Has the way we have treated the surfer for the last 10 years has helped or harmed you
 

Many of the sites out there are great, well worth $30 and play it dead straight. However some sites are not so good. Sites that install programs, spyware, upsell without the customer knowing, hide the cancellation button, mislead the surfer on the tour into thinking the site is something it clearly is not.

I'm sure you can think of other examples.

So do you think the way we have treated the surfer over the last 10 years has helped you make more money or hindered you?

Discuss, I'm sure most of you know my feelings.

Discuss what?

Yesterday a poster said I should not worry about poor sites because it makes mine look better. I answered that every bad site makes my job harder. Harder to convince that my site is honest.

Whether you think you have profitted from some of the methods some sites use or whether you have suffered.

Have we made surfers more wary about signing up?

Does free porn serve as an alternative to joining a paysite.

Lots of things to discuss.

No one got an opinion. Either way?

I only sell traffic, so I wouldn't know.

you mean sites who says join now for only £2 and hope the surfer thinks its 2 dollars? Yeah those hurt us all.

Ofcourse all the shit around makes the surfer more scared to sign up. All the horror stories about virusses and cc abuse don't help alot.

Of course it hurts the business and the trust of surfers in general. Porn sites have a bad mystique to them by a good percentage of the public. Although there are bad tactics now, it's nothing like it used to be.

So yes you can be upset when you see something shady going on. But will it fix anything? No. Every industry has people in it for the quick buck and to fuck the surfer over for everything they can. If it's not the guy you're looking at, someone else will come along.

well, i think the thing that has hurt the industry more than any of us will ever know is the explosion of free (promotional, not stolen) content.

the average surfer probably doesnt know how to find the stolen members content forums and such.. but why would he sign up when he can find a linkdump with 50 FHGs for the site he intended to pay for?

i'm not bashing anyone in the TGP/LL/etc game, its just the way the industry is now and we have to be as competitive as we can in the current environment, but if these sources of free porn didn't exist in their current form conversions would triple.

I would never advise a surfer to buy a membership. There are many reasons for this.

1. Lot's of adult webmasters install shitware, yet people still trade with them and do nothing to freeze them out.

2. The Zango saga showed that many adult webmasters don't give a shit and have a I'm all right Jack attitude.

3. A casual reading of GFY shows that an unusually high proportion of adult webmasters hate their own governments whilst supporting their enemies, are extremely shallow, are ass kissers, are attention whores, are plain stupid, have no problem with selling snake oil products which they know don't work, would sell their own mothers if only they could, will willfully deceive the surfer, etc, etc, etc. In short, are complete idiots and not the kind of people any sane person would want to give money to.

I would advise surfers to boycott paysites until the adult industry grows a pair and throws out all the trash. There's more than enough free porn out there to keep things ticking over anyway.

But are people seeking out free porn more because of the crap we pull. I mean $30 for 10 movies. Trials that give you access to one video. Installing crap on people's computer. Making it near impossible to cancel.

If buying porn was safe, easy, and not a hassle, would more people not waste their time scouring the web for free porn?

You just posted what I was going to say.

We blame free porn all the time and ignore our disability to provide something that competes with a site with 50 galleries 90% of which have no interest to the individual surfer and the ones that do serve up 20 images, usually reduced size and quality, or 4 15 second video clips. How bad are we as an industry that a surfer chooses to go for that rather than spend $1 a day for what we could be offering.

Well, either the surfer can spend half an hour every night finding a 'wank worthy' gallery (waste of time) or he can join a site which will save that half an hour search whilst still delivering the wankworthy material.

Problem is, that surfer probably gets 50 spam emails a day for porn, which pisses him off. Then he remembers the dozen times he has had an infected computer and has had to reinstall his OS, then he remembers that his favourite search engine has been fucked up by blackhatters, making it hard to find useful information. Then he thinks about the time he joined an adult dating site only to discover that all the decent profiles were fake.

Is that surfer more or less likely to give money to someone who belongs to a pool of people who have treated him that badly?

Excellent points, Paul. (and pocketkangaroo)

However, I think you're both painting an unrealistic picture of how difficult it is to find free porn.

Look at the number of daily searches for free porn, free sex, etc.

If even 5% of that traffic converted (because they couldn't find any free content), it'd mean billions to this industry.

