The Real Reason why paysite affiliates are broke
 

We all know this. Tubes and torrents and site rip sites. They are all bad, we all fight them. This is nothing new.

Welcome in 2013.... starting a paysite theses days is a bit nut in my personnal opinion I guess there's some professionnal into it! Thats why I stick with cams....

What are you guys talking about?

Haven't you read the posts where Fabian explains that more people than ever are paying for porn?
And then all the guys that sell traffic join in and agree with that 100%?

Everything is GREAT! The porn industry is bigger than ever! Everybody is RICH!!!

I am a paysite affiliate, and I'm not broke.

Well, maybe it's because I'm crazy.

No, the real reason why most are broke is because they think linking up a few FHGs and putting up some free image and movie scenes will make them money.

The fact is, in the last 10yrs affiliates have become lazy, so lazy in fact that most of them would have quit years ago if sponsors weren't giving them all this shit for free, promising them they'll make thousands of dollars a month just by linking to their promo tools... And the majority of affiliates believed them, started flooding the net with free porn and useless links yet wonder why surfers don't want to 'pay for pink' any more.

What people have to realize about Fabian and Manwin is what they are telling you, based on their stats, is true.

To them more people ARE paying for porn, because they are getting more and more of the traffic... As their traffic goes up, so does the amount of paying customers they get.

Welcome to the interweb. :helpme

There are several different things that all come together to cause these problems. Too much free porn is the first and biggest problem. Piracy is a problem. Reputation is a problem. How many people over the years has this industry screwed with shady cross sales, card banging, dialers, malware and other crap like that? Those people will likely never pay again and they will tell their friends to never pay because they will get fucked over.

Add in that piracy has made being a webmaster a much more global thing. Gone are the days of at least needing to plunk down few hundred dollars to get the software you will use to make sites. Now you can download photoshop, any HTML program like Dreamweaver or anything you want in minutes with no hassle. So more and more people from all over the globe are getting into the business (not to mention how all the mainstream media used to say about porn was how much money people were making) and the market for affiliates has gotten very diluted.

So, to me, there are a lot of reasons affiliates are struggling these days. Laziness is part of it, but the #1, far and away is too much free porn. We bitched for years about giving away too much porn and finally it has arrived and bit us in the ass.

Only the lazy ones

Those were the days...

a difference of opinion
 

1. As long as we run our program, we have never had shady cross sales, never changed terms and fucked an affiliate, never stole traffic, never closed and re-opened under another alias, etc. Find one affiliate that got "screwed" by Homegrown. One. Try going back to 1992 when I took over. You still can't find one person that says we screwed them over.

2. I was around for "the good ol' days" and for me those days sucked. Doing much better now and I think the traffic situation these days is way more egalitarian and professional. The so called good ol days were way more wild, wild west, suffered from more cronyism, more boorish with ego, more shady with scammers; I hated "the golden age". For me, that was the Age of the Law Suit. Nowadays is far more professional imo, more corporate, but in a positive not negative way.

3. If you can't figure out how to make money with adult content then stop making excuses for failure and try and spend the energy determining the recipes for success. Most of the examples listed are also ways companies are making money. Just like the "stolen password" sites of yesteryear, what you think you are seeing may be ways legit copyright holders/companies are profiting by using. People are making money still. Different people perhaps, but same cheeseburger, so to speak. As I like to say, sex is like food and people have to eat.

You forgot Google.

This again....

There's money, but those who can no longer remain competitive or profitable are eliminated.

The way some act they don't know it. I still see people claiming "it's better than ever!" or that "those not making money or complaining are lazy".

It's crazy to watch the psychological processes involved. For some they don't want to admit that the affiliate paysite business is pretty much dead. Others are trying to sell a get rich quick scheme to affiliates so they will keep pushing those 5,000 hits a month. Individually it isn't much but combine 100 or 1,000 affiliates each sending 5,000 hits a month and it's a lot of money even though the individual affiliate doesn't even make enough to pay for their internet connection from it.

people still spend money on porn. What we are seeing now is the absolute proof that traffic is king. Get the right traffic, and you'll make plenty of sales, it's as simple as that.

i am running a small company focusing on selling paysite memberships [hundreds per month]. we do Very Well, thank you! :pimp
Don't Panic! :pimp

sometimes i eat at home. sometimes i eat fast food. i like sushi too, sometimes the cheap stuff, sometimes the very very expensive. i like to pick up a burrito at the burrito joint, i also like to go eat mexican in a pricey, nice, sit-down restaurant.

sometimes i get a free meal, eating at a friend's house or someone treats me to a meal/event, which is nice too.

making money as a paysite and an affiliate is comparing apples to oranges. to get traffic today you have to give away a shit ton of content just to get people in the door. is homegrown really doing that well or are you living on your legacy? when i surf around i never see you guys advertised anywhere. regardless, if you really think there are more money making opportunities for the average affiliate today, i'd say you're out of touch with affiliates.

