adendreams

I hate pirates.
I spend hours per day seeking out my shit and sending take-down notices. I even have battles with pirates trying to take their domain names. Fuckheads are rabid with my content.

I actually started winning in the last few months, I got so much shit taken down that I have tipped the scales and I'm actually getting the drop on these fuckers the same day they post my shit. (I also have help of a good anti-piracy firm)

Anyway it's when I started winning that I started noticing something surprising - I'm making a lot of money from the pirate traffic. The pirates that don't take the effort to cut off my watermarks are sending me a SHIT LOAD of traffic (type-ins). So what does this mean? Should I continue to wipe them all out or let some of them run with my shit and send me joins...where is the tipping point? How do you find it?

The answer was right there in my stats - once you get the piracy down to a manageable level you can see quite clearly the fluctuations of your type in traffic. One pirate link sent my traffic to a higher level than its ever been - fucking Reddit is HUGE and its all pirate motherfuckers and I hate them - but goddamn they are making money.

Moral of the story - battle them hard - then watch them and watch the flow of your type ins carefully (of course this wont apply to many of you) But if you can strike a balance and allow some of the guys (who dont remove watermarks) to run with your content - big gains can be realized.

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SplatterMaster

Most type-ins are just people seeing what else you have on your site then going back to the pirate board and requesting what looks good. Yea they send traffic, but very little if any converts. Why would it when they know where to get it for free.

purecane

Should I continue to wipe them all out or let some of them run with my shit and send me joins...where is the tipping point? How do you find it?


I think your tipping point was three drinks ago...... You're gonna be tasting your foot on that statement

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adendreams

You missed the part where I said they CANT get it for free - where I said I was winning the battle and wiping out my pirated shit the moment it goes up.

Pirate traffic certainly does convert - proof is in the pudding. Remember my essay is in 2 parts - you have to battle to get your pirated content down to almost nil - so ONCE you are winning you can employ this strategy - of course if you let pirates run wild its lose lose.

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adendreams

I stand by that statement 100 percent and would like to hear a reasoned opinion to the contrary. My stats show me very clearly wild jumps in traffic when Reddit pirates post my shit - I see direct income from those uniques. I'm making statements of fact so please tell me how my foot tastes.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/reddit.com

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Bman

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purecane

So your saying piracy is acceptable if it gets you traffic and joins.... But if some douche wants to use it to make himself that traffic it is a crime...... In my opinion, you can't walk the middle of the road on this debate, you're either for or against piracy

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His Infernal Majesty

It's basic branding principles, similar to street artists who put their work out there for free to get people interested in paying for it later. Like Shepard Fairey and his Obey campaign which is now a clothing brand.

It is interesting to apply those principals to adult, though, I don't think it would be sustainable.

The main problem I have with piracy is the hypocrisy about "sharing". It is a big business, and the worst kind of business. One that exists only to make money off other people's work with no creative initiative.

Struggle4Bucks

You can't proof these typins are from people that saw you on pirateboards..., could be anyone...

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L-Pink

Your argument makes no sense.

DWB

I think there is money there and you need to choose your battles wisely. We leave some content out there so long as it is watermarked. We've seen times where we've totally cleared tubes of our videos and noticed a drop in type in traffic, so we put up some videos again and it came back with a sales increase. You just have to find the middle ground, find the right lengths of videos that work for you, and for sure remove anything not watermarked.

helterskelter808

Do whatever works for you and that you're happy with. Simple as that.

Semi-relatedly, affiliates should never use content that is watermarked or, even worse, has a URL.

wizzart

I agree with that, but we don't have a choice.

mineistaken

10$/hour would hire outsourced help to do that.
Hit me up if interested in a hookup.

mineistaken

Makes some sense though. When they see screenshots of movies on pirate forums, but their rapidshare links says "file not found" they are curious to check that site typing in.

Yngwie

ok so it gets you a lot of traffic and some joins, but at what ratio? All the traffic in the worlds means absolute shit if you're converting at 1:10 000, 1:20 000, 1:30 000 etc.. Still means that 10's of THOUSANDS of surfers are getting all your content for free yet you think that it's ok since you're making some $ from a small % of that traffic. So, how much traffic are you getting and how many sales are you getting from that traffic? Without specific # your original post means nothing.

