Do you think the freeloader culture is also hurting dating and cams sales?
 

So I am working more on monetizing from some traffic sources which are typically seen as freeloaders. I know better than to try to sell these people paysites. But do you think the learned unwillingness to pay for porn also translates eventually into an unwillingness to pay for dating or cams as well? It seems to me that to some degree it might. You have MFC and other such sites for cams. For dating you have plenty of fish and other options.

I'm just curious to hear what others think about this one...

About dating, I really thin that facebook, plentyoffishes and so on, have hurt nicely the $$ dating sites, as it is so easy to find local people in fb to deal stuff (esp. affairs). But I don't run dating program so I can't say. About cams I know more. It is not "hurting" the cams sales total (for big cam sites who adapted), it is however "changing" the cams sales process, and hurting the single cam model (per cam model) sales.
Tipping 1 token (few cents) per week, thinking it is a big gift, it is popular :)
Let's say the top 5 cam sites was making $X in 2005, these top 5 are probably doing the same $X in 2013, just are not the same sites, for example MFC replaced someone else who did not adapted. Also, the total models online to make $X it was less in 2005, but simply the sites got 5-10 times more models online, so the same $$ is made finally. Hosting is cheaper now than in 2005 so it balances the more leech.
Starting cam sites always been a problem, today is a problem for a little different reasons but I think the ease of failure for new cam sites it is stable in past years, simply most failed before and most fail now.

Cam Sales are up

Nope, people flock to dating. Nearly everyone is into dating. Married? No problem, a percentage of married folk chat using casual dating or cheating sites.

Even out alt sites do good - Buck Angel is making a killing just by mentioning his site on social networking, etc.

Cam sales always high.

Hard to 'freeload' an experience/dynamic experience

Apples and oranges

Are they as lucrative as before? No. Will they be going away like the TGP any time soon? No. Sites like chaturbate with sex in the free area will make others have to use the same model and you'll make peanuts compared to what you made before them.

Dating has decreased for me but not nearly as much as paysites.

To answer your question I do think that freeloaders will have a hard time paying for anything since 'free' is their mindset. Even $1 trials make them hit the 'back' button on their browsers. Unless they really want to get laid (and believe they will) they won't pay (and if they do they won't rebill) and cams are generally expensive unless you are on MFC and then like someone above said, you can tip 1 token and be in the game.

God knows how to convert hardcore freeloader, but i guess you need to test and fit with your lvl of freeloaders

what the hell is 'free loader' traffic?

Good input so far. Thank you. :)

It's decreased considerably for me as well. At all points. Unique to free and definitely unique to pay. About a threefold ratio increase within the last five years. OTOH I used to get very good ratios so that's not as bad as it sounds. It could also be that I am somewhat limited in who I can send traffic to for many sites due to different reasons.

Also what bothers me with most affiliate arrangements today is that I realize ti isn't very sustainable for the affiliate. You almost have to promote a new product or model for a year or so and then move on to the next. At some point it always gets saturated and even where lifetime commissions are claimed that seldom actually occurs due to tracking issues or dishonesty.

People who wouldn't pay $1 if you offered them a lifetime membership to every paysite or private show currently in existence. Basically they won't pay for anything online related to porn or non-physical adult products no matter what you do.

No really :) It is not the people tipping 10 cents (or nothing) in the free cam site that let the girl do full shows in the room for the free users of such cam site. You sure agree most of the hundreds of free shows happening in mfc (and other similar sites, I run one too), are done without get any money there.
Here how free cam site it really works: except those 5% of shows getting big tips in first page, so can be sustained by mfc (chaturbate etc.) tips alone... who pays (funds) the rest 95% of free shows in myfreecams, chaturbate etc., are really customers of other sites with no free show (livejasmin, streamate, and including your xlovecam), who pay per minute, and the girl sends the same video live (with splitcam) in mfc, ct and elsewhere, in hope to get some extra for a job she got paid anyway.
No any free cam site would have any naked girl live unless these naked shows wasn't paid by other pay cam sites in the same moment. If pay sites "closed", then the free cam sites would collapse too - except perhaps mfc, which would however include way less free naked shows (since these wait to get a private in other site to be naked - if private does not happen in streamate, livejasmin etc., the girl keeps clothed until a tip happens, which does not happens often).

