Are they Suffering as Much in Mainstream?

[mopek1]

I'm working 3x as hard and my income has slowly gone down over the last couple years (very much so since Sept 2012) and is now steady at this lower level. It sucks and I hear many on here echoing the same sentiment.

Since I am not in the mainstream world I was wondering, from those who are, if they are suffering in any way since they don't have their product given away for free at every other website?

[notauniquename]

In mainstream, if their sites were shit with single income streams then they are hurting / rebuilding. If they built quality sites with multiple income streams they are most likely fine. This was all because of Google changes. Adult problems are a combo of free porn and Google changes.

[96ukssob]

Problem is there is way more people involved than a few years ago, this gives the visitor more options of where to go and where to buy.

In a few things I do on the side, I'm seem competition ten fold in the past three years. Market is becoming over saturated with folks looking to make a buck, and with how easy it is to create a website now even if you don't know what HTML is, we will only see more and more people coming out of the woodwork

[adultsitecms]

Everyone has content stolen in adult. The key to find your niche is to really promote your brand, so that it's somewhere customers want to go and stay. They want to find content easily and use it easily. So in a way, it helps deter your content from being stolen. Make it a good and simple experience.

[Barefootsies]

First off, you would have to define what you classify as "mainstream".

As an example, if you're a mailer in "mainstream" you can sit around making $500-2000.00+/per day day from your undies hitting send and loading up offers all day. There are entire affiliate programs set up around this, pushing many of the most recognized brand names you see on TV and infomercials.

While you must be CAN-SPAM compliant, have good data, IP's and resources available to some degree, it does not take a long learning curve to apply what you know an adult affiliate marketer, and switch over to mainstream affiliate programs and mailing.

If you have a traditional mainstream sort of site, I am sure they are impacted by discretionary income, access to credit, social networks, and growing number of online options the same as the adult industry. That being said, even in mainstream it will come down to the interaction with your members/mailing list/etc..

[Antonio]

Have to agree with Barefootsies, mainstream could mean just about anything. Making money off of sites solely - a lot and I mean A LOT of people got hurt badly by the every 3-minute Google updates. A lot of people offering services are struggling since they have to compete with the 2-dollars per hour guys from far far away. Most of the kids in mainstream are chasing the next big social site, making a few bucks here and there wothout any long-term strategy in place. With that said, it is probably 10 times easier to make money in "mainstream" than in adult right now...

[_Richard_]

don't they have a bigger market/pie.. id assume everything was 'harder' for ms

[notauniquename]

It all depends what you are passionate about. I've tried mainstream affiliate adsense sites and I failed. OK I didn't try very hard but I also was not very passionate. I'm passionate about sex and blogging about it. I'm not successful but I haven't hardly tried. But I do get small amounts of money coming in from porn. You need to go where your interests take you. I wish I could find the same excitement in mainstream. I would rather do that than be all secretive from friends and family. ex Wife says You received another cheque in the mail. Your mom was coming over to visit the kids so I had to hide it so she doesn't ask questions

[harvey]

of course not. The market is ever expanding, the offer is expanding as well, you have 1000 new products a day, you have tens of millions people specifically looking for that product, you have millions of products and services you can't download from a torrent.... really, you can't even compare, simple logic tells you that mainstream is not 10x but 1000x easier than adult.

While in adult is easier to get traffic, conversion rate for that traffic is ridiculous, just yesterday I saw a program bragging how well the convert with a rate of 1:2500 or something like that and I was like WTF! With a very high CTR of 10%, you need 25000 uniques to make a sale and get $30. 25000 uniques in mainstream probably amount to several thousand dollars.

Of course, nothing is like the old days, you can't start a mainstream site and make money in a few days as we did in adult. Plus, while adult is full of cheaters and scammers, its own restricted amount of people and companies served as some kind of safe net. Thus, most companies tried to play legit for as long as possible since they knew they would be shooting their own feet since we know each other. In mainstream, the amount of scammers is proportional to the difference between mainstream and adult markets, so good luck with that

[mopek1]

Thanks for the replies everyone. It seems there is pain in mainstream but many of you think there is opportunity too.

I know it's a wide open field but I was thinking mainly about selling physical products/services (not pills or snake oil) etc. and not lead generation or mailing although those options are on my mind.

[Alice22]

I spend a lot of time in mainstream forums, and looks like the situation much better there.

[mopek1]

Originally Posted by Alice22

I spend a lot of time in mainstream forums, and looks like the situation much better there.

I've also looked around in a few and found that the people who were hurting were the ones who have/promote similar products to google shopping.

[slapass]

Mainstream had a big blowout in 2006 or so. That was the one of the first big google changes where they went after affiliates. They have stabilized since then.

[mopek1]

Originally Posted by slapass

Mainstream had a big blowout in 2006 or so. That was the one of the first big google changes where they went after affiliates. They have stabilized since then.

When you say 'stabilized' do you mean they went back to where they were at before the 2006 blowout or do you mean that their downward spiral has simply stopped going down?