Marquis85

This thread is golden.

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Bman

Lots of people don't have the luxury of being a big company.
I applaud him, he is trying to make it work for him. Why people are criticising what he is saying and doing is beyond me. Especially when I have never seen any proof of the critics working in the Adult or online industry.

Affiliates tend to be ubber critical of things. For the most people dont even want to post stuff cause of this type of attack.. Anyways man Like i said

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BFT3K

I used to manually create a un/pw that was good for one day.

Then, late in that day, I would go to password exchange sites and post the pass, complete with great accolades for my site network.

Within no time the pass wouldn't work any longer, but it would still drive traffic back to me, via the frustrated pirate surfers.

Some of it would actually convert!


You're welcome.

Far-L

CE taught us all about "hacked/cracked" password sites back in the day. That traffic converted amazingly well. Even in the case of non-seeded real crack traffic back in the day we would send them to our "cracker-hacker tour". That tour's marketing message was "hey we know you are trying to get in free, and we know you want our stuff, but here is why we have to charge a reasonable fee" and that tour converted that so called junk traffic at less than 1:400.

Most of the comments in here are assumptions about user behavior, reactions to perceived injustices, and condescending judgments.

I applaud his honesty and give him kudos for actually looking at the numbers rather than just falling into the reactive thinking that is so prevalent when it comes to this topic.

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mafia_man

This

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SplatterMaster

I’m right there with you Aden. Every day, day after day, sending in those takedown notices the minute content is posted. My problem is the slowness of filelockers like Rapidgator and Upstore with taking content down. And then allowing the same people to upload it. Just another day of wack-a-mole. I’m a small content producer so that’s about all I can do. I can’t afford to take these lockers to court and they know that.

When I do find the pirates and suspend their accounts, I haven’t noticed any increase in sales. I thought like you and figured dead links would bring in sales. And them not posting for a couple of weeks would bring in more sales. But I haven’t seen it and I’ve been playing this game with pirates for a couple of years now. Those that download from filelockers know the pirates will produce what they want. They know the pirate will just use another stolen CC and rip the site again. Because pirates get paid big money stealing your content and posting it on boards. Even more than some of us small producers get paid.

Far-L

We have years of numbers stating the exact opposite thing so what are you basing your information on?

Not saying this is the case for you but more often than not I find those "people come but leave" statements are made by people that don't really know and just form hunches about it without actually observing any sort of data or doing any form of testing.

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Far-L

Try replacing the clips that were taken down with well branded versions you control that have strong marketing bumpers. If you are making the effort to counter-attack then you might as well go on the offensive a little too. Even better if you set up a specific domain too so that you can track the type ins better.

Make the pirate a privateer just like the English, Spanish, and French did to each other back in the day out on the high seas in the 1600s. Pretty soon you will be able to give out free peg legs and parrots to the most swarthy.

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mafia_man

Heresy, anecdotal evidence and my Columbo gene.

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SplatterMaster

I welcome explanation on how I can replace stolen content with content I can control. Rapidgator and Upstore don’t seem to willing to work with those who own the content.
Why would they turn over an account that makes them thousands to replace content that will make them nothing? Nah, they just delete the content and allow the same person to use the same account to upload more content they don’t own.

I agree if the content could be controlled, money could be made. But the only ones controlling the content these days are the pirates and their filelockers. And you can't control links being posted on boards. Owners of the boards make more than the pirates.

That’s the way I see it anyways.

SGS

Pearl & Dean. The cinemas in the UK have doing it right for years. Branding, product placement and advertising and getting your product out in front of as many eyes as possible. We used to beg affiliates to take what they wanted to use with a 50% cut then the world would end when sites started posting content for free.

The problem is that most adult is still in the Stone Age. 100% raw product and even though Hollywood makes millions on other things other than bums on seats the adult industry were just basically taking one revenue stream at the front door for a raw product. This will change in the years to come that is for certain.

We used to use a take down company and two people at our end almost devoted full time work on take downs too. Utter waste of time and an utter waste of a new audience. Yes it's a fucker when your product and hard work is stolen but rather than grit your teeth and scream at the world just make a few changes to your produc so that piracy (free traffic) works in your favour.

