search.xxx traffic decreasing
 

Disclaimer: not a pro or against xxx guy/company here, just posting some updated real stats of traffic I get from search.xxx, for anyone to use as they wish.

Note that we are #3 result for "cams" and #1 result for "free cams", etc. so we're getting already most hits we may hope from the searches we want.
It happened as someone forecasted: from 1 oct to 20 oct the daily hits dropped from 617 to 120. The percentage ratio of hq countries kept stable around 60%.
Only news: search.xxx now shows a "feature sites" at top and "ads" on side, same as google. So since some time for each "cams" search we get an ifriends.xxx/clickcash advert result on top and side (must be special deal as I see nowhere a way to buy advertising), this may have decreased/hijacked very few clicks.

2012-10-01 617 (HQ 391 : 63.37%) 1( 1:617)
2012-10-02 510 (HQ 312 : 61.18%) 2( 1:255)
2012-10-03 324 (HQ 191 : 58.95%) 1( 1:324)
2012-10-04 245 (HQ 148 : 60.41%) 0( 0:245)
2012-10-05 216 (HQ 138 : 63.89%) 0( 0:216)
2012-10-06 255 (HQ 158 : 61.96%) 1( 1:255)
2012-10-07 159 (HQ 90 : 56.60%) 0( 0:159)
2012-10-08 197 (HQ 106 : 53.81%) 0( 0:197)
2012-10-09 154 (HQ 95 : 61.69%) 1( 1:154)
2012-10-10 219 (HQ 144 : 65.75%) 0( 0:219)
2012-10-11 214 (HQ 138 : 64.49%) 1( 1:214)
2012-10-12 160 (HQ 79 : 49.38%) 0( 0:160)
2012-10-13 134 (HQ 84 : 62.69%) 0( 0:134)
2012-10-14 170 (HQ 91 : 53.53%) 0( 0:170)
2012-10-15 140 (HQ 94 : 67.14%) 0( 0:140)
2012-10-16 141 (HQ 88 : 62.41%) 1( 1:141)
2012-10-17 113 (HQ 57 : 50.44%) 0( 0:113)
2012-10-18 114 (HQ 64 : 56.14%) 0( 0:114)
2012-10-19 125 (HQ 77 : 61.60%) 0( 0:125)
2012-10-20 128 (HQ 80 : 62.50%) 1( 1:128)

This is the geo % for traffic from 15th to 20th:

United States 184 22.66%
Israel 101 12.44%
Germany 71 8.74%
China 59 7.27%
Italy 48 5.91%
France 39 4.80%
Greece 35 4.31%
Switzerland 25 3.08%
Canada 25 3.08%
Turkey 22 2.71%
Netherlands 20 2.46%
Romania 17 2.09%
Spain 16 1.97%
Australia 14 1.72%
Brazil 14 1.72%
Sweden 14 1.72%
Indonesia 12 1.48%
United Kingdom 12 1.48%


The ratio it is free users signups (only hq users can signup); results from google traffic are better as hardly lower than 1:100; search.xxx it is at 1:220. Pay users: I got one from Congo; seems legit, altough funny and accidental :)

Before of search.xxx we was getting 2 hits a day to .xxx's, so all traffic comes from search.xxx. Now I am happy we are in top results, so getting "all the hits we could", but this is just 120 hits a day and seems the drop is the trend. Same traffic we would pay to our affiliates max $20/mo with pay per free lead, or we could buy from a broker for even cheaper, and if drops more that ends into none.

The first week of launch I was getting 900 hits a day, if this could be replicated and kept stable, it would pay back the (higher) renewal costs easily, more a success story. But search.xxx being not promoted = not useful for adult webmasters to own any .xxx's, except a defensive brand for other tld, we and many others do normally with .net, .org etc., but no real extra traffic/sales involved. A pity if final, as a search.xxx with big traffic (even not a porhub level) may be interesting... but would need to buy so much ads to make icm broke quickly, not making sense if traffic does not grow organic on its own.

Damn.. guess you'll have to postpone retiring early now. :(

Thank you for sharing this information so freely. This thread and the last one.:thumbsup

Fixed it for ya :thumbsup

I can be wrong, but i always tough .xxx will never works... it may still have some traffic in, but the Hype is already gone, it will never be big...

+/- like a .net .. it worth not much if you dont have the .com

And maybe the day that a .com company will be able to get back .xxx with some lawyer or out of court deal maybe not that far...

It will died by itself with people not renewing most on the normal domain..

