Originally Posted by signupdamnit

I'm mostly ignoring anything about whether it is harder for affiliates/others and am instead focusing solely on whether the total revenue in adult (porn+dating+cams mainly) is higher in 2015 versus 2000.

I'll just make some points to make it a quicker read rather than a wall of text.

- There are more people online. Definitely, but a good portion of that traffic is almost garbage. Now that statement is just not true. Sure, some traffic is garbage, but to say all the increased traffic we have now vs 2000 is low quality is just inaccurate. I see stats (some my own, some from others) on email, socialNetworks etc that are doing 1:5 click to free and 1:12 free to paid on dating...on huge volume. A HUGE % of the increase over 7-10 years ago is in social networking, which is tailor made for dating and cams. So it doesn't end up being a 1000% increase or anything near what you need to offset the negatives. I remember arguing over this with Fabian of Manwin circa 2011 and actually going into country of origin figures from official internet traffic sources over the last couple decades.

- A dating company which had their data leaked also had some reports leaked which detailed affiliate earnings. The reports showed that their top earners (mostly tubes) appeared to make less than about $3,000 per week. In fact beyond the top 10 it was pretty much all under $1,000 a week. A few hundred a week put you in the top 100 for sure. Im not sure what tube that is, and what sponsor. If its traffic from videos pre rolls, under player, banner etc. If so how many videos, how many views? The big Tubes are generating into the 6 figures a month for EACH of their top banner spots. And there are more than a few dating sponsors doing 1000+ joins a day. In some cases, far more than that. To just say their top earner is making 3k a week is not enough info and is definitely not any indication of the state of traffic as a whole. Its like saying "I know a sandwich shop and they only sell 10 sandwiches a day, therefor the food service industry is obviously not what it used to be.

Granted there are bigger companies in the dating game as is there also cams but I think this still shows something. The money being made today from these traffic sources isn't near what some assume they are. The weaker ability to monetize traffic (as compared to before) significantly harms earnings industry wide. Basically you have something like 10x more traffic doing $2 cpm now versus 1x the traffic doing $30-$50+ cpm in 1999. This results in a relative net loss. Of course individual results vary but we're talking overall only. First, There is FAR, FAR, FAR more than 10X the amount of traffic than there was in those days. At the end of 97, there were apx 70 million internet users, in 2014, its 3 Billion+. Thats 42X more actual people. And they are online, more often, for longer and on new devices. The increase in total Pageviews vs 97 is many hundreds of times larger.

Side note, nerd porn:

This is almost unbelievable, but its true.........Take a look at the internet as a whole from 1997-2014. In 1997, the web as a whole used apx 2400 GB per day of BW. In 2014, lol, it used that much ever 0.14 SECONDS. If you do the math to figure that increase, its almost laughable......we use 608,000X more BW than we did in 97