Originally Posted by Konda

First of all LOL at Paul not knowing what a media buyer is...

As for affiliates, in the past an affiliate (publisher) hand picked a few sponsors (paysites) that he thought would convert well on his site and put up some banners and started to make money. If a new site was released or one of the ones he was using stopped converting he changed around some sites/banners. It was making good money so he didn't care that probably about 75% of his traffic was wasted, eg the majority of his traffic could make a lot more if it was sent elsewhere based on the user's profile (GEO, Device, etc). The rest of affiliates back then were mainly FHG submitters and some SEO guys.

Most adult affiliates at that time were people that got lucky at some point but did not have much business sense, they just made easy money and didn't care much about anything else while slowly the industry changed; smarter people came around, the internet grew quickly, connections got better, users got more demanding/picky, and instead of innovating and adapting they stuck with their old fashioned sites complaining about too much free content and bad ratios.

At the same time adult traffic networks came along and for the affiliates that still had traffic it made a lot more sense to put an iframe from a traffic network than an individual banner for a individual paysite site. The traffic networks made the affiliates more money again, because they fully optimize the traffic, something the affiliates didn't know how to do. Like for example why would you send a user on a mobile phone from India to a paysite where the chance he signs up is almost zero while if you send him to a one click direct carrier biller offer you can easily get a few bucks out of him.

So most of the old school affiliates that survived are now just publishers for the adult networks. There are probably not many publishers left that have high traffic sites that promote individual paysites, unless they are working in very specific niches.

So adult affiliates these days are not the same as what affiliates were in the past, now it's mainly media buyers and then some tube submitters, SEO guys, review/discount sites, top list sites, etc.