The first article written about the adult Internet was on how to get traffic, and everything written since then has been an offshoot of that topic. Or so it seems; we're a traffic-obsessed culture.
While many of the early traffic acquisition methods are still used, a testament to their efficacy, each has undergone profound changes over the years, as have the many products managers use to analyze traffic. The surfer also has developed, in the process becoming an increasingly visible and noisy partner in the sophisticated cat-and-mouse game whose ultimate objective used to be only to get him or her to click and pay.
Today, most people take for granted that what happens after the surfer arrives also is an important part of the big picture, influencing for better or worse their future involvement with all porn sites. Some website operators still act as if the "courting" and "seducing" parts of the transaction are unconnected, but they're wrong. The way a person is treated throughout coalesces into a single emotional response, positive or negative, never neutral.
That's one reason why, no matter what methods are used, today's traffic trend is to focus on more original and efficient ways to attract and keep the surfer. Managers have learned that good things happen when creativity and innovation are brought to bear not only on design and content but also the marketing of the site. The reverse is also true; stagnating rather than confronting the challenges of today's marketplace is a guarantee that nothing positive is going to happen.
But traffic fundamentals are changing far more than just in the methods used to snare the surfer. In the old days, a relative few sources controlled large amounts of traffic, so that being admitted into the inner sanctum of certain affiliate networks was a guarantee of success (given some very minimal site development and maintenance skills)
For the most part, those gravy days are over now.
Dead, Dying, Dormant or Just Different?
"The affiliate model used to be a cottage industry, allowing everyone from the hobbyist to the serious professional webmaster to make money," said Scott Rabinowitz, co-founder of online ad agency Traffic Dude. "Now, more people than ever want their networks to be closed, by invitation only and due-diligence-driven."
According to Rabinowitz, the closed-loop program creates financial gain and liability reduction. Why not spend more time and energy taking care of better quality people who you know?
"Liability management is driving it," Rabinowitz told AVN Online. "It's no longer just about where do we get traffic, customers, and money from, but how do we cover our asses while we're doing it. If you don't have affiliates that you've sourced and managed properly, and even if you do, buying and selling traffic is finally coming into its own. There simply are a lot more people now who want to buy and sell traffic as opposed to just farming it to an affiliate program to see what they make."
Rabinowitz is not saying the affiliate model is unimportant, or that people are not profiting from it. But the model continues to change, and those who use this model should continue to adapt to market realities.
"The big shift now is from paying purely for performance to a mix of paying for both performance and the traffic itself," Rabinwitz said. "What program owners really want is better control, and they need it. Whether they have better affiliates or better in-house ability to generate traffic, no matter how they do it - through search engines, TPGs, it really doesn't matter - they want to have a level of control."
Control is certainly in the air, but people who run affiliate programs, no matter the size, still emphasize the importance, if not the dominance, of their affiliate traffic. Its DNA may have been altered, but it is still their affiliate traffic.
"The traffic landscape for our company has not changed all that much over the years, really," Q. Boyer of TopBucks told AVN Online. "We still get the vast majority of our traffic via our affiliates, which includes other affiliate programs like TB that we trade traffic with and/or purchase traffic from. What has changed is where specifically the traffic those sources send is coming from.
"Exit traffic has declined significantly, as the use of console blocking software has become more commonplace," Boyer continued. "Some programs still take a significant amount of mail traffic (especially those located overseas who don't have to comply with CAN-SPAM), but many have stopped taking mailer traffic entirely. We've also seen an upswing in member's area up-sells being used by paysites to send traffic to each other, which doesn't typically yield a high volume of traffic, but the traffic quality is high."
According to OCCash owner XXXJay, the game has changed with the increased use of affiliate tracking software.
"The business from day one has been built to fail," Jay said. "The way it was done back in the day was they would give these people these huge payouts but then they would shave the shit out of them. I know how it worked back then because I was there. First, they were shaving everybody to one extent or another. If someone had particularly unproductive traffic, they would get shaved more. If they had better traffic and the members stayed longer, they would get shaved less. But now, 70-80 percent of the industry uses NATS or MPA3, which you can't shave on. I can say that for a fact."
The results, according to Jay, have not all been positive.
"Affiliates know that if you're using one of these platforms and can't shave, they still want their 40 bucks, but they don't want to know where the 40 bucks is coming from. And then on top of that, there are these tube sites, which are eating into your profits. So in order to sustain your business, you have to become ... well, it's like one problem necessitates the other."
Purchase or Perish?
Affiliates aside, anyone who is seriously building traffic sources for the near future is knee-deep exploring as many new avenues as possible. According to some industry players, there is a growing demand (and need) for responsible and mature decision-making.
"Companies actually have to operate as companies now," Rabinowitz said. "It's not just that the business decisions have changed relating to how to source traffic; it's that all facets of looking at economics are what are reflecting what's going on in all industries."
Rabinowitz sees "an explosion" not only in ad networks, but in many different types of online traffic resources.
"There's a demand for technology solutions, such as ad networks, as well as more labor-intensive solutions such as ours to basically be the hub of distribution activity," he said. "Ad networks are just one part of the picture. People can buy from us, from other self-service ad networks, directly from site operators who do their own ad sales, and probably from a thousand other sources.
"The biggest sea change is that there is an absolute demand for transparently accountable traffic," he continued, "which means that at times the advertiser, meaning the sponsor, or merchant at the top of the food chain, will have to take a little more risk economically."
