frantically uploading 15 minute clips to some scumbag's tube site so you can make one sale for every million views.

The above is pretty much the experience for affiliates who run the traditional non user uploaded tubes. Good on you if you really make the same content available to your old partners as you do with the CPPs but that isn't what is happening with most of the industry so many of us have "adapted before we died". We monetize in other ways now as opposed to pushing your affiliate links. Or we've moved on from adult.

Originally Posted by bigluv

I'm not convinced very many tubes give a good enough user experience to actually cannibalize would-have-been sales.

I think the paysites have cannibalized their own sales with shady xsales, misleading promo's of no-update members areas, DRM combined with shittily implemented stre (pause) aming, etcetera.

I guess there's a segment that has switched from pay to free, but I think the majority of purchase-less tube traffic were confirmed non purchasers to begin with and consume the free shitty quality, shitty experience porn because they can.

I don't have any numbers, but my personal experience on most tubes is fairly crappy. Some of them do it closer to right though.

Paysites generally do it worse, from what I've seen. It's a mix, of course, and some do it great, and there's always exceptions on both sides.

I think our own industry is to blame, personally. Not so much the tubes. When card bangers are feted and even respectable sites have deceptive xsales ... I mean, how long were those customers supposed to keep coming back and being abused?

I would never put my fucking credit card info into an adult site without having seen the inside and even then I'd think three times and want to use a prepaid or something. And I buy everything you can imagine online. I don't think I'm alone.

An interesting report out of the UK today said something along the lines of .. music piracy actually has not hurt the industry, and it may have actually helped. I didn't delve into the details, but one of the ideas was, all those "lost" sales were unlikely to have been sales in the first place.