The Tube Myth
 

If google can't monetize a tube site, with their almost infinite resources, who can? Tubes are nothing but fool's gold. Here is a quote from this article http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...ubeloss04.html

"For a site that generates as much online traffic as YouTube, it would seem a no-brainer that profit is streaming in.

But according to a Credit Suisse analyst, the most popular video Web site ? owned by the richest Web site Google ? will lose $470 million this year because it sells advertising only on a fraction of its pages.

YouTube sells ads on less than 3 percent of the Web pages that could carry commercial messages, analyst Spencer Wang wrote Friday in a note to clients. To boost that percentage, Google needs to standardize ad formats and better demonstrate that ads on YouTube help sell products, he wrote."

Should of started this thread as "FACT:"

More clicks :)

YouTube.com is not porn.

Youtube has more traffic than any porn tube

"YouTube.com is not porn."

Heh...true enough but the economics are the same. Bandwidth is most of the cost, and ad revenues aren't paying the bills for tube sites. (People looking for free stuff don't buy much and so those ads don't convert).

The bottom line is that these tube site owners are digging their own graves. Throwing money at an intractable problem.

Google also probably pays fraction of what adult tubes pay for bandwidth (on per mbit basis)... so it's much easier for them to be profitable...

Excellent point. Google has the advantage of economy of scale, so costs for others are going to be much higher.

[sarcasm]Yeah, and we all know that Adult Traffic is much more valuable than mainstream traffic[/sarcasm]

I'm sure porn advertising converts a lot better than the ads on youtube.

How hard is it to sell a fucking ad to nike and put it on the page?

Every other fucking site on the internet doesn't seem to have a problem.

Is it SOLEY based on the fact Youtube has "questionable" videos that Advertisers don't want to get associated with?

You can SOO easily target markets by using the video tags..

This shit is Marketing 101.

WHAT THE HELL?


So Google will jump up to 240.9 Million brought in.. HOWEVER they will spend $252.9 million to pay content owners for the rights to show their material...

Hahaha, anyone catch that? How do you do ad/profit sharing (Which Google does), and pay out more than you bring in, on ad revenue sharing?



Did they also calculate in how much the total cost of corporate bandwidth went down when the increase of a product like youtube, making the other departments that also burned mad bw, more net profits? This guy must not understand why hosting companies and the biggest porn companies owned free hosting sites, now own tubes, owned newsgroup services, and so on...

Youtube does its own advertising via Adsense from Google.

Whereas porn tubes have dating and cam sponsors PRE-PAYING spots on the sites.


I highlighted the part that makes porn tubes profitable even though Google is having problems profiting off Youtube.

:sleep:sleep

Does youtube run ads in the player?

YouTube sells ads on less than 3 percent of the Web pages that could carry commercial messages

I think most missed that part. I'm pretty sure most porn tube sites have ads on 100% of their pages.

you people seriously don't think pornhub is making money??

:2 cents::thumbsup

I don't know if it will end up the same but I remember when a lot of people thought Amazon would never make a profit. It didn't happen until 2002 but eventually it did.

But then a lot of those companies from back then went down in flames too.

I can't believe the fucking morons in corporate America, Madison Avenue and website operators like Facebook and YouTube. I will pay as much attention to an ad for a new movie, breakfast cereal, deodorant, whatever if it's on a YouTube or Facebook page or a pre-roll video on YT than I do to a TV commercial on network or cable TV - actually you have a better chance at getting your message across to me on the web cuz i don't have a remote control to flip to another channel in my hand.

Wherever the fools go, the money will follow. Thats what I learned from Sesame St.

There is a difference between "revenue" and "profit."

I would like to see some numbers on any sizable tube site that is actually making a profit. Since google is public, we get to see their numbers and their tube site is burning through money.

Also, people seem to think that google doesn't know how to market advertizing...since it's their main income, my guess is that they're pretty good at it. If they can't sell enough ads to make a tube site profitable, it seems others might have trouble as well.

I would love to see some numbers on ad conversion rates from an adult tube site...my guess is they are very low.

I can give you a number from my own jugland.com

I put vids up that are offered to affiliates and I link to the site. Here's the conversion ratio for my own Claudia-Marie vids on jugland: 1:403

I just now looked that up as I was reading this thread. I didn't even realize I was doing that well on jugland :) Guess that's from having a high search engine ranking for big tit tube

I have to say I am impressed. I don't have much data to go on, but the little I have seen elsewhere indicates that tube traffic often is very hard to convert. So, congrats to you!

To be honest with you....I'm kinda shocked. I guess I shouldn't be. Everybody told us with our TGP's that we wouldn't be able to convert and sell memberships using so much hardcore and giving everything away like that. But I sure made a lot of money with ampland until 2006 when Al and I split our company. And I sure made a lot of money to this day with grampland and shavedgoat

I just decided to keep an open mind and try it myself. I'm finding I can give the surfer what they want (without stealing it like some tubes do) and handwrite some wild descriptions and make a sale. Not much different than what I used to do when I made my own galleries back in the 1990's. :)

Of course it matters WHAT site I'm selling. The sites I can't sell on my tgps...I can't sell 'em on my tubes either. They are all the sites whose content is stolen and the entire members areas ripped on torrents and tubes. I can't sell that stuff no matter how hard I try. :(

Without traffic trading I assume your traffic is cleaner then the old TGP model but what % is the CTR? that is where tubes probably fall down. Just my guess.

