Can you open a new program without xsells, shaving etc. and be successful?
 

honestly: is it possible to make a decent profit without cheating on anyone - neither members nor webmasters?

tube sites show how it works

Why not? We've done it for years. the key is providing a product that your surfer can't see anywhere else.

Yes!
____

seems like we have not the same understanding of the word "cheating"

Have a good product and have your own source of traffic... a good vision can really help. :-)

damn, I sure hope so..

Possible, sure.
Its a lot easier to ripoff and scam though.
WG

absolutely, you have to start from scratch and scale up as you progress, low cost grass-roots marketing. but as far as coming in and making a big splash, its much harder to do without the tactics you mentioned earlier

interesting to point out that thread shap started a few weeks ago, where you dont find many successful companies that have not started from scratch or close to it

yes you can !
(drop me an email stefan)

There're few successful programs which i'm sure don't cheat surfers and definitely don't cheat webmasters (based on ratios).

If you have good unique content and update often you can make good money with a regular CCBill site and 50/50 revshare

yes of course you can, why wouldn't you?

adding cross sales is just another way for that site to pull in revenue. as long as you have enough traffic and decent content you can make it successful. but in all honestly, you will probably have to rely on pushing the site more yourself then your affiliates unless you are pushing a niche if you are offering a lot lower revshare or pps

the "good product" seems easy to achieve, from a members point of view. as long as they get good content, regularly updated, good customer service and everything for a fair price it should be a piece of cake

the traffic thing - having (or building) your own traffic seems to be the only way to go in that case. i would consider something like $24.95 or $29.95 per month as a fair price but how many webmasters would settle with 50% revshare cause in the beginning you surely cannot pay PPS - considering we want to keep everything legit

yes. There are several ccbill-based programs that dont shave or scam and are very successful

Actually there are many that are succesful and honest programs out there and that deliver this honesty to both consumers and affiliatiates. Just most of them are not active on (several) boards. Ratios vary a lot lately due to the current turmoil of mass media spreading the word "crisis" making people more carefull and aware of spending. Many programs run things locally and not international (or jus have lower profiles as to media coverage).
Local markets are THE potential growth. I know & meet lot's of people on tradeshows doing local things in UK, Holland, France or anywhere that have thousands or tenthousands of affiliates in mobile, web, etc. in all kinds of businessmodels and generate millions or even a tenfold monthly (and most of them we never heard of on boards or even google doesn't know them).

Europeans Billing Europe!
 

Ah, but Ma, the allure of that huge PPS payout...EU programs ran for years on revshare-only platforms, and sponsor loyalty flourished...steady as you go and building for the future were the mainstay for a few programs, and I think you know the successful ones - obscure and quietly successful and have never advertised :winkwink:

Man...I sure hope so.....we just launched and we are running things just as you described

What is the measure of success?

Hi Joe ! I hear what you say and I agree instantly :thumbsup

Your ideas becoming reality.
No complaints from your recurring customers or affilaites.
Growing revenue

Thats true and I even know some of them :-)

Absolutely, you just have to have a legitimately good product :)

The key is having a good product AND knowing how to generate sales yourself.

It amazes me how many programs only exist on revenue from cross sales and a small handful of affiliates.

Well, we all define success in our own ways, so it was a legit question.

Presuming they're well tested and tweaked paysites. In other words, you KNOW they profit from your traffic and now you just want more eyes to see your links, so you open an affiliate program.
Absolutely no reason why not.

from an economic point of view i'd say ROI. it should be significantly higher than putting the money in the bank

I think there's a misconception that the only programs that make money are the ones who pay big PPS numbers and sponsor shows and boards...

It's a very big industry, and for everyone you have figured out, there's 5 more people you've never heard of.

It really depends on your definition of success.

If you mean can you make 3-5K a month with a 50/50 ccbill program, then yeah. That's very do-able.

