I think by the end of the year we will see another 20 to 30% of the industry gone
 

We've already seen an exodus but I think things are accelerating now.

Verotel - Raising fees on smaller owners significantly, dropping some of the very small ones completely. A couple years ago they discovered an "error" and started collecting from owners based on a couple years worth of transactions in "error".

Zombaio - Having somewhat serious problems getting payments to people on time.

CCBill - The biggest adult processor and ultimately in an indirect way adult's biggest affiliate program (I know). Has a huge successful webhosting business and is IMO likely to sell to a bigger player such as Manwin at any minute. Has been having a lot of small controversies lately such as with scrubbing and webverify.

I wouldn't be surprised to see one or more of these leave adult or fold in the next couple years. Especially as the adult pay site numbers decrease it may no longer be worth it to them. If CCBill in particular goes I can see that taking 50% of pay sites with it overnight and 50% of the old affiliates.

Some other models (non-paysite) will pick up some of the slack but by number of people in the industry it looks like it's radically dropping. Sad times.

Don't know numbers, but if a significant number don't drop out I will be surprised.

There's always going to be a few processors in the mix. If one dies, another is born

Yes, there will be a decrease in web properties as a whole but I only foresee smaller, non-unique offerings folding.

Adapt or die.

:2 cents:

December, 21 th

happy birthday lol



Sure, it would be better if it ends but it won't.

Why would CCBILL sell? Processing is a cash cow. It is an industry much like owning a large tube. You make huge bank on very little overhead. I think you are high in that regard.

As for affiliates... I have switched up and now make about 1/2 of my income from ad sources I wasn't even using just 2 or 3 years ago. So for the adapt or die thing... I have definitely been adapting.

By next year I see myself making far more from selling alternate stuff, whether it be an adult pay site membership to someone else's site (popunders, sidebars, 404's, etc), dating, men's health products or web cams products than I see myself selling products with the model I used (and abused) since 2006 or so.

I would suspect that the revenues are declining and they may want to focus on their other successful projects instead. Some might see being in adult in this way as a liability. I don't want to see it happen but I can see it occurring soon if it hasn't already. <tinfoil hat on>

It's the same here. Declining pay site revenues from affiliate programs aren't enough to maintain my income. It's still profitable but not at the levels I am used to. I have taken to other monetization methods in order to keep income up.

The problem with dating and especially cams are there are less competitors than with pay sites so an affiliate can easily get a bad deal. I've enjoyed the competition in being a pay site affiliate over the years. If I felt someone was doing me wrong there were often 100 other sponsors I could use. With cams and dating I often seem to find myself trying to choose between who is screwing me the least. At the moment I prefer to sell the traffic outright as much as I can.

At the same time let's say CCBill and Verotel went under tomorrow. That would be a huge hit to me and over half my income. I could survive but it would not be fun and I doubt I would want to keep investing much time in the affiliate pay site sales game at that point.

Paysites and processors are still making plenty of money. It's the affiliates that are getting squeezed out of the mix.

I think you would be right if you said a year. Still summer is coming and that's a tough time for many.

I predict a lot of people working full time in online adult, will go part time and find other work.

Don't see CCbill selling, less turnover on a cash cow is still a good business. They will just cut costs.

Manwin will suck up some more of the weak businesses or just ignore them.

Those without a truly great product to sell, will find driving traffic isn't the solution any more. You can lead a horse to water.............

As for getting screwed, they're doing that because they can't operate without doing that. Affiliates might become too expensive for some and the cheaper option is to just buy tons of cheap content, open a Tube and then have user uploads from fake accounts or from site owners themselves. And sell the ads along side the owners own.

All industries mature and the small guys who stayed small have to go. The small guys who got big, don't need you. Sounds harsh, but it's true. The small guys rarely bring anything to the table. Excepting those with very small niche sites.

This says more about today than I ever could. https://gfy.com/showthread.php?t=1053082

I'm glad we made it and amazed we're still trading 4 years after Eva's accident. I see us being here for a little while longer.

I think affiliates are taking the brunt of it but I notice sponsors are getting hit too. Especially the smaller and medium sized ones. Reading the Signbucks.com Important Changes page at http://www.signbucksdaily.com/adult-...rtant-changes/ confirms it. Sponsors are dropping, pay sites are closing. Processors are raising fees. I see sponsors here looking for alternatives to nats and mpa3 because they can no longer afford the monthly fees. At the low end I think Nats is $100 a month and Mpa3 is $50. So presumably at their current revenues it isn't worth it to pay that any longer. Some sponsors are posting their stats and revealing less than 50 sales a month or showing that they process under $100 a week. Then there are all the other anecdotal pieces of evidence such as the people posting, the bling factor at the shows, lack of people skinning the boards, and people otherwise appearing broke.