Sounds daft? Well we have been shooting since the mid 80's and our stuff is 100% exclusive so it's easy to put it together to make sales in loads of different ways. Hurts me to see our effort being used by others but changing it to work for us has made far more sense in loads of ways.

Adapt or die? You need to be adapting every day or you are already dead.

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Far-L

Have you tried asking? We have always found that a polite, non-threatening, and professionally worded request works more often than not. Granted and agreed there are some that won't but just turning a few in your favor reduces the stress of going after all of them. Putting up legit content also is advantageous to them. They make money off the traffic from having free content, not off of taking down DMCA'd content all day.

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SplatterMaster

With all due respect, we?re talking a criminal enterprise. I?m sure they?ll just open their money-laundering world right up to me And to be honest, I have no desire being a part of the problem I?m trying to fight. Why should I work with them as they continue to rip other sites and sell content that is not theirs?
If they want to do things legit, then let them make the move to only allow copyright holders post material on their servers. I?ll be happy to upload material every week, allow a few signups to the filelocker in exchange for advertising, and then take my content down or replace it. My guess though is that doesn?t pay them as much as allowing several thousand signups before they take the content down.
Filelockers know what their doing. They work with the boards and the pirates to maximize profits. They are the top of the chain.

Filelocker>boards>pirates>consumer

Nice little enterprise they have going. All paid for by other peoples work and stolen CC?s provided to the pirates. It?s so big and profitable; I wouldn?t be surprised to see someone very big in this business at the top of the food chain.

I have approached them very nicely, very politely and very respectfully and asked them to not allow my content on their service. Unfortunately it falls on deaf ears. I?m usually very polite and respectful in my emails. I?m only an asshole sometimes in forums

adultmobile

Traffic from pirates can for sure convert cams, just looks the streamate popunders of thepiratebay and those mfc or livejasmin ones all around others. It makes sense (to who knows cam users does not search "porn"), I can confirm I got cam sales from full dvdrip sites - not that I had targeted piracy. Simply some ad networks shown my ads in pirate sites too when purchased generic "us ca au" traffic. I found out by checking http referers of pay users in a second moment... and reported this in the kill file lockers thread, with very little reactions. Piracy ads are not cheaper so I buy those less controversial ("legal tubes" etc), but would apparently make no big difference in conversions.

Now, to further claim: piracy traffic converts prerecorded content sites... if these sites content is not fully available for free immediately... this may be questionable. I remember that manwin advertised brazzers on thepiratebay and to people complaining here in gfy, Fabian answered: well, what if it is worth and converts. But this is manwin, nothing normal or to compare with.

It is however true that piracy sites create awareness of products. I remember now that back in 1990's when I was into shareware, I had a web design tool it costed $20 to buy, and I remember when it was "cracked", it been listed everywhere next to photoshop and the such, everyone knew it existed, more magazines reviewed it and most traffic seemed to come from pirate sites. Also this first crack that came out was very complicated to apply, needed to read a .nfo file and do lots of steps, so lots people was so lazy they buy the license. Had to change key system and sales was good as some guy wanted last version which was not cracked anyway. However guys this was 1990's when any ccbill site was doing a million dollar sales a month.

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adendreams

Oh I'm against piracy - thought I made that pretty clear - I'm just making observations here and one thing is clear I already lose money due to the time I spend battling them...if I spend more time battling them I would lose more money, so I'm learning to pull back and manage my time better - and noticing all this pirate traffic coming in makes it clear that there is a crux - a point where its better to say fuck it, focus on production more and watch the uptick in sales coming in from reddit and tubes.

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adendreams

In most cases agree this statement is true - but in my case I dont have a lot of traffic so its really noticeable when someone posts something of mine on a huge pirate tube or link site - I see a huge spike in type ins (and search traffic) and I know exactly where they are coming from.

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CT-Content

It's topics like this that you need to keep to yourself. What financial gain is to be made here on gfy by bragging of a handful of conversions while indirectly thumbs upping a major criminal enterprise such as piracy?
Keep your mouth shut while you make $.

slapass

Is it scalable and will it support your site? I understand what you are saying and it makes sense as that is where the traffic is. But if getting one in a million to sign up isn't going to pay the bills then it is not really getting all excited about.

anexsia

Even Google has admitted it's whack-a-mole trying to deal with piracy.