If you compare this with illegal tubes however it is quite different. Illegal tubes would not exist if there was no content producers paying performers so videos exist to put in a pay member area. Then the pirate (mostly the tube owner himself) copies the full videos from member area and put in free tube, this is easy, and involves DMCA which is not so effective and so on.
When it comes to free cams, really it is the performers who uploads, in realtime (live), the "splitcam" of their content, and this is done in a way, that a cam site (the "tube") can not even know, unless going to open 1000's streams in all the cam sites to catch who streams what and where, which is boring and expensive monitoring job no one does really. There is no user uploads (this is the cam girl who sends to multiple sites herself) or content to delete with DMCA as is live and realtime deleted after it happened. Just a customer of cam site number 1 take a "private" and pay for it, but it is not really private as the model (on her will, for greedyness) sends the same to the freeloaders in cam sites number 2, 3: mfc, chaturbate and others too - why she does? Since if she gets 10 cents more, is still extra, why not. In fact some studios have a setup with 3-5 sites open, and some login in mfc when a private started elsewhere, and close when it ended, so you not even can see them clothed ever in mfc. They login when there's a show.

PS: on a side note it is especially boring when some girl got text "property of myfreecams" over video, and send same video to my site :)

Maybe I need a life, But I like doing a quick count of the amount of active tippers in a room. Just checked the top room in chaturbate.

3132 users viewing. around 19 active tippers. .6 %
around 98 users with tokens 3%

Or.... they are not sending it to your site.

how would you determine this exactly? and even if you could, why would that traffic be useful to anyone? You said it yourself, they would never pay a cent for all the tea in china.

Why would anyone ever try to market to that? Would be like trying to sell steak knives to bird seed except the bird seed burns through your bandwidth..

You're right. The reality is maybe 99.999% from a given traffic source are like that but there is still 0.001% who might buy with a knock-your-socks off type deal for the right product. Some things are out for sure. Other things might not be entirely.

For instance let's say I found a way to grab 10,000 general visitors from Reddit. It would be suicide to send these visitors to some general porn paysite. They'll probably laugh at me about "paying for porn", DDoS my site, track me down and string me up by my balls from the flagpole out front and then put the photo of it on Reddit. But if I tried to monetize them by sending them to myfreecams maybe if I'm lucky I'll get a join or two.

And there is always some sucker who will pay for that kind of traffic. At least for a while. We call them ad or traffic brokers. :) Or depending on the site maybe they have use in some other way such as helping to attract better users who will pay for what I am marketing.

Most "freeloaders" are probably some kid sneaking onto their computer.

A lot(certainly not all) of people will pay for a product if the product is exactly what they want.

Every sponsor I've ever seen complain about bad sales has crappy content and an even worse marketing department.

I have no issues with ratios on almost all sponsors.. the sponsors with poor ratios just don't get anymore updates posted on my sites.

And this.

But I've converted torrent traffic from TPB at 1:500 before on a pay site.. I don't think you get much more "freeloader" than that.

In what year did you do this and was it more than two sales? Could it be possible something happened such as the torrent hit the first page of Google for a niche term?

Split-cam seems to have really proliferated - are the girls still averaging 50 US or less per hour even with 5 sites?

$50 per hour with 5 sites is already quite good, most studios are ok with $20 per hour. These are in countries where a good wage is $300 per month so it makes sense.

Now I remember that myfreecams paid $120,000 a year to have an advert embedded inside splitcamera software itself. The previous years it was livejasmin to popup from such a software. I know its $120,000 a year simply as I asked, but they said mfc had booked it.

About those girls who write "property of myfreecams" in their screens, this is a fun story. It originated by some model on the top of mfc writing this stuff. Then the other models guessed, that if you don't write something like that, you are not going to be top model, or something like it. Is like, when a singer does a tatoo, then all fans got a tatoo, I talked a few of these girls and no one could find a reason why to print that, except they seen it made by certain top girl. Still those girls splitcam everywhere... and some don't know how to remove the text (from splitcam) even if they wished. Often they call our admin to help how to remove the text lol... I seen that "property of myfreecams" in chaturbate and other sites, the admins are having good time in tell the girls either remove the text or don't splitcam a myfreecams advert in own site. There's nothing worst for a cam site to have a "myfreecams" advert shown to own users.
So an mfc advert inside the splitcamera software, make also popular to print "myfreecams" over splitcammed video, and lots other genius marketing touches, it is the reason of success.

It would've been 2009 or 2010. I'm not sure, but I doubt it. It was a term I heavily monitored since I ranked top 10 for it. IIRC, it was 5 sales. I've also generated sales from uploading content I own(or otherwise have the permission to do so) onto private trackers. I've only done both probably 5 times... the private tracker one was after TPB, but ratios were around 1:1500... wasn't worth it when I was averaging around 1:250 at that time.