And thats what those scammers deserve... imo

How these stats would be something a "pro xxx" guy would post ever? :)

How can you own a bunch and not be pro xxx? :2 cents:

http://camstube.xxx/
http://chatgf.xxx/
http://tubecam.xxx/
http://tubecamgirl.xxx/
http://tubecamgirls.xxx/
http://tubecams.xxx/

Because even if you're not pro something, you're stupid if you leave money on the table, as long as it's easy for you to pick it up.

search.xxx sucks ,they just don't know how to do it

Fail to see the money on the table with .XXX being picked up at higher registration/renewal costs but I guess their marketing effort protect your brand did work wonders on the sheep. If I don't believe in something/someone then my money doesn't flow that way as it's the only way to stop/change anything. Funding things you don't agree with makes zero sense as your dollars give them a "pro" vote. We agree to disagree :thumbsup

That sounds like a personal problem. :2 cents:

If you noticed his first post when search.xxx was released he did pretty good with it; better than if he had bought traffic and it paid for the registration at an inflated price. If it had continued, he would be doing well; as it is, it appears to just be from the publicity.

So, just because you don't see it really is a moot point.

+1 :thumbsup

Well, if one domain costs you $100 and it makes you back $1000/mo, I'd say not buying it is leaving money on the table. Remember, many EMD's are already taken in popular extensions, so buying say freesexcams.xxx would be a good way for you to rank for 'free sex cams' in Google. All the traffic coming from say search.xxx is just a bonus.

Remember, principles cost you money. If you have enough money, then that's fine. But if you're struggling to make ends meet, then it's just stupid.

It is pissing me off too. :mad: I have lots of good domains.

I do. Quite a bit of it xxx,xxx actually came from .com domain sales. Still own 500+ from 1999-2012 but each month developing more actual adult/mainstream sites and selling off domains I will never develop. Latest mainstream project I built was on a domain I had been holding for 6+ years as when you own too many x,xxx easy to forget what the hell you own so a nice suprise when you actually sort them out. :thumbsup

Agreed on the principles part but I don't see any xxx in google search and I certainly don't see freesexcams.xxx when searching for free sex cams within google. If dude is happy with 100 "bonus" hits a day then good for him.


xxx is code blue.

Adopt me please.

I've seen quite a few .xxx rank well for competitive terms. Depends what you're searching for, I guess. That being said, it's only natural that you don't see many .xxx domains ranking well, compared to .com's. The former has been around for just over a year, while the latter has been around for almost 30 years. Not rocket science to figure out that there's a lot more .com's out there, which have been around for much longer and rank much better than just about any other extension. Has nothing to do with the extension itself, just with age.

I'm averaging around 100-200 UV per .xxx site per day after the initial boost. It's too soon to tell what will happen with search.xxx, but obviously, for my own benefit, I hope it's an incredible success.

I've already renewed all of my .xxx domains, as they have paid for themselves and then some. I've not sold any off and plan to keep them and develop them. All but 1 which I'm currently in the process of selling.

If anyone is interested: Selfshot.xxx

So you're saying 6 are "a bunch of" domains... http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bunch -> "A considerable amount of things of the same kind."

The xxx of 2 main sites of ours chatgf.com + tubecamgirl.com , typo variants, one for seo, I call it a "a minimum commitment".
We instead got "a bunch" of .com domains we did not booked in xxx, dozens for mobile as videomobile.com, moviemobile.com, teenmobile.com, 50's with cams terms etc., no one we got in .xxx. I checked now a few, all still available to register in xxx, but how I would know in advance for our main 2 sites, I didn't wanted to risk; now I may renew if there's search.xxx traffic; if not we'll see, but this domains cost it is really small, guys that's not "a bunch" like 50 or 100 domains, these are the guys you should target if you're so good with whois searches.

just keeps on getting worse huh

Let me add something to the discussion -- a point that I don't think has been brought up before.

Disclaimer: Before I say anything, I should mention that I'm an adult industry outsider. Yes, I have a lot of adult domains; but they're not developed at this stage. I concentrate on domain names as such. Also, I realize that .XXX has been a controversial and divisive issue; and, although I own about 400 .XXX domains, my job as a domain investor is to take calculated risks -- and not to take sides. .XXX has pros and cons. It can be debated which outweigh which. I just happen to be mentioning a potential benefit. It's up to you to decide how plausible or significant it might be.

Let's leave aside how Search.xxx itself will affect adult website traffic. Think about Google or any generic search engine whose job it is to get relevant results in front of people. Now imagine that you're Google's software engineer, and it's time to tweak the algorithm.

If you were Google, what would you want the Google algorithm do with long-tail search phrases like these:

"porn star salary"
"salary of porno"
"salary for porno"
"salary porn star"
"porn movie salary"
"adult industry salary"
"salary in porno"
"what is salary porn"
"average adult salary"
"adult star salary"
"salary porno"
"salary for adult"
etc. ?

