In this article, TrafficPartner.com, a European leader in the adult online industry, shares details on studies it has done in the wake of joining forces with North American-focused companies Grand Slam Media and Adnium.
In Europe’s online adult industry, new momentum and directions do not easily lead to growth possibilities, as many businesses are simply afraid of spending resources for an uncertain or even negative outcome.
However, TrafficPartner.com is confident that members-area traffic is a profitable and easy-to-integrate solution that is becoming available in the European market since it teamed up with Grand Slam Media and Adnium. The companies recently announced an epic business venture, with first steps soon to be taken, that offers interested parties ways to create new and controllable revenue streams.
“We believe that members-area traffic could very well be the next big thing for adult and casual-oriented sites coming out of Europe,” TrafficPartner.com’s CEO Michael Reul said. “Sure, it’s always a demanding and sometimes risky process to bet on the right trends, grow alongside with them and remain on top, but we’re certain that working with members-area traffic is not akin to playing with fire. Especially when the technical setup is literally child’s play and tests have rendered it bulletproof in terms of risks. You don’t see TrafficPartner.com offering traffic for the first time in company history without a solid reason to do so.”
“The landscape in the U.S. and Europe has always been diverse. Traffic swaps between competitors, exchanges of users and cross sales always played a paramount role in the U.S., yet not so much in Europe,” Reul continued. “TrafficPartner and its subsidiaries have been around since 1998, but still just recently implemented selling members area traffic. Our Business Intelligence Team did set up extensive A/B/C tests in a couple of our products and intensively analyzed the test and control groups. We assumed a somewhat big drop in revenues from subscriptions and coin sales once we showed ads to our registered users. Even expecting them to be widely distracted from our products and drawn to other (competitors’) offers.
“But after we ran tests for a couple of months on different sites, the surprising outcome was huge. At first, I couldn't believe the numbers and asked our BI guys to crunch them again,” Reul said. “Still, the result showed only very little decrease in subscription and coin revenue. Depending on the site, it showed minus 2 percent to minus 7 percent. The upside, on the other hand, was astonishing. The revenue we generated through Grand Slam Media was amazing. Between 33 percent and 46 percemt, so the average upside was a statistical 30.5 percent. This is money that adds directly to our bottom line.”
It may come as a huge surprise to critical observers, who would fear a decrease in earnings and loss in subscribed members, but feedback of early experimentation has underlined interesting results. “Even though I can fully empathize with some partners being rather cautious about this, in the end there initial skepticism combined with the higher revenues generated will most likely make all doubts obsolete,” Make More Money Manager Stinger states. “Slight and overseeable reactions by subscribers after implementing ads. On top, the numbers don’t lie and our experience allows for the following estimates. Small member areas with standard banner sizes already have the possibility to turn five-figure revenue. Bundling sites of this magnitude? Potentially turning it up a notch to six figures. If that’s not reassuring in terms of the given potential and possibilities, I don’t know what is!”
One of the earlier integrations happened in cooperation with Fuckbook.com’s CEO Fabian. “When we first started out with our own media sales, we had our doubts that the revenues from them would make up for a possible loss of subscription revenues. Because in the end, you are distracting your users. But after thorough and very detailed testing, we saw that the subscriber revenues only dropped by a single-digit percentage. Ad revenues started to make up 25 percent of our earnings,“ he explained. “One other big advantage was, we got a slight decrease of chargebacks, aligned with the decrease of the lower amount of subscriptions. This was a nice added benefit.”
Implementation is set to be handled with professional and dedicated care based on years of experience in monetization, with the goal of delivering individualized and context-sensitive ad material that is suitable and appropriate for any customer product. Meanwhile, greatly advanced tech will influence which type of banners are shown, the genres they’re promoting and, of course, which user is experiencing them at what times.
This procedure has proven itself already. CPM estimates range from a steady average, only fluctuating $1.00 to $1.50 CPM to a gigantic leap when it comes to maximum options of up to $10.00 CPM.
“There’s a great opportunity here, which has shown to work in North America,” Grand Slam Media CEO Luke Hazlewood said. “So, Europeans should find themselves adding another profit layer onto their existing revenue streams now, as this procedure is running globally already. Don’t miss the train. I mean, besides all lucrative options here, why wouldn’t you join the action and thus decrease chances of your customers finding appealing ad material somewhere else, when you can have them run with your offers instead and earn in doing so, right?“
Asked about what the fastest and easiest way would be to run a test for those EU companies that have never monetized ads, Reul said, “The quickest and easiest way is to implement pop-ups/pop-unders and banner spots on the logout page. That showed almost no decline in members and coins revenue in our extensive tests. And it´s a piece of cake for tech guys to implement it. If you don´t at least test it, you must have too much money already or don´t care about your business.”
TrafficPartner.com will be taking this topic on the road in Europe right away. One of their stops is in September at Webmaster Access in Amsterdam (September 8-11). Furthermore, the team is already hyped to discuss the potential with interested advertisers and publishers at shows in Cologne, Berlin and Prague. All dates are available on the company’s social media channels (Facebook Link, Twitter Link) and at TrafficPartner.com.