Who is "we"? As you said, there are people who use every trick in the book to get their money out of the surfer, and obviously, those people hurt the image our industry has in the eyes of the society and the average surfer. Then there are the honest people. Unfortunately, I don't believe surfers "spread the word" when they don't get fucked over, but do so when a porn site tricks them / fucks them over, so there are a lot of horror stories going around.

I still remember when I was a surfer, maybe not comparable to an average male surfer, but still, I was looking for porn online. I was even afraid to click links on TGP's in the fear of viruses! Should I have found a porn site that I was interested in (before I found Kazaa, lol), I probably would never have filled in my card details because of the image the online porn industry had in my eyes.

Well, thank god the average surfer isn't as much of a worrier as me, and some of them are unbelievably naive when it comes to signing up to a paysite. My site used to be a very small personal site and I would talk to most of the guys before they signed up, and I've had several cases where the guy has been drunk or whatever and asked ME to enter their details for them. And countless times people have just straight up told me their credit card details before I even got the chance to say hello. I just see these situations as a chance to make my contribution and educate these poor fuckers before they get themselves into some serious trouble.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we all benefit from the naivety of surfers in one way or another, even if we don't intend to. For example, there are always people who forget they signed up and continue to rebill for months. And with the current reputation of the online porn industry, you have to be either naive or really confident and experienced to enter your card details.

I would like to see the reputation change for the better, but all you can really do is to run your own sites in an honest way, and try and educate your surfers. I remember some people didn't like the new "educational" section TheBestPorn.com has for their surfers, telling them about the common tricks paysites use, but I think we need more of that to bring up the reputation of this industry.

I think the subject is too complex to be judged without any qualified behavioral studies or surveys. Everybody is just assuming what surfers think or how they act.

I am sorry, but what is it you do in the industry?

I love how you twist things around in your own weird little mind.

The discussion in the other thread was regarding content. It is your opinion that unless one is using Paul Markham quality content, they were ripping off the consumer.

This can hardly be placed in the same category as installing spyware on someone's computer.

Yes, it is bad to fuck with the surfer. It hurts all of us.

No, buying content at $300 instead of $600 is not is not fucking with the surfer.

What if I bought all your most expensive content, then put it on a site loaded with toolbars, and prechecked cross sales . . . .would you feel the same way then?

What the hell does the quality of the content have to do with whether or not the surfer is going to get screwed?

My exposure to adult is low. For a reason. However, this is neither here nor there. One doesn't have to be a 'player' and go to a convention in shades and a pimp jacket, then thank someone for a cheesecake in order to boost one's image :1orglaugh to have something to add. The concepts behind the long term stability and growth in adult are the same as for any business.

If you shit where you eat, before a certain time you will have cause to complain.

Why on earth would a surfer with even half a brain want to pay for porn? There's plenty available for free, and he knows that if he gets his credit card out he is funding the kind of people who have been filling his inbox with junk and his computer with trojans for the last 10 years.

The industry has for a long time had the opportunity to create some kind of quality control system to freeze out the bad guys and increase customer confidence in adult virtual products but has failed to do so.

Yeah, it is. I have my fingers in a lot of pies in adult, and I can't think of one of them that would not take a hit if there was a massive boycott by surfers to avoid paysites.

Even if my pushing of porn is minimal, I know that without paysites my adult customers, no matter what they do, would not serve much purpose.

I would venture to say that more trojans and other evils come from sites with free porn than from paysites.

If there were no paysites, there would be no free sites or TGP's.

OMG :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

I think the surfers have gotten smarter over the years with that said you still get the naive ones but in all I beleive they are smarter because of the tactics people use

The problem with adult is it is filled with short term thinkers.

The industry has changed. Remeber when 2 checked crossales was the norm? When everyone spammed and denied it? 52 front ends leading to one backend filled with dialers and upsells. This used to be the norm.

Now we have grown and will continue to.

I love how you twist things around in your own weird little mind. :1orglaugh

No I am asking

Has the way we have treated the surfer for the last 10 years has helped or harmed you?

Lazonby, I agree with some of the things you say. But if you do not understand WHY PEOPLE BUY any product, it's very hard to sell to them. Yes you can copy the successful ones, but do you know what to copy and why they are successful?

Short term thinkers who don't know how to deliver and market one of the easiest products in the world to sell. Contrary to beliefs of some, porn is not hard to sell.