Obviously, Google will recognize that PornStarSalary.com matches with "porn star salary" and so forth for each phrase. But is that the best we can do? Ideally, the search engine would be smart enough to detect that every single one of these long-tail searches is basically the word "salary" plus some wild-card adult terms -- "salary" + {XXX stuff}. That's how we perceive a list like this, right? And we want a search engine to think like us.

Well, if I were Google, I would say to myself, "You know, the .XXX TLD is basically just wild-card, general-purpose adult content. So let's interpret the .XXX TLD as being equal to any {XXX stuff} in the search phrase." And then I'd tweak my algorithm so that the .XXX extension itself is treated as a match for any adult keywords in the search phrase. In other words, a domain like Salary.XXX should match with all of the search phrases above.

I'm NOT saying that this happens currently. I'm just saying that if you or I were updating Google's algorithm, this is what we'd do to make it smarter -- just because it helps Google deliver more relevant content. After all, someone who searches for any of the phrases above would probably be interested in whatever content is on a website called Salary.XXX. Wouldn't you say so?

Personally, I think Google would have to be blind not to do something like this. It just makes sense to interpret the .XXX TLD as representing adult themes. So if I were a gambling man, I'd expect this modification of Google's algorithm to happen in the next year or two.

Would that give .XXX an advantage as a catch-all for unpredictable adult long-tail phrases? It might -- but not always. For example, as far as this goes, I see no advantage to PornVideo.xxx compared to PornVideo.com. Why not? Because the keywords are clearly adult, and the .XXX TLD adds no additional information. But there's a world of difference between Salary.xxx and Salary.com. Google SHOULD distinguish between the two. So Google WILL.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that I do see an advantage for many .XXX domains as a result.

so running illegal tubes is ok then?

.com will be king forever. all the other extensions have failed miserably. Google isn't going to change anything, they are going the other way if anything. By your reasoning you should start registering .mobi domains again, which also failed terribly. You just ended up with a ton of overpriced domains getting .xxx. Not in adult & buying .xxx = sucker

Traffic started off HUGE on search.xxx when they first launched at the end of Sept (i assume they were buying crap traffic), but really low conversion. Traffic died pretty quick and was doing half of what it was 2 weeks after it launched. Seemed to level off, but still low conversions.

The problem isn't really in interpreting a TLD as adult-oriented or not, it is that you can't base a site's categorization on the domain name - and Google doesn't and won't. The domain name is a very small (mostly non-existent) part of the overall relevancy equation that is applied to sites as they are indexed. A search query is compared to a sort of hash of a site's content, generated by Google's algorithms, with the more relevant sites returning higher in the results. Of course, relevancy itself is only part of the big picture - you've still got things like site age, inbound and outbound linking, CTRs, etc. that are all factored in when ranking and indexing sites. This is how sites like WeLiveTogether.com, which superficially has nothing to do with adult content, or Kayak.com which superficially has nothing to do with air travel, can still rank very high in search results in their respective, relevant categories. You could have sex.xxx and if the site is about growing potatoes, Google won't return you as a result for any searches for sex. Or more to the point, you could have Lesbians.xxx and if your site is all midget porn, Google won't return you as a result for any searches for lesbians.

Now without getting into my personal opinion about the .xxx TLD (although I do own a few and a couple hundred more or less mainstream domains), the one advantage that it has relative to search engines is that it frames the crawler's hashing efforts. As GoogleBot, I don't have to wonder if a site like WeLiveTogether.xxx is about a family with several different types of cute and cuddly pets, or a bunch of voyeuristic lesbians. i can instantly switch to my adult site indexing criteria and continue crawling the site thus offering a more confident result. So from a search engine's point of view, the only real differences are efficiency and confidence - neither of which being related to the site's domain name of course. As a site owner, this will not change my ranking relative to other adult sites. What it *could* do is minimize the number of irrelevant false positives when someone searches for a crossover term. This has a net effect of boosting your overall placement, but along with any other relevant sites that you are already competing with anyway.

So, the moral of the story in my opinion is that buying a relevant .xxx will not affect your search engine rankings any more than a comparable .com assuming the content is the same. Obviously from a branding and exposure perspective it is a completely different story.

As far as the Search.xxx traffic dropping off - that was to be expected. The initial spike was due to a number of factors like people searching for themselves to see where they ranked, outsiders getting their first glimpse of the fabled "red light district" of the web, etc.

I would expect Search.xxx traffic specifically to gradually increase over time as more sites are added, but until other engines start indexing .xxx you will not see a big change in your incoming traffic on those domains.

