Quote:
Originally Posted by deltav
It is pretty mind-boggling. Even going back 3-4 years ago you were somewhat limited as to what you could find on the tubes. Generic mainstream porn was easy & abundant, but many of the more specific niches the surfers' options were limited. Not so anymore. In 30 seconds of searching a surfer can bring up hundreds of full-length vids in nearly any category they can think of, enough to keep them masturbating 3x/day for years. It's comical. That's what happens when programs give affiliates a neverending stream of "promo" content and then they saturate the Web with it by the millions for a decade-plus, using the "throw enough shit against the wall & some will stick" marketing strategy.
It was the affiliate model that built online adult up and it's the affiliate model that killed it.
I still believe you can sell effectively to the true aficionados of certain micro-niches, the rare people who will indeed pay for the content they love and even perhaps develop a loyalty toward your brand. But those people are .001% of the original porn-buying customers, so the pie is tiny & getting smaller by the month. And reaching that audience takes a lot of work.
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I can tell you understand the situation with niche and micro-niche as well. It's a relatively small amount of surfers and once you start handing out content for free in great numbers it can totally change the viability of the market.
I admit it was a rough lesson for me. At first I thought that niche and especially micro-niche would be largely immune to the piracy. I figured that the tubes would keep their focus on the mainstream markets. I did not think micro-niche sponsors would tolerate them. But little did I know it's even more vulnerable due to the above. You cannot make it up on volume when in a micro-niche. It's impossible because the interested surfers just aren't there. Once the sponsors in the micro-niches got hit with reduced revenues they mostly turned to the tubes in desperation further accelerating the problem.
Admittedly I think affiliates didn't help matters either. I know in the past if you managed to find a micro-niche where little or no affiliate or other content exists while also finding the right target demographic you could get very, very, very rich in a short time. This was true as little as five years ago. There was a lto of opportunity still with paysites and even as an affiliate.
But I don't believe the affiliates of old are so much responsible for this mess we see now. Most of these giant tubes were started and financed by the large players in our industry. Often it was done secretly. For instance look at Brazzers. For the most part the affiliates of old hated it. I know I've been rallying against it for at least five years. We knew it would decimate the paysite affiliate model and that was how most of us made our living. We also suspected it would hurt paysites in the long term as well. We were right sadly.
The people who mainly dropped the ball in this industry are those at the top. They did not think long term. They were greedy and stupid. They took short term profits. But that used to be how most business was done. It was a frat boy type atmosphere with hookers and blow where most people at the top had little real business education.