Why did no one question the BIG porn sites business model?
 

One thing that I found interesting was how for a few years porn sites came out offering 50% or more on there affiliate schemes. Some even 100%.

These sites seemed to have exclusive content, a huge amount, and often very expensive. By this we are talking huge budget shoots.

Presumably they invested thousands upfront.

Presumably the Netflix model, where you purchase a huge amount of content, and the idea is you make a profit. In the short term, you burn cash, make a huge loss, and live off whatever money you have, and act as if your a millionaire, pose next to expensive cars, talk a lot of rubbish about being rich.

Even some giving away cars.

How many of these sites are still around would be interesting (I mean not sold off, or taken over by other firms).

What was interesting was many started to set minimum affiliate playouts higher and higher. At first it was often $50, then $100, and many now is much higher. Presumably because in some cases they simply cannot afford to pay affiliates.

Indeed, if you pay affiliates 50%, and minus your costs, your profit could be very close to $1, and your still having to pay for content.

Often we read how people have not been paid by such firms. But the truth is, one suspects thy have not got the cash, and you can moan as much as you want on this and other forums, but they cannot pay you if they do not have the money. And to be honest, if you promoted these sites without questioning how they could make a profit, then perhaps you have some blame in the matter.

You might be missing a part of the equation there... Even if you gave 100% to your affiliates, some sales still trickle in without affiliates, and then... Upsells in the members area, selling them on your other sites, selling them on other similar sites, emailing them and selling them even more stuff....

Maybe you're referring to the cookie cutter programs from 2004-2009 that had prechecked xsales, etc?

It was very profitable for them then. Visa / MC made it difficult to be aggressive with prechecked xsales, so then it wasn't profitable anymore, so it stopped. The ones who still operate this way (or similarly) figured out how to generate their own traffic and are still making bank, without the need for affiliates (and thus the support staff required).

As far as pay sites who do that now - if they know how to generate their own traffic and at the very least, do on page SEO on their own tours, then I guarantee they're making good money.

The ones who don't know how to do those very basic things may advertise 50% or $40 PPS, but their NATS install has a WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLE lot of rules enabled for any particular join to be able to get that. This group, you can hear whining at shows about everything other than their inability to do really basic webmaster tasks, or hire someone to do it for them.

You're such a fucking moron.

Yes, I missed that bit out.

I know a lot of sites did (they may still do) had banners links to many other sites in the members area.

I thank you for your input.

Yet you also opted-in for a 50% affiliate cut through CentroProfits for your website? :Oh crap

Just quoting for truth 👍

you summed up the slow decay of the affiliate industry. Not sure why no one agrees. The sites you mention were exactly those sites we sent traffic to, and they all closed doors and sold off. It's just a pump and dump scheme in another way. Anyways, happening for years. I took my whole portion to live cam traffic, models cant be copied, or whatever, always unique :)

Yes. And some sponsors start upselling affiliate customers with endless packages and bundles, including versions that may undermine any future rev-share for the original customer referral.

Affiliates seem to have become one-time lead generators for their sponsors.

If an affiliate is using the PPS business model to generate income, there is no residual revshare involved, they get their $35 payout and thats it.

IMHO at that point, the surfer / member becomes the programs / paysites to do with what they want to recoup that $35 payout and potential profit :2 cents:

Revshare programs definitely didn't have a lot to do with killing the profitability of paysite sales, the vast majority of them actually offered their members enough content to keep them rebilling for several months, so long as the affiliate who sent the member did their job and pre-sold the sites members area AND content correctly / honestly.

Program owners like Bradshaw, the Bottos, DeForest's, Lightspeed, et al did way more damage to paysite profitability than most mom & pop revshare program owners :warning

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh . . .

RE: PPS is one time income for affiliate. For sure. That's understood.

But RE: Revshare undermining affiliate's rebills by competing against the affiliate using their original subscriber can get gray quickly.

I value sponsors who, when you send your visitor to their site, and the surfer navigates to a different sponsor site, the affiliate's code still shows up in the different site's join page. And even better, when a surfer comes back to the sponsor's site the next day (using the bare domain name - no affiliate link) and the cookies are still active to keep the affiliate code in place. That's good faith business.

Affiliate cookie expiration duration used to be a thing that distinguished one sponsor from another. Where are we at these days on that?

Also re Trial Subscriptions, I seem to remember we used to be able to select No Trial join pages. A trial can be a great sales tool, IF the sponsor doesn't poach the member by offering a different deal from the trial, or the Email Subscription.

But that has only really been an option for sponsors in the past 5-15 years, prior to that, we (the industry) didnt have readily available access to facilitate that, cascading billing and cross programs tracking changed the landscape in the paysite business, some could argue for the worse.

Agreed.

All using NATs with cascading billing, apparently that was what we gave up as affiliates the ability for long-term tracking, versus better reporting with more options, was it a good trade off though?

I honestly did just as well using CCBill tracking codes than I did with NATs sponsors and, in some instances, when programs switched to NATs there were traffic discrepancies.

Indeed we did and indeed a trial can be but, those members areas were the exact same as PPS trial members areas and as mentioned above, were typically operated by those site owners who heavily relied on the PPS business model, wanting to try and skim some of the affiliate traffic that was being sent to dedicated revshare programs, giving them the best of both worlds, 50% revshare and a members area packed with upsells, cross sells and shitty content, payouts on no trial tours were also significantly lower, for absolutely no reason other than the program owner wanting to pay less to their affiliates.

My point was, the big sites could not afford 50% as they had invested thousands and were heavily spending more than they were or could make. Sites like most could do 50% becase we were not peeing money away.

Yes.

And people come on gfy moaning they have not been paid saying they were ripped off. I suspect many firms did not intend to rip people off, but just got in a mess.

I also wonder if sites simply panicked if not bullied into going silly.

By this I remember when affiliates were on this site pushing for more and more, such as win a car, 150% revshare, and so on. And then others copied, presumably as they also wanted to look the big cheese, as worry they would not get affiliates.

Even at the time I used to think, this is stupidity, and the sums do not add up.

The content alone they had must have cost a fortune.

Often I do not think these firms meant to rip people off, but simply got into a mess.

centroProfits & ModelCentro
 

I remember when i started as model in 2014.
i had no clue how affiliate marketing worked.

i wasnt even able to embed the links under the model banners!
MC cms intentionally deleted or garbled referrals from others!

In the end a CMS designed for noob model farming. it was fun but i lost so much content by theft alone!

I allways hated marketing & my success shows.

i lik getting in a mess... :thumbsup