I would say you are entitled to your opinion but unfortunately you need more information to form a more knowledgeable opinion.

1. We promote many other programs as an affiliate so it is incorrect to say that we don't know what it is like from that side of things.

2. Legacy shmegacy, no one cares how long you have been around if you don't provide a good product then you are still going to go out of business. I can't count how many programs/brands/legacy companies that have disappeared trying to rest on prior laurels.

3. We use free content to promote ourselves just like everyone else. I do concede that we have an advantage because we have so much more content and you are not going to see the same content you got for free being the only thing you see in the pay area.

4. We are very in touch with our affiliates and the knowledge we glean through testing, refining, testing more is something that we share. We provide custom content, develop specific niche tours/sites, and support our affiliates any way possible. If you have never been our affiliate then you wouldn't know that but with that in mind maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make a judgment and cast aspersions on things you are entirely ignorant about.

5. We have multiple top ten listings in terms of reviews/views on the biggest tubes out there so if you haven't seen us that is not because we are not out there but perhaps because you didn't look closely enough.

6. The so-called "average" affiliate is most likely promoting too many programs - throwing up anything and everything hoping that one of them will magically be the be-all end-all of adult content that "converts like it was 1999!" They don't focus on the product, don't care about the service, disregard doing due diligence, etc. and hope to be successful. Not a recipe for success imo.

Indeed.

Primarily because they are lazy and just want to use whatever tools an affiliate program gives them.

Too many affiliates spread themselves to thinly, to the point where the stats they do have on hand, are virtually useless.

Throw 1M hits towards 100+ different paysites... You turn those statistics into sheer random figures, without any type of correlation to the initial 'my site got 1m hits'.

i just think that someone of your size couldn't begin to imagine the problems facing an affiliate who makes 3-5k a month (if they're lucky). sure you work with affiliates but its not comparable in my opinion. i saw the writing on the wall back in 2004 that affiliates were being pushed out and the hey days were gone so i moved on for the most part.

however for affiliates today unless you're going to stoop to stealing content, the only content affiliates have to work with is the same content all affiliates have to work with. only tubes and affiliates who can play the blackhat seo game really well do good these days. if you really think its better now than it was in 99....there is obviously no point in even discussing it.

So what you are saying is, the last 8+ years where everyone was screaming exclusive content is king, they were wrong?

I mean, there is a reason that there are no more content providers other than the DVD stores selling the same old stuff over and over and over again to affiliate websites...

I miss the days of being able to go to Ounique and buying 10-20 of their newly released sets, throwing up some sites and making money, it can still be done today the problem is finding the providers of that content though, that will sell it at a price suitable for a good profit to the affiliate.

You have a very strong opinion about the state of the affiliate game for someone that left in 2004.

it just irks me when the big boys tell everyone else how great it is now and if you're not doing well you're either stupid or lazy. i still work and make money as an affiliate however its a small percentage of my overall income. i realized in 2004 that its only going to get worse, not better for affiliates and if i want a stable income, i can't rely on being an affiliate to do that.

it seems pointless to pay for content as an affiliate. as soon as you put it up, its stolen anyways and doesn't match the sites you are advertising. exclusive content is great for paysites that are actual paysites and not just a front to get credit card info.

But if everyone has the exact same content as you just stated... Nobody makes sales? /confused

Non-exclusive content isn't supposed to be marketed as being inside the sites members area, it is supposed to tease the surfer, looking for whatever type of content we are showing them, into joining a paysite that has thousands of other sets of similar niche content.

Again, you make unfounded assumptions about us. We have the ability to provide our affiliates with exclusive content. You are not our affiliate so you don't know that but I would appreciate if you didn't generalize us with the mass of generic programs out there with ho-hum content, zero branding, bad service, etc.

We had a much tougher time supporting affiliates in 2004, due to multiple factors. I look back on that time and only have regrets. For us, it truly is better and I don't care if you choose to believe me or not. We went from 1:20000 a few years back to 1:300 to 1:500 on tubes. If you don't believe that is possible or that I am lying then you need to come up with a better assumption why we are still around. If you ask those particular sponsors and or affiliates for a reason they will tell you it is because we have worked harder and smarter than most of the companies they work with.

Traffic is easier to get now as far as we are concerned. Converting it in the proper "join funnel" is the "magic" that is not so much of a mystery as it is a matter of hard work and strong analytics.

Oh, by the way, Homegrown just got listed at Rabbits as a top site so maybe you should start to reconsider the "I don't see you guys anywhere" chide.

The only way to make good money and get rich nowadays is through lying / cheating / scamming.

If you don't do that, you only make beer change.

What fuckign tools?

Do you realize that even if you have the best tools out there, you still need traffic to make sales. And right now all the traffic is controlled by a few middle men.