If the small and medium sized sponsors and affiliates who tend to use ccbill, zombaio and verotel are getting hit then I would think so are these processors. Sure some other customers in mainstream and bigger sponsors might be softening the hit but I would bet good money that it's less than previous years overall.

By the end of the year you will hear less from the people who are pretending that they are making the kind of money that they state they are.

I'll agree with you there.

You are doing conspiracy theory here about cams and dating screwing affiliates more than pay sites. Ok you can choice from 100+ pay site programs and only from dozen cam/dating, but still 10 choices it is not a monopoly or even oligopoly. If there was nly 1 or 2 cam and dating program to choice from, the could have fixed price or do as bad as they wish, BUT, this could not happen yet exactly because there is a dozen competing. And this is dozen instead of 100's just because only 5% or max 10% of traffic who is interested in pics and videos it is interested in cams too, so there must be less sites anyway - another reason of cams and dating can't be too many programs, it is the critical mass and social dynamics, can run small pay sites but not small cam sites really.

About the billers you link them strictly to pay site programs it seems, but I would remind you that epoch it is the biller for myfreecams (first in list for new user signup) and secondary for streamate, and we use it too secondary; about ccbill it is biller for many cam sites too, for example most of asian niche ones, and zombaio been biller for small cam sites since day one - especially single cam girls with own site bill with zombaio for even skype shows. So I agree many pay sites will continue to die (and could be not many new ones launched to replace the died), still I think the main billers as ccbill, epoch sure not "gone" as they could keep up with just cams or else than pay sites, as well as smaller such as zombaio, segpay I would be surprised anything happens to them really - and even without need to bill for filesharing or shady stuff, at times even paypal is used until busted but occasional shady bill for weeks until pulled not so relevant except for GFY gossip.

I would bet that CCB, or any other real processor, could lose all of their adult clients and still be clipping along like a champ in the processing world. Especially considering adult is considered "high risk" and the fees are typically going to be higher for them, than dealing with a brick and mortar, hosting or 'clean' mainstream processing business.

In short, they are not going anywhere, and I doubt there is any real incentive to "sell out to Manwin". CCB owns Phoenix NAP, Secured Servers, and possibly other businesses (i.e. diversity) to my understanding. I can't speak to all of the others.

I have been with Verotel almost a decade, and while they've had a bump here and there over that time, I have no real complaints in the grand scheme of things. I have heard they are big in some other markets, and especially in Europe with SMS billing. I've been with Zombaio almost since their introduction to adult 3-4 years back. While Zomabio may be new to adult business, it's not a new processing company. Feel free to read up on their history (common sense). Have they had a few hiccups here and there? Sure. But almost every processor in adult has at one point or another.

What I am getting at here is, adult is probably a drop in the bucket for their overall revenues considering they are diversified companies. It's not like losing adult business would completely crush their business model like it would some beer money baron affiliate.

:2 cents:

I haven't tried every single dating or cam program out there so I cannot say they are all up to shady things but when I see dating sponsors showing me as converting at 1:2,000 uniques I automatically call bullshit when that traffic is from profile iframes which used to do 1:300-1:500 a year ago. It's not just one sponsor either. And with cams it's nearly the same. I know with good certainty some do shave. I've seen very strange statistical anomalies which I can duplicate at will with certain sponsors. Such as when on a pay-per-signup program I will have 1:x free-to-unique but when on pay-per-free with the same exact traffic I will have a 1:3x free-to-unique ratio. I've had one where I sent them hundreds of thousands of popunders and still made the same amount of free signups I made the month before without sending those extra popunders. There's too many things to list in total here. Then there are all the other observations I've read from other affiliates such as them sending targeted tier 1 traffic and still getting a lot of signups counted as tier2+3. Suffice it to say I think it's very common for dating and cam programs to shave affiliates. You'll never convince me that the search engine traffic I have really converts at 1:2000 on dating sites. It won't happen. I'll never believe it. I'll believe it on a pay site because of piracy but not on a dating site. I think it's more likely that someone is trying to capitalize on the perceived gullibility of affiliates who are used to seeing those ratios with pay sites.

