Lady Sonia cancelling hosted FVLs - not profitable
 

so i just got this message from old school site Lady Sonia:

Hi
Notification Of Removal Of Embeded FLVs
We would like to notify you of the impeding removal of all Embedded FLVs
served by us at Sonia Cash.

Having studied our sales stats we are seeing very few sales coming from
so we have decided to completely remove them.

We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause you.
All FLVs will be removed on Wednesday 17th July.

interesting...

links pulled :disgust

good thing i dont promote them anymore

Idiots! Why dont thet just replace all of them with a short trailer, so webmasters dont loose money? Hope they loose lots of affiliates

They like staying in business. Webmasters that want their promo vids should host them themselves.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

Lol wtf host your own shit if you don't want things like this to happen.

Links pulled lol

Bandwidth is almost free. There's real value in that typein traffic that can't necessarily be measured by however they are tracking the sales from those embeds.

I second that. Hosted flv is madness.

only pittty they gave us 2 days for download. i have no time now to do that...i rather speak about it on gfy, lol .....

Sure, but its fucked up to provide a marketing tool for webmasters, and then pull all the content when all the links are up.

It's easy to replace all the videos with a small trailer, telling the surfers the content have been moved to the mainsite, and still provide the webmasters credit for the traffic it generates.

:1orglaugh

Which is why those of us who have done this a long time would never use an embed.

Bandwidth is cheap. Why take a chance on an embed vid's host having problems or loading slow or, as in this case, embeds being stopped?

Serious affiliates take their work seriously. I've never used any embed from anybody. I download the promo clip and host it myself.

And Sonia Cash is right...why waste their own bandwidth on hosting promo clips for half-assed affiliates who can't send any sales anyway? Their good affiliates will have already hosted the clips for themselves and are sending sales.

If sales were actually coming in from their embedded clips they would keep them up. Simple as that.

As for value in type in traffic...Lady Sonia had huge name recognition and branding long before most of those affiliates ever even tried to get in the game. She doesn't need them to get her type in traffic from people who already know who she is.

She needs affiliates to bring in fresh eyes. And that is not easy because she is so popular and has been around for so long.
It's almost like trying to find a surfer who has never heard of Adult Friend Finder.

So I would say that they are making the right biz decision. The embeds are a waste for them. Cut the waste.

this is why its smart to setup the videos on a subdomain so you can run them off low cost bandwidth if need be

I agree that the notice is a bit short to date but I totally understand a business decision

I thought that too, it seems the sensible way to go to me.

How many embeds did they offer?


.

2 days notice, the adult industry standard

what a fucking joke

Id be more inclined to look at where their traffic is going and getting wasted. I had a problem some time back where a domain on my feeder network was getting huge traffic from China. Just free jerks and no conversion from it. So I just redirect out the Chinese traffic, keep my embeds and keep my affiliates happy. Win, win, win IMHO

This is another reason why it makes less sense to be a paysite affiliate these days. It's not just that profits are dwindling but also that the hassles for the reduced profit are increasing.

I understand a bit of why they would do this but I also think two days notice is bullshit. 30 day minimum is reasonable. Then again some other companies did this shit and gave no notice at all.

Sponsors who wonder why they can't get affiliates for their paysites should take a good hard look at the reality of the situation. To be honest I can't even give away most paysite affiliate promo content these days. The surfers don't want it. It's a joke to them. They can get the whole video on youporn or some file locker for a click or two. A few who protect their content and have good content still sell but not like before because the surfer can still go to extreme board or some other place and get 20 pages per day of other content in that niche for free.

i think something around 500 videos....

will they will now redirect all fhg links directly to lady sonia with NO aff ref code?

I don't have any of their embeds but my tube script deletes in mass by sponsor.
So if I deleted their vids they would have no links on my site.
Once I delete videos, I never put them back up.
So this move is forever.

What a bunch of assholes at Lady Sonia. Bandwith is cheap and it's more work to remove these movies instead of leaving them on the server and create new promo stuff.