If your definition of success is doing $1MM/year or 1000 joins a day or something like that then that's an entirely different discussion.

Alot of the tactics I see going on today I haven't seen since the babenet/xpics days....and I think alot of people are doing what they're doing in the name of self-preservation/self-defense.

In other words, they think that the big players doing the hidden x-sells and other shady tactics are going to bring down the wrath of Visa and MC on all of us, to the point where it will be near impossible to secure processing for an adult site....so since we're going to be put out of business anyways, we need to do whatever we can to increase revenue today, with no eye towards the long term because in their view there is no long term.

With the Visa hammer sure to come and the tubes giving away the members areas, they may as well milk every cent they can out of every click on their way out the door.


Things today are actually the total opposite of when I first started.
Standard practice back then was this:

1) Members are gold. Do whatever it takes to keep them, it costs alot more to replace a member than it does to keep one.

2) Free site surfers are freeloaders. They should be slapped around. Blind links and consoles should be the norm, the price they pay for using up our bandwidth. If they want a safe place to download porn, they should join a paysite.

Today that has been totally flipped on it's head...and we coddle free site surfers and give them every full length video we can get our hands on, with no blind links, no overly aggressive advertising, searchable databases of free content, etc.

Yet as soon as someone whips out a credit card to buy one of our products, we immediately try to fuck them over by cramming a bunch of hidden charges onto their card.

Pretty sad state of affairs really.

Everything's possible with a good product and marketing strategy.

sad, but true

Very accurate and well put.

If you can somehow protect your content from being shared/uploaded everywhere then it could possibly work, if you dont plan on protecting your content dont bother... it will be on everyones hard drive within a few weeks...

Define successful.

It depends on the amount of money you can invest, the business idea (maybe you invent a new niche?) and your hard work.

If you got an absolute winner of a business idea and have no money to invest, the idea won´t help much.

If you start from scratch without much seed capital, you can´t expect a large income but I´d call it successful if it works. Sometimes it´s difficult because not every business partner thinks highly of customers who buys on the cheap.

But: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

WoW, nice post.

wise words once again my friend.

Yes.

;)

yes it's possible. work hard and many long days but if you work on it eventually the profits are all yours. you get out what you put in. better to get it out there and fail than to wait for the perfect time. it can be hard to compete with some of the big guys because they give out ridiculous pay per signups payouts or those $100/signup on this day promos (*special rules apply) - hmm those are funny since we all know how traffic works on those - sales come in the following days, a nice way for you to focus on them and take away attention from competition.

But let's face it most sponsors (not me) are cross selling. Not just movie sites, but dating, cam, adult stores as well. they say they have to do it because it covers the cost of the PPS BUT if you have a good site you should be giving out a PPS based on the average period a member stays on. let's face it most of these sites people download all the content they want in a month and they dont sign up for a couple months later. thats why sponsors give 2 shits about webmasters because most never were webmasters making a hard sale. It's good to see some webmasters are starting to stop promoting some programs that are cross selling, but i understand it's tough resisting their tempting tricks. the worst part is they wont reply to you unless you're a big player and afraid of your influence on other webmaters.

As soon as i made my site last year i had sponsors (reality sites, movie sites, dating sites, cam sites) trying to get to cross sell their site or get their links up in my members area. Most are arrogant and just want their links in your members area but wouldnt do the same unless you give them ridiculous payouts. And whats worse is most sponsors will give reduced price plans to screw over other webmasters. you wonder why your ratios drop well because let's say Bangzzers in their member area has a special $15/month for their competitor while other webmasters are pushing the same site at $25/month. you dont think a member will remember that especially if it's a member who likes to sign up for sites?