This is what you get when you have only a handful of sponsors who are mostly larger players. They tend to think they can take advantage of affiliates more and they usually do in some way. It's always been this way. I agree on the billers but I don't think that will cover for all the revenue lost from the pay sites.

I mainly think they will sell just to focus on Phoenix NAP because adult will be seen as a liability in comparison and not worth it. Not in a declining market anyway. I know they aren't under-capitalized. It's just a gut feeling I have. Speculation is all.

The beer money baron affiliates simply have to come to accept the facts. The business model has changed. Many programs had started developing their own traffic sources back in 2008 to bring more in house so they did not have to keep paying the high ransoms some whales were demanding.

This was openly talked about at the conferences and on panels. Long story short, at the time that the PPS was getting to $75/100/200.00 PPS, because the whale held all of the cards. Programs were overly dependent on them for traffic. The whales were demanding higher PPS, and payments upfront (among other things) or they would pull all of their traffic. Which would essentially crush the program. They essentially broke the camel's back, or killed the golden goose.

Programs wised up, developed their own tubes and in-house traffic sources so they could keep more of the profits for themselves, and stay in business. The more successful they became in their own traffic, the more you saw them slowly phasing out the high PPS, PPS in general, or affiliate program all together. They no longer needed it. Perhaps they kept a handful of whales, but they shut down the rest of the hassle and expense (affiliate managers salary, & support expense of providing tools, etc.).

They "good ole days" of the adult affiliate are over. Unless you're a whale.

Well In my case I sell the dating and cam traffic now as much as I can rather than attempt to send it to 1:2,000 sponsors. Failing that there are even mainstream sources who want adult traffic. As long as you have decent traffic you have a business. The question is if you will be a chump and give it away to someone at 1/4th of it's value or not. Many will.

You're right though. The golden age of the adult affiliate are long gone. The same with the average pay site.

Indeed.

What is funny, and I was commenting to my friend at the Miami conference about this, is that now EVERYONE is in the traffic game. There were so many traffic brokers at the conference it was almost amusing. I guess when they can't convert their own traffic anymore, sell it to others to stay in business. :1orglaugh :thumbsup

Now, I am not saying your traffic is shit nor implying it. I am simply commenting on the vast number of "traffic brokers" you are seeing show up at the shows. The ratios of these guys to some of the others in attendance has been increasing.

Which is odd, considering that (as you mentioned) many programs are going out of business. Who are they selling too? Desperate program owners trying to stay in business?? All in all just a sad state of affairs as people are clawing and scratching to not have to go find a real job.

You used to see these shows packed with the various affiliate programs, and what not at the cabana's. Now you get a few here or there, either well established or brand new, and then a flood of traffic dudes.

At least that is my observation. It is just a noticeable shift in the market.

What do you mean by gone? I am not aware of many sites that have gone out of business but I am aware that many have sold their sites and I am also aware that new sites are coming out virtually every week. So it seems to me that the number of sites are pretty much the same.

With that said, I've sat back in this industry for quite some time just watching and waiting.

A purging is needed to make the industry more competitive because it's not evolving as fast as it should.

Adult companies should be looking into broader branding opportunities such as browsers (e.g. heatseek), tech device offerings, ISP/Mobile companies, resorts, nightclubs and other ventures where porn is a value-added experience.

Lifestyle management opportunities are plentiful, but few are paying much attention to them except for the known big names like Playboy, Hustler and Penthouse. We all know that sex sells, but from a surface level analysis it appears as if the general public's interest in paying for porn is waning.

And whatever happened to government lobbying to ensure that the interests of the industry are met on a persistent basis? Serious money is needed in that regard. Or what about specific venture capital funds for industry companies/productions or even IPO's? There has only been a handful of companies that have stepped up to that plate. How about technology incubators that focus on developing the latest and greatest innovations to allow customers to view and interact with porn products?

Let the purging continue, I say. The industry will come back stronger as persons are forced to adapt accordingly. Meanwhile those deeply involved in the industry have to broaden the vision for where it is going and reach out to those who may have the ideas and concepts, but aren't as well known.

:1orglaugh

I want money.

Dont forget controversy regarding CCBill processing for Oron, known thieves and owners of PornBB. Im a client of theirs and i will be looking for an out eventually because of shady business decisions such as this

why worry about it ?

just focus on alternative revenue streams and milk adult for all you can

Iff CCbill sells to Manwin, we will steal their biz model/scripts and open a much better processor for everyone.