If your hosted FLVs just show how bad your program is then you should pull them.

So basically they are saying: sorry, our movies don't sell.
The quality of the movies are not so good, too low bitrate.

Why would you want to use something that doesnt make any money?
They clearly stated that they dont convert for them.
If they made money they would use them.
I am sure if you asked them what converts they would tell you.

I have noticed that people tend to chase pennies instead of dollars.:2 cents:

I have no problem with them but unfortunately I was never able to sell them very well either when compared to others. I made a few sales and they seemed like nice people on the board.

I wonder could this be partially be related to the mess in the UK with ATVOD in some way?

To be honest these days most affiliates using hosted FLVs aren't trying to sell the pay site because it's such a tough sell for most sites. It's filler content to get traffic so they can sell mobiles, popunders, CPC ads, dick pills, dating, webcams and traffic.

Why do that? Wouldn't hosting bill be the same per single embed?

Interested to know their methodology, what exactly is considered sale from embed and what is not (text link close enough to embed is or not?).

The picture galleries have also embedded movies. THAT won't sell.
Use pictures OR movies .

this has NOTHING to do with sales, conversions or bandwidth

but everything to do with REDIRECTING ALL fhg links WITHOUT ref links

How can you determine where the sales come from? Embedding movies have no referer, unless there is a link floating as an ad on the movie.

Thats what I wanted to know. Plus type ins as somebody mentioned.

a 10-20 second advert would be a lot less of a strain then a 5 min video.

So there is type in traffic from those fresh surfers. Plus type in traffic from lots and lots of surfers that knew her, but maybe did not visit her site for months or years before they saw that embed and thought - "lets type in ladysonia.com"

I thought we were talking about embeds gone, not FHG's themselves. No?

maybe it's just a calculation: increased bandwith compared to increased (or not) sales =
or = not profitable. I hear people say bandwith doesn't cost a thing... well... I get the fucking bill every month and it's really not for fucking free:winkwink:

Why is that?

That would be seriously wrong calculation. No way of knowing what would sales have been if they did not offered embeds in the first place.
For instance X sales, then embeds offered X+y sales. They see that y sales does not cover hosting and disabled embeds. But who knows if they would have gotten same X sales without offering embeds. Maybe not only "y" but also part of "X" was due to embeds.
Seriously wrong calculation that would be.

I have a 100 mbps server for $60 a month.

Free? No. Pretty damn cheap? Yeah. :winkwink:

I don't know how long they were offering it.

Exactly

Check sales pre embedded videos and check sales during embedded videos... increase in traffic and costs: yes - increase in sales: no... then skip embedded videos. Since you can't exactly count the sales that come from embedded videos you can only watch the bigger picture or trend: increase traffic-costs against the sales.

When I did put a trailer (4 minutes) in every fhg, my bandwith trippled and the costs increased, but... the sales also increased. I have no hard proof it were the trailers in the fhg's but the fact that increasing sales started when i put the trailers in the fhg's it was enough proof for me to claim it was no coincedent. So I kept them in...

I pay 5 eurocents per 1gb datatraffic... yeah yeah i know i'm getting fucked:disgust

Stopped promoting them when Damian was hired !
WTF ever happened over there D ?

I explained why it would be wrong way to count already. Again, example.

You get 1000 sales/month. Offer embeds and get 1100 sales/month.
You look at profit from 100 extra sales and see that it does not cover BW.
But how do you know if only 100 were due to embeds? Maybe 200 (without embeds maybe you would have had only 900 sales/month) ?

Not to mention other variables such as extra webmasters who started pushing your program on some sites not using embeds just because they used some embeds on some of their sites and decided to build some extra non embed sites pushing lady sonia. Thats just one out of many possible scenarios which you can not correctly count into if embeds were profit or loss..

And none of that has anything to do with the situation at hand because they terminated their hosted FLV videos, not their FHG.

And the winner is.....

In my experience programs which usually do things like this going out of business.
I mean seriously bandwidth cost nothing these days.