“It has always been part of our attitude to follow the trend of what sells,” says popular affiliate site SilverCash’s (www.silvercash.com) founder and CEO, Mike Price, of his nine-year-old company’s sustained success in online adult entertainment. Indeed, whether peddling more general, nonexclusive content (as they did back in the very beginning); riding the wave of reality sites like SquirtingChicks.com, AverageHo.com, and GayHitchhiker.com; or offering up a fresh selection of exclusive solo girl footage (their current forte), SilverCash has managed to build an empire by keeping its fingers firmly on the pulse of the adult webmaster industry.Created in 1999 to showcase its roster of high-traffic sites, SilverCash quickly grew into an industry giant by always staying tuned-in to the current marketplace. “It’s basically just been a trend-following progression,” says Affiliate Director Terrence Thurmond of the program’s increased prominence. “Eventually, when there are enough people doing the same thing, you have to move on. As things went along [in the adult industry], the basic trend was that as the surfers saw more and more of the same thing, it became a competition to see who had the best original content.”
At Price’s insistence, SilverCash morphed into a high-profile program offering a variety of mainstream and niche sites, all of which offer hardcore, original content. Ranging from the voyeuristic thrills of the surfer-submitted amateur content site VideoSeekers.com, to the no-frills hardcore footage found on TittieFuckers.com, to the, um, “tongue-in-cheeks” hilarity of the naughty gay superhero site SuperTwink.com, the sites on SilverCash’s roster both attract attention (not to mention traffic) and produce rock-solid conversions. “With all the niches we have covered, the only thing we can attribute the success of our content to is the fact that it’s exclusive,” Thurmond theorizes. “When it comes to content, there are no sure things. We just kind of look at the market and see what's going on.”
Though Thurmond maintains that it’s often hard to say where their best traffic comes from (“It follows the same general pattern of all adult traffic,” is all he will offer), he does say that SilverCash has created several tools to help them better understand it. And apart from input received from processing companies regarding sales, fraud control, and similar issues, SilverCash keeps tabs on their stats in house. “All of our programming is proprietary,” he says. “We don’t really rely on anyone else for their input. Everything that we do, we’ve written for ourselves to be tailor-made to what we do and how we look at things.”
Like most other online ventures, SilverCash faced the daunting task of navigating through the sometimes choppy waters of the adult online community, taking chances with new sites and hoping that it all panned out in the end. “Everything is a crapshoot,” Price claims. “You just have to figure it out as you go along.” SilverCash concedes that they had pretty good support along the way to help them find their bearings. “There are a lot of good people in the industry—great people to work with,” says Price. “Webmasters in general are fairly liberal with their knowledge.” Even so, he adds, there are some trade secrets he wishes those webmasters had been more generous with. “We do wish somebody would have told us how much domains would be worth in the future,” he chuckles. “Even at $100 a piece, we would have bought thousands!”
Missed opportunities aside, SilverCash doesn’t seem to have much to worry about today. Boasting more than 90 hardcore sites, their roster is stronger than ever with, Thurmond says, over 30,000 affiliates to help them move traffic to those sites. And with payouts like 50/50 revshare, referral rewards, and per-sign-ups of up to $35, SilverCash’s affiliate program seems custom-built to keep its supporters happy. “A