my best advice is checkout the members area of the sponsor you want to promote. check what their restrictions are, some limit # of downloads or Gigs / day, check their outgoing links - what are they selling in their members area. would you join and how long would you stay. Personally as a webmaster i think my site should be a dead end. It's an experience why would i fuck over my affiliates one by one by linking to other sponsors? I guess i can do it the hard way because we do a lot of work ourselves, it's usually fun and leads to new projects and it's even better when you can keep your overhead low. Other big programs employ their buddies (or they say amis) to say how great their program is.

so yes it's possible but get ready for the ulcers. ulcers are fun

I cant agree more. things have gone down the toilet

The answer is it is very difficult to accomplish a successful new program in this climate, especially without your own quality traffic base to start with. If you depend on affiliates, even with the most amazing exclusive content you will not have longevity. The affiliates that will sell a new site/program are transient, meaning that they can easily switch their attention and traffic sources elsewhere to promote something new. That's how they started promoting the new site program in the first place. Less loyalty, less cash reserve, higher overhead and less profit than previous years.

Most newer programs will not be around in the next 2-3 years, and won't be growing.

I started a new program 6 months ago. It's in my sig.

I could write a book.....

It's 5 o'clock in the morning where I am and I don't feel like writing a book but yes, it's possible to be successful depending on what you're going for.

I didn't have a big budget so I stuck to "amatuers" and "hotel rooms" as a lot of people do when starting. I shot about 10 scenes and slapped em up on Clips4Sale. They did very well so I decided to try a paysite. I failed miserably. Not because the content sucked but because I had no freaking clue how to market a paysite.

So, I brought in an affiliate manager. We went with an entirely new domain name and began building traffic organically. We rolled out an affilliate program and our affiliates have helped quite a bit although we still send half of our sales on our own.

We don't fuck anyone over. In 6 months, we've never had one chargeback. We have members who signed up in month one and are still with us. I was chuckling the other day when I saw a rebill come thru and it was the guy's 5th rebill. I'm like, "Have we even been around that long?"

You build it up slowly over time. Eventually your rebills will be enough to keep you in business and your new sales are gravy.

I'm still not rich but I do support myself solely on porn. No part-time job or anything like that. And it's only been 6 months. So, hopefully 2 years from now I'll be driving around in a Ferrari and the Falcons will be playing in the BrokeAmateurs.com Dome. :-)

So, my response to your question is that you can be successful(successful is a relative term, depends on how much "successful" means to you) without being a fucking shady x-selling, sale shaving, industry-killing fuckstain. But, as in some other non-porn business, it takes time to build it up slowly with a solid foundation.

I'm still only 6 months into it and sure, I'd like to have made more than I have made. But, overall, considering the state of the worldwide economy and the shady x-selling, sale shaving, industry-killing fuckstains, I'm happy with where my program is at this moment.

Really nice post, interesting.
bump for you

Great post! I think everything has been said. If you got a good product, then no doubt you can be get a successful program...

great post, i hope you can resist the temptation when you see that adding 2 xsells makes you 10 times more money in 10% of the time what it takes to build that organically

You know, I just don't think I could do that.

Unchecked cross-sales...fine. Upselling in a members area while I don't do it, I'm fine with it. I'm fine with up-selling galore. I'm just not OK with misleading a surfer or confusing them into paying for something they don't want. If I did that, I'd be a pretty poor excuse for a human being and I'd be fucking over my fellow smut-peddlers by ruining a perfectly happy paying customer. I'd rather get a real job and close the site down. Not to mention that I don't want to move outside the country to avoid US prosecution. I like the U.S. and I like my own bed. :-) And I like not having to worry about dropping the soap in my shower.

Sounds like you may be jumping into the game. If you ever need any advice on anything from a relatively new paysite owner's perspective, just email me.

Good luck.

Steve

We did it with HDPays.com

thank you :thumbsup

not really sure about it, but thanks for the offer. i might take you up on that :)

It definitely would be a challenge to just start out now, but as long as the person doesn't have the "Get Rich Quick Mentality". Consistent hard work and constant revamping, finding out what works for your niche and running with it. Always have the members in mind.