Just to update I am getting average 70 hits per day since 27th october.
Was getting 100 hits per day from 20 to 27th.
Was getting 130 hits per day from 13 oct to 20 oct.
Was getting 200 hits per day from 4 oct to 13 oct.
Was getting 500+ hits per day end of november.
Or if you want to read it other side, every next week went from 500 to 200 to 130 to 100 to 70.

It is not just that search.xxx gets less traffic, I can see my domains are lower in search results for keywords if compared with before. I am unsure if this is due to others optimising SEO (but pages seems to me same as before) or just there's more sites indexed, or they tune it in a way my results got lower, or a mix of all.
I see special partners (in case of cams, ifriends) appear in the adverts spot, there was none at launch.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. A lot of times when a search engine starts out, the only ranking criteria they have to go on is their indexing algorithm. That's what initially looks at a site and tries to classify it. Once people begin using the engine and generating data, different metrics such as CTR, age, search term relevance, etc. will come into play which will absolutely affect rankings. You can look at it as the indexing algorithms "learning" from traffic patterns and whatnot. Also, like you said - a lot of folks might have been waiting for .xxx to "go live" before getting their sites ready.

With Search.xxx, I wouldn't rule out something else causing it as well though - they aren't a standard search engine per se. They have/had a preexisting database of every single site on the .xxx TLD and seem to be more driven by $$$ at this early stage. My experience is largely with more mainstream engines and algos which actually have to go out and "crawl" for sites and then index them.

Regardless, I wouldn't base any strategies around Search.xxx at this time. The tried and true approaches that work for .com and others will prevail eventually as the mainstream engines build their .xxx indices.

Just keep faith bros :thumbsup. xxx will prevail,

If you do, I'm not gonna judge you.

That's a very well thought out reply. However, I still think I may be right in some important respects. Emphasis on "may be".

Google is moving towards semantic search -- i.e. to interpret and anticipate the intention of the person entering a query. At this stage, Google already lumps together various particular query phrases and keywords into topic-centered "Broad" search sets. Many AdWords advertisers already see their ads appear for queries that do not have any literal overlap with keyword or phrase inputs. That means that Google does interpolate keywords when making ad assignments. And if it works for ad assignments, then it works the other direction too -- meaning that Google is probably at least considering options for interpreting search queries as if they correspond to or represent other literal phrases.

Given the explosion of new gTLDs that will happen in the next few years, I find it hard to imagine that Google would not be looking into the TLD as an increasingly important factor in search. Let's assume, just for the sake of argument, that .hotel becomes successful. If I search for "chicago places to stay", wouldn't Google consider displaying Chicago.hotel purely on the basis of the domain name? Let's assume that the keywords "places to stay" and "hotel" do not appear anywhere in the on-site content for Chicago.hotel. (Perhaps the copy writer was asleep at the wheel and only used phrases such as "visiting Chicago" and "rooms" and "motels".) Nevertheless, Google would ideally know that "places to stay" is semantically similar to "hotel" from the TLD. Then, after verifying some other signs of relevance in the site content and authority from the links, Google would presumably index Chicago.hotel even for a query that does not contain overlapping keywords.

Semantic search has to make inferences from literal search queries to vocabulary sets associated with some topic of interest. One of the pieces of information a search engine can use to help make these logical leaps is the domain name itself. Theoretically, .XXX can stand for the entire "adult" bundle of keywords and phrases as a sort of * / wild card. Naturally, other on-site factors will have to corroborate this before Google will index a website.

Let me give an example to show what I'm thinking about. As you mentioned, if Lesbians.xxx is all about something else -- used tractors, for example -- then Google should and will throw out the adult associations gleaned from the .XXX TLD. But what if the website built on Lesbians.xxx contains phrases like "girls having sex with girls" but NO instances of the word "lesbians". Let's suppose that a site promoting conservative values contains the words "girls having sex with each other". Finally, suppose I search for [girls sex each other porn]. That's not an exact match for any of the content on either of these websites. But if Google were a human being, that human being would refer me to Lesbians.xxx on the basis of .XXX = porn plus "girls sex each other" = "girls having sex with girls". And if Google were a human being, that human being would not refer me to the site on conservative values, in spite of the resemblance between the phrases. Why the difference? Because the domain name itself conveys important information.

If somebody came up to us and said in broken English, "girls sex each other porn", we know which of the 2 websites we would recommend -- Lesbians.xxx versus ConservativeValues.org. And we know that we would base part our recommendation on the domain name itself.

I'm not saying that Google does this. I'm saying that you or I would do this in person. And what we would ideally do as human guides is what Google tries to emulate with its algorithm.

we can understand now how you see it :2 cents: