The state of adult marketing

[SecondFloor]

I came into the adult marketing space as a web developer. Before starting my own affiliate sites, I'd been employed working on marketing websites for different industries. So while I didn't have adult marketing experience, I felt like I knew enough about online marketing in general to give it a shot.

However, It's been my experience that the adult marketing world operates very differently from that of mainstream businesses. In short, it seems like theres a way higher abundance of spammy and low-quality sites intent on amassing huge amounts of traffic. I don't see a lot of pushing the envelope with better design, engineering, and marketing content. I don't see a lot of sites trying to be valuable to consumers - I see a lot of sites trying to trick people.

I'm not trying to trash the industry as a whole. There are absolutely great sites out there. But for every one of these there are 300 spammy wordpress blogs with illegible content - and some of these amass a huge amount of organic traffic even though they seem low effort and low value. The link-trading is very transactional. There isn't a lot of honest guest-blogging. Sometimes it feels like the only practical way to build up a link profile is through trading with low-quality sites, or paying for a hardlink.

Is my impression of adult online marketing correct? Is this really the way it is? Or am I looking in the wrong places and missing opportunities?

[bigPunk]

Yes, there are alot of low quality sites that gets lots of organic traffic, nothing new.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by bigPunk

Yes, there are alot of low quality sites that gets lots of organic traffic, nothing new.

But is it true that this is way more of a thing in the adult industry? I feel like there are way fewer low-quality spam sites about consumer products.

I also don't love trading links with these sites because of their quality. Yet, I feel like I have to try, because they often still have better backlink profiles than my sites.

[Rochard]

This is a political board.

[Bladewire]

One of the best ways to promote in adult is via social media platforms in a PG way.

Giving power to low quality spammy sites, and linking with them, will bite you in the ass later on via SE update. It always happens sooner or later.

[Rochard]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

I came into the adult marketing space as a web developer. Before starting my own affiliate sites, I'd been employed working on marketing websites for different industries. So while I didn't have adult marketing experience, I felt like I knew enough about online marketing in general to give it a shot.

However, It's been my experience that the adult marketing world operates very differently from that of mainstream businesses. In short, it seems like theres a way higher abundance of spammy and low-quality sites intent on amassing huge amounts of traffic. I don't see a lot of pushing the envelope with better design, engineering, and marketing content. I don't see a lot of sites trying to be valuable to consumers - I see a lot of sites trying to trick people.

I'm not trying to trash the industry as a whole. There are absolutely great sites out there. But for every one of these there are 300 spammy wordpress blogs with illegible content - and some of these amass a huge amount of organic traffic even though they seem low effort and low value. The link-trading is very transactional. There isn't a lot of honest guest-blogging. Sometimes it feels like the only practical way to build up a link profile is through trading with low-quality sites, or paying for a hardlink.

Is my impression of adult online marketing correct? Is this really the way it is? Or am I looking in the wrong places and missing opportunities?

All kidding aside, you might have missed the entire point of adult marketing.

The reason why there are so many crappy sites is because there is zero entry barrier. Anyone can become an affiliate.

[beavr]

Trending means selling
VR is trending
It's hard to sell porn audience.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by Bladewire

One of the best ways to promote in adult is via social media platforms in a PG way.

This makes sense. It seems like twitter is the best way to do this now, but i have zero experience with social marketing. Im happy for any advice here!

Originally Posted by Bladewire

Giving power to low quality spammy sites, and linking with them, will bite you in the ass later on via SE update. It always happens sooner or later.

I totally see the logic in this, but I feel like my options for legitimate links are extremely limited. I'm sometimes able to get promotion from my affiliate partners, like this post on the Cam4 blog, but other than stuff like that Im not totally sure what to do to expand my link profile.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by Rochard

The reason why there are so many crappy sites is because there is zero entry barrier. Anyone can become an affiliate.

The low barrier is true of amazon affiliates also, but I really feel like even the worst consumer affiliate sites are better than the majority of adult affiliate sites.

[Paul Markham]

If one searches on Google or similar, one lands on tens of Tube sites. Adult marketing has always been a fancy word for slinging traffic at free stuff.

How much traffic do porn sites that give out a bit of advice, real article or similar.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by Paul Markham

If one searches on Google or similar, one lands on tens of Tube sites. Adult marketing has always been a fancy word for slinging traffic at free stuff.

How much traffic do porn sites that give out a bit of advice, real article or similar.

There are a ton of tube sites - but why do so few have quality design or engineering? How do sites like this command millions in organic traffic per month while looking totally dated?

Whats confusing to me is that in a mainstream businesses, a site with such low quality would never be accepted by consumers when there are better alternatives. What is special about porn that lets site design be stuck in 2001? It seems like all these tube sites are clones of one another that arent even trying to do anything new for customers.

[~Ray]

Create a link wheel. They still work.

LINK WHEEL is a buzzword in website SEO industry. A Link Wheel is one of the best and most efficient ways of building tiered links in the most powerful way to increase webpage ranking increases.

https://www.stayonsearch.com/httpdoc...wheelsmall.jpg

Ray
Hardlinks.org

[Rochard]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

The low barrier is true of amazon affiliates also, but I really feel like even the worst consumer affiliate sites are better than the majority of adult affiliate sites.

But an Amazon affiliate makes nothing where in adult on the low end we make 50%...

[venus]

amazon has gotten has bad as adult sites, most of the reviews are fake, paid for which is the way to spam amazon, most of the stuff from third party is junk from china. there is like a hundred of the same things under different names, different prices probably from the same china man. the only way to shop on amazon is stuff sold and delivered by amazon. the rest is junk being spammed.

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

the worst consumer affiliate sites are better than the majority of adult affiliate sites.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by ~Ray

Create a link wheel. They still work.

LINK WHEEL is a buzzword in website SEO industry. A Link Wheel is one of the best and most efficient ways of building tiered links in the most powerful way to increase webpage ranking increases.

This is an interesting strategy that I've read about before! Usually when people talk about link wheels, It feels like its a ploy to game the system, but maybe theres a more "white hat" way to go about it. Not long ago we created this niche site about gay webcams. We could make more of these for different niches, get a few links for each on linkspun, and hook those up to our main money sites.

Obviously this is a little more time consuming than just starting up blogs on free hosted services, but It seems safer long-term.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by Rochard

But an Amazon affiliate makes nothing where in adult on the low end we make 50%...

We actually looked at lots of other non-adult niches first, but when we saw the payouts in adult, it seemed too good to be true!

Originally Posted by venus

amazon has gotten has bad as adult sites, most of the reviews are fake, paid for which is the way to spam amazon, most of the stuff from third party is junk from china. there is like a hundred of the same things under different names, different prices probably from the same china man. the only way to shop on amazon is stuff sold and delivered by amazon. the rest is junk being spammed.

Damn that's a bummer. I haven't delved far into the consumer product affiliate world, so maybe its equally bad there as it is in adult. Still, it seems like its such a larger space that there are more opportunities for linking and guest blogging. And it seems like there are more people really trying to push the envelope and make stuff thats new and modern.

[wankawonk]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

I came into the adult marketing space as a web developer. Before starting my own affiliate sites, I'd been employed working on marketing websites for different industries. So while I didn't have adult marketing experience, I felt like I knew enough about online marketing in general to give it a shot.

However, It's been my experience that the adult marketing world operates very differently from that of mainstream businesses. In short, it seems like theres a way higher abundance of spammy and low-quality sites intent on amassing huge amounts of traffic. I don't see a lot of pushing the envelope with better design, engineering, and marketing content. I don't see a lot of sites trying to be valuable to consumers - I see a lot of sites trying to trick people.

I'm not trying to trash the industry as a whole. There are absolutely great sites out there. But for every one of these there are 300 spammy wordpress blogs with illegible content - and some of these amass a huge amount of organic traffic even though they seem low effort and low value. The link-trading is very transactional. There isn't a lot of honest guest-blogging. Sometimes it feels like the only practical way to build up a link profile is through trading with low-quality sites, or paying for a hardlink.

Is my impression of adult online marketing correct? Is this really the way it is? Or am I looking in the wrong places and missing opportunities?

FWIW in the last few years, pornhub/xvideos/xhamster have gobbled up *huge* portions of the available organic search traffic that they didn't used to have. So, things are changing--more of the traffic/money is going to the big players with valuable sites. But there's still lots of low-value sites ranking!

Sites like alohatube have just been around forever; they got big back when it was easy, and still have all the same direct visitors keeping them popular and keeping them ranking (google strongly values brand searches--if people are typing "alohatube" into google, alohatube will rank for many queries). Eventually these sites will probably die and in 2018 it's harder than ever to get a low-quality site like this to rank. (Though, alohatube has relatively high-quality search results; their visual design is stupid but they do the right things where it counts.)

I have a conjecture about why you see low-quality sites ranking so frequently in adult--it's based on nothing but my own observations and intuitions, but I think there's something to it: Because google strongly devalues adult backlinks and websites, spammy links end up being almost as valuable as good links, because a good, contextual backlink is still coming from an adult website, which google devalues. So you're able to rank a site with a spammy backlink profile (temporarily, anyway--eventually google will devalue your spam, and continue to value Pornhub's high-quality blog posts and massive, varied backlink profile) because when it comes to adult, google doesn't see a huge difference between a spammy link and a strong contextual one. Adult is all spam, as far as google is concerned.