I think it'S more about the fact that they don't want to risk making direct income off copryighted material.

The only ads are on the approved videos uploaded by the markers.

I honestly don't know what the click thru rate is.
But my tgp model was always super clean. Never any popups or blindlinks. I don't even call those type of site "tgps" because it is an insult to me and people like Persian Kitty, The Hun, Al, and others of us who never used that circle jerk model.

I can tell you that the CTR can't be much worse than when I had 1.2 million uniques a day of clean REAL traffic between Grampland, ampland, and ShavedGoat Out of all that I'd get 50 to 80 sales a day dispersed amongst all the different text links, banners, and galleries. Though if you had broke it down per gallery of per click on each text link and/or banner I'm sure it would have been pretty decent. Hang on let me go check that ctr real quick on jugland for claudia-marie.com

Okay, did the math....looks like on the Claudia-Marie.com vids I'm making about 2 cents per viewing of her vids on jugland.com

Never really worried about those kind of stats before. So I'm not even sure if that's good or not. I just took all the views of the Claudia-Marie vids, then I took the amount of money made for Claudia-Marie using my jugland campaign and divided it by the amount of views.

I guess that's how you do it? As I said, I never really worried too much about those kind of stats. One of my partners told me in 1997 to stop looking at stats and only worry about one number...the one in the bank account
That was actually some advice that has served me well. But this thread made me stop and take a look today and it's pretty interesting. But again, I have no idea if 2 cents per vid view is worth a damn or not.

Well imo that is awesome!

What's the "average" CTR supposed to be? I haven't got a clue.

2 cents a view good... Kind of interesting breaking it down like that.

If you can pull 2-5% you are doing fine.. so anything above that and and still making sales.. well, dance up and down for joy.

Imagine if you will a company that gets paid for information, demographics data, media trends, user trends etc etc. and not so much for banners... and imagine if that same company can see those trends from a thousand miles away and also knows the right people who will buy that information?

You have to think a bit more three dimensional... They are profitable because they sell information and are in the know. Remember that they were data miners before they were owners of a "tube site".

You think they didn't map the net and think about the bigger picture before they purchase a business. They see what people want and where they're going before even the owner of the site knows how popular his site is... that type of information is worth a lot.

I don't consider youtube and the porn tubes revenue streams even remotely similar in nature.

I just read the article and how easy would it be for Google to join CJ.com and slam a few million ads up? then htey could show people they do or don't sell shit.

Tell that to the tube owners who've been in biz for 3+ years on the way to the bank :helpme

Adult Magazine owners probably said the same thing about "The World Wide Web" and banged their heads against the wall thinking how to stop it, writing articles about it, etc ... all the time while the young, smart, creative web guys KILLED it.

Think inside the box, that helps.

Um, they own adsense and doubleclick.

The only reason youtube doesn't make a huge profit is because they are waiting!!!!

They are waiting until they can place the needed ads on the site without pissing off
their base clients who went ape shit over possible ads when google first bought the thing.

Further more, youtube is nothing to them except a "loss leader".
Do you think google search volume increased after they bought youtube???????????


Think about it.
What business is google really in?

Yes it would be easy for them to advertise next to every video.
However, once they do, they lose the Viacom lawsuit. Simple as that.

Good info on this here, and here.

That's absurd and proves you have no real business knowledge.

See above for why Google can't profit.

As for the prepay, they used to say the same thing about TGP's. They only make profit off of their freeloaders because the spots are prepaid.
However, if advertisers don't get a ROI, they're not going to renew their ads, so at some point no ads would be sold and the site would go under.
Pretty basic math there.
Someone is making money off of those surfers. The adult companies that buy ads on tubes aren't charities.

Exactly

I'm sure you would. I doubt any would show them to you.
Except maybe one that's for sale, but only if you could prove that you can afford to buy it.

Tube site owners aren't running a charity either.

Even if the owners had deep pockets to begin with, at some point the site has to pay for itself or it goes under, just like any other business.

apparently someone can't read. doesn't sound to me like they are trying to make money.

maybe they need some losses for their taxes? ever think of that?

You're right, very few private companies are going to open their books for me or anyone else to just browse around :) That's why I'm having to use public companies and anecdotal data and just make a guess as to what's going on.

I guess one question is, are there 'legal' tube sites that are making 'profits?' If so, what is their business model? Are they making money from ads? affiliate sales? traffic skimming?

I wasn't aware of google's licensed content vs. uploaded content issue. The Viacom suit could prove critical to all tube sites. If not, it is a limit on their ability to monetize the site.

Someone has mentioned the dot.com bubble earlier in this thread, and it has a lot of bearing on this conversation as some of these companies that seem to be doing well on the outside are running out of cash.

It was easier to bet on long shots when the economy was good, but I think we are going to see many more failures than successes when the dust settles.

I also think we're going to be surprised by some of the companies who fail. I mean, two years ago you wouldn't find many reasonable people that would have though that GM would ever face bankruptcy...but they are.