Such an authoritative response! You must really know what you are talking about. Guess you are buying the next round of beers! :thumbsup

If you are making good money now, you could have been making literally x10 more back in the day (if you weren't a retard).

Your arguement is invalid.

You are wasting your money on scamming middle men.

I apologize about any assumptions made about your company. yes, i don't know anything about you guys other than you've been around for a long time. I never should of made specific comments about your company.

that aside, you've proved kind of proved my point. affiliates are not needed, you've got the tubes. the tubes control 80-90% of the traffic, the tubes work with sponsors. the tubes are the only affiliates really needed now. if traffic is a lot easier to get because its all centralized at once place and there are a lot more people online now, i agree. however lets see how easy it is to get traffic for the average nobody who has limited resources and no traffic from previous projects, its not easy at all.

i've always preferred to promote exactly what is found inside the members area. you start teasing people and they want to see more of that specific girl or specific scene, its chargeback city when they join. my point was its impossible to compete with the content the tubes have.

Thanks, apology much appreciated and accepted. My apologies too if I have come across too defensive.

For us, it has been the reverse. Ever since we split with CE, we have begged for affiliates. We still have way too few affiliates for where I think we should be (try going from 18,000+ to zero and see how easy it is to bounce back). For us, we were forced by necessity to build our own traffic. However, I look at all these affiliates that bounce from one recently defunct program to another and wonder why they don't realize what we have or what stability we provide.

Looking at the tutorials Crak Revenue supplied for generating blog traffic, I think that is just one of the ways that even a complete newbie can get in and figure out how to start creating traffic pumps. In my opinion, making tumblr galleries is much less work intensive than the old heydey of creating good tgp galleries. The thing that remains the same is that only a consistent effort is required to get accumulating returns.

Everything is relative so i find the "I'm doing great!" and "I'm doing shitty!" arguments so amusing.

Perhaps an affiliate makes 5 sales a day but lives in an area of the world where $400 a week is a lot of money. So therefore he's happy.

Another affiliate lives in a major city, has 3 kids and a wife, and needs 20+ sales a day to just get by. A sponser can be selling 10 memberships a day without affiliates and think he's doing great because he lives 100 miles outside Cleveland. LOL

Everything is relative people. Profit, overhead, standards of living, employees, splits, taxes, property taxes, mortgages vs. renting, single vs. family, etc etc etc.

There is no way to determine an entire Industry's success by vague comments on a message board like "I'm doing great!" An affiliate can come on here and share their experiences and compare past success with current struggles but even then there are so many factors as to why THAT affiliate is "struggling" that it's almost impossible to compare. Then you mix in hundreds of niches and sponsers and traffic sources....no, threads like this are a waste of time.

PS: Homegrown is a great program and I'm glad you're doing well and bouncing back so nicely. You do have some advantages that other programs do not have, including mine, but what you say about CONSISTENT (hard) work is spot on. Traffic is here today, gone tomorrow so you MUST ALWAYS be pumping or you simply lose ground and eventually disappear. Best of luck to Homegrown (I'm an affiliate full disclosure)!

Seems like the next step is obvious. :2 cents:

QFT! :2 cents:

That should be made into a new post and turned into a sticky.

Dude. Provide something worth paying for.

Many thanks for the nod!

I agree, we have some very unique aspects that do make us hard to compare to anything else... and that sometimes works to our detriment as much as it works to our favor.

For example, for years we have had the hardest time with reviewers comparing our truly homemade amateur videos to the very slickly produced so-called amateur content most people have, all shot by that small cadre of producers that shoot for every program under the sun. They complain about the sound, or lighting, or the girls not being hot enough, blah blah blah, but they miss out entirely on the reality of the emotions and the singular uniqueness of some couple that may make only one video.

Fans get the difference so while they may find the new girl of the month suddenly out on every site under the sun, they don't get that at Homegrown. In my opinion, affiliates like to move as a herd, or maybe lemmings is more apt, because they seem to glom onto the stuff that you can find on every X,Y, or Z site out there rather than really testing what actually works. That is because they don't think like a fan and that means they are not thinking like a business person either trying to insure customer satisfaction, and so just end up following the other lemmings right off the cliffs of wasted efforts.

I agree that too many affiliates are short sighted and easily fooled by advertising campaigns and unrealistically high PPS. the crak tutorials while interesting also promote breaking TOS on the services they are using. I'm not a fan of having my work deleted. in the end it all comes down to time spent vs money made. if it doesn't work, people have to move on. most people don't have the luxury of being able to fail and keep working at it until it works. they need steady money coming and if it doesn't come in, they're fucked. i saw greener grasses elsewhere so i moved on but i still have 100's of adult domains that i contemplate working on but then wonder, am i going to spend weeks on these and make next to nothing? would my time be better spent on what already makes me money?