I could be totally wrong about all this, but I really do think there's something to it. Google rates all porn as spam/low-value, so it's easy to short-term rank a site with bad backlink profiles. Of course in the long-term bad backlink profiles will be penalized, but you can make a LOT of money getting a site to rank for a year or so with spammy backlinks.

Just look at anybunny.mobi--they went from nothing to alexa 1k in less than a year with completely shitty backlinks, made a ton of money, and now 6 months after they hit alexa 1k they've been penalized and are making beer money. You get penalized eventually but spammy backlinks can pump you up to absurd traffic levels for short amounts of time.

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

There are a ton of tube sites - but why do so few have quality design or engineering? How do sites like this command millions in organic traffic per month while looking totally dated?

Whats confusing to me is that in a mainstream businesses, a site with such low quality would never be accepted by consumers when there are better alternatives. What is special about porn that lets site design be stuck in 2001? It seems like all these tube sites are clones of one another that arent even trying to do anything new for customers.

There are loads of people in adult traffic who don't have the money or skills to improve their sites. So the big one gobble up most of the traffic.

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by Rochard

But an Amazon affiliate makes nothing where in adult on the low end we make 50%...

50% was always way too high a rate to start at for affiliates, it made the whole thing too easy for the incompetent. Now add all the assistance given to affiliates making it even easier. With less affiliates those left would have made a lot more money.

[CaptainHowdy]

The whole of the internet is a mess . . .

[CurrentlySober]

Originally Posted by venus

amazon has gotten has bad as adult sites, most of the reviews are fake, paid for which is the way to spam amazon, most of the stuff from third party is junk from china. there is like a hundred of the same things under different names, different prices probably from the same china man. the only way to shop on amazon is stuff sold and delivered by amazon. the rest is junk being spammed.

Yeah, just yesterday a facebook ad for a shitty cctv camera came up from Amazon. Nothing new so far, but this was from the makers of the camera. They said if you bought one, and left a five star review, you could claim the entire cost of the camera back from them via paypal...

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by wankawonk

I have a conjecture about why you see low-quality sites ranking so frequently in adult--it's based on nothing but my own observations and intuitions, but I think there's something to it: Because google strongly devalues adult backlinks and websites, spammy links end up being almost as valuable as good links, because a good, contextual backlink is still coming from an adult website, which google devalues. So you're able to rank a site with a spammy backlink profile (temporarily, anyway--eventually google will devalue your spam, and continue to value Pornhub's high-quality blog posts and massive, varied backlink profile) because when it comes to adult, google doesn't see a huge difference between a spammy link and a strong contextual one. Adult is all spam, as far as google is concerned.

This is a really interesting take that makes a lot of sense. It explains why spammy linking with low-quality sites is more prevalent in adult. Thanks for the insight!

I think a lot of people try to roll with this by "churning and burning" sites. They'll make a lame site, rank it fast with black hat SEO techniques, and in 8 months when google catches on, they already have other bad sites waiting to take it's place.

[SecondFloor]

Originally Posted by CaptainHowdy

The whole of the internet is a mess . . .

I remember when I was young and naive and believed the internet was going to solve the worlds problems by democratizing information. I thought it would end xenophobia, because how could anyone be prejudice when they're able to talk to foreigners online and empathize? How could miss-information propagate if the truth was out there for anyone to find? How wrong I was. In my opinion we fucked it all up when we tried to monetize literally every facet of the internet.

[Bladewire]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

In my opinion we fucked it all up when we tried to monetize literally every facet of the internet.

Wait for the day where you are charged a few cents, or less, connection fee for each link you click outside your providers network.

[acwm.biz]

Originally Posted by SecondFloor

I came into the adult marketing space as a web developer. Before starting my own affiliate sites, I'd been employed working on marketing websites for different industries. So while I didn't have adult marketing experience, I felt like I knew enough about online marketing in general to give it a shot.

However, It's been my experience that the adult marketing world operates very differently from that of mainstream businesses. In short, it seems like theres a way higher abundance of spammy and low-quality sites intent on amassing huge amounts of traffic. I don't see a lot of pushing the envelope with better design, engineering, and marketing content. I don't see a lot of sites trying to be valuable to consumers - I see a lot of sites trying to trick people.

I'm not trying to trash the industry as a whole. There are absolutely great sites out there. But for every one of these there are 300 spammy wordpress blogs with illegible content - and some of these amass a huge amount of organic traffic even though they seem low effort and low value. The link-trading is very transactional. There isn't a lot of honest guest-blogging. Sometimes it feels like the only practical way to build up a link profile is through trading with low-quality sites, or paying for a hardlink.

Is my impression of adult online marketing correct? Is this really the way it is? Or am I looking in the wrong places and missing opportunities?

I dont see that you are apart of the affiliate program. I think you need to address this.