TopBucks, one of the most established and successful adult affiliate programs, purchases traffic like everyone else, including from brokers such as Wildline!, Traffic Dude, and others.
"We also purchase traffic on a per click, per signup, or flat-rate basis directly from select sites," said Boyer. "Managing the cost per acquisition on paid traffic can be a challenge, but these traffic sources have their advantages, too, including for testing purposes. When we soft-launch new products, we'll often purchase a burst of traffic from brokers, to give the new site a kick-start, and because we've got a pretty good handle on the nature of the traffic, and therefore can make certain judgments about the new product based on its conversion performance with the purchased traffic. It gives you a baseline to measure tour products against each other, and an opportunity to refine your tour and general sales pitch before you release the new site to your webmasters."
Traffic, Thy Name Is Diversity
In some ways, the TopBucks testing process utilizing paid traffic still seems to exist ultimately to serve affiliates' needs. That seems to be the general breakdown of the current traffic situation. The two generalized sources break down as "affiliate" and "other", with micro-sources following behind.
A trend that will probably become the norm is more and more companies moving from in-house traffic management to outsourcing by using agencies that offer an increasingly diverse array of services. More often than not, the economic upside is a no-brainer, but so is the peace of mind that comes from knowing that a specialist not only knows what s/he's doing, but has your back in terms of such potentially serious issues such as liability.
Below are some other tried and true methods site operators are using to exploit and promote a variety of traffic sources that often include significant branding opportunities:
Perfecting SEM
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) basically refers to the often mysterious ways search engines like Google and Yahoo are used to both develop traffic and brand products. These include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as paid placement and paid inclusion. A cottage industry of experts has sprung up to help with mastering the intricacies of search engine algorithms and culture, which also are evolving.
Buying Normal
As mentioned, purchasing targeted traffic is perhaps the biggest growth area in adult, and may ultimately outpace the affiliate model. Buying and trading traffic is not new, but its sophistication has exploded over the past few years into a finely tuned discipline.
Buying Weird
A whole slew of cool, new advertising technologies offer unique ways to deliver your message and generate traffic at the same time. These include interstitials, peel-type ads, and walking, talking avatars, among others. Product placement within content is another proven method whose use will only continue to evolve in the adult marketplace, and is an especially fluid method when used online for branding and as a direct source of traffic
Tube-site traffic might also be seen as "buying weird". But as much as people complain about tube sites as a tsunami-scale disaster for the online porn business, Rabinowitz says that half of the major tube sites are now promoting legally obtained content. Likewise, TopBucks' Boyer downplayed the negative impact of tube sites on the business.
"People talk a lot about the porn tube sites, and to some extent I think their impact has been exaggerated, but there's no question that a major migration of traffic to the tubes has taken place," Boyer said. "One look at Alexa ranking trends and you can see that many major, old-school free sites have declined greatly over the last couple years, supplanted by tube sites that have exploded in reach over the same period of time."
XXXJay believes that while tube site traffic is of limited value, the sites remain a big problem for content producers and distributors across the board.
"Most of them are owned by people who also own porn sites or dating programs, or maybe they're private people taking big pre-pays," he said. "It's a huge problem. But there are a lot of people that won't advertise on tube sites, and there are a couple reasons why they won't. One, if you're a content owner you're going to get a lot of heat from everybody else in the industry, and two, the traffic doesn't covert very well. How are you going to sell something to somebody that you're already giving away?"
XXXJay, of course, runs his own tube site, Snizzshare.
"I've had Snizzshare forever," he said. "I know from running the program that people charge so much for traffic now that on nine out of ten buys we don't make a return. But I know there are people out there proactively looking for traffic, so I was like, here, it's free, but please don't put long videos on it. It's doing OK, but it can't compete with those guys who have 20-minute videos. The traffic grows slowly, but it does OK."
Get Testy
Don't forget to always test new traffic sources before you make a long-term commitment, and make sure that you test a sufficiently large measure of traffic relative to what you plan on purchasing.
Going Offshore
Going after foreign customers means learning about different cultures and laws, communicating with people in their own language, and enabling them to pay in their own currency, but many companies provide those services. There are few reasons anymore to leave that traffic on the table.
Print? Are You Fu**ing Kidding Me?
There are more opportunities than ever to advertise and brand in print. In many ways, the word rules and should never be taken for granted. But exercise extreme caution. Unless you have a big budget, B2B print advertising should be done sparingly, wisely, and always with an eye to the target audience. It's also best to plan a long-term print campaign in advance, even if it is rolled out intermittently, since inconsistencies in print exposure (there one month, gone the next) tend to get noticed.
Write It Yourself
If you know how to write, write; maybe an article on something you know about, or a blog; create press releases that say something newsworthy about your business. If you can't write, hire a freelancer to punch up your copy, and more importantly, edit it. Nothing spells unprofessional like typos in site copy or marketing materials.
Reach Out and Touch Someone
Over the next year, we are going to see a number of large companies roll out direct-to-consumer campaigns designed to develop traffic sources. Some are already doing it but are not crowing about it publicly. It is going to be a big trend with results all over the map, literally.
Reach Out and Grab Someone
The video and gentlemen's club sides of the biz have long worked the face-to-face angle, as have many on the Internet side. Successful amateurs learned long ago that an in-person encounter with a fan often results in a "lifer." Bring a regular or for-hire model to a fan-based event, even to a mainstream one, and watch it work immediate wonders. Fans, like lovers, appreciate any honest effort you expend courting them, and will repay you.
This article originally appeared in the February issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