Yup, sometimes it seems like that is the prevailing attitude, but such a lack of vision should not be allowed to continue because eventually the milk will run dry if the (cash) cow isn't fed and maintained properly.

We already are seeing the results.

If payment processing is becoming a challenge then there needs to be a concerted effort to solve that threat. A direct blow to the money flow of the industry would be devastating. (Although it must be said that there would be some unique opportunities created from such an occurrence.)

If CCBill was ever to go out of business. Or.. if Manwin was to buy CCBill (same difference).

Methinks that you would hear of it before you read about it.

http://www.wallchan.com/images/mediums/13061.jpg

Imagine, if you will, the collective roar of thousands of guns discharging simultaneously into the heads of webmasters from one side of globe to the other.

Things would get pretty quiet around here though.
.

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

Many, not all, of the bigger adult programs have their own merchant accounts. In short, I doubt that CCBill going out of business, or selling to Manwin (either of which equally ridiculous), would effect them one way or the other.

:2 cents:

There would be a shortage of paper hats at the local fry-o-lator, or beers to cry in.

:2 cents:

I concur, but what about the smaller industry peeps? Larger companies always have a better chance at surviving any change in the ecosystem.

The question remains of whether the industry deliberately is allowing the smaller porn companies to starve and dwindle out to prevent newcomers, thereby eliminating competition/future threats.

Or is that reading too much into things?

The thing that struck me about that thread, which I assume was only a small % of the people who use the hosted tube. Is the tiny payouts people are getting. It's like I shooting custom for $5 profit a set. :upsidedow

The money in processing for online businesses not porn is growing. Internet revenues are only shrinking in the porn business.


:1orglaugh :1orglaugh

**********************

The business has changed 180 degrees in the years I've been here. From my P{OV of the industry, stilll a good indication of how we all changed.

Jun 2001 few could afford a digital camera or scanner or video editor and most were buying content like there was no tomorrow. In those days online pron was a novelty and the customers were curious and easily converted. Also 10,000s who bought offline were coming to buy or get free online porn. It was so easy to drive traffic and convert it.

Jun 2005 ish. Big changes had happened. TGPs ruled the traffic game and to get the traffic, affiliates couldn't be given content 20 other sponsors were giving out. So sites had to start getting very cheap exclusive content. Very cheap in terms of what the rest of the industry produced.

This led to 1,000s of sites full of poor porn.

Today. Tubes rule the traffic. The customers are far more educated and picky. There's an odds on chance that today's customer has been a member of another site selling the same niche and style. And an even safer bet they have been a member of a site that has filled and exceeded their needs. They now demand that on every site they join.

This led to 1,000s of sites full of poor porn. Failing.

The problem is how to pay affiliates and satisfy the customers demand for a great product. Because, this is an example) if he's into "Teen Lesbians" he's found and joined Sapphic Erotica and that's now the bench mark for getting his business. A sponsor in that niche now has to exceed his needs to get his business. Throwing mud at the wall no longer works.

Now you can all tell me throwing mud at your sites works. :1orglaugh

If you only have your figures available to you, I can see why you would think that.

Only Luddites worry about change. Entrepreneurs embrace it.

hmm not wrong

True. I've changed so many times in this business.

Online was just another one.

There are people changing still changing. We've seen the move to better produced content in the "Met-Art" end. Now others need to think about how they can change their niche and style of product.

The obvious change is the dropping of being reliant on outside affiliates and the move to larger Tubes. Either self submitting to the big guys or building their own Tubes. The little men are being squeezed out.

If only Damian had figures to prove he was stupid. Oh that's right he does, it's here. LOL

The question at hand is whether the industry is changing fast enough to support itself on a broad scale, in addition to continuing expansion and growth.

Right now, given the global economy (among other things), the industry is in a state of atrophy.

Nothing is funny about having a dedicated team of persons that monitors US government on a state and federal level in regards to laws that directly affect the Adult industry.

Persons who can argue intellectually, scientifically and legally as to the rights of citizens to view and enjoy adult content while assuring politicians that the industry will abide by standards that protect children from viewing sexually explicit content.

The Free Speech Coalition needs more support in that regard, don't you think? Or if persons don't believe that the aforementioned organization is up to snuff, an alternative one that can adequately lobby on our behalf should be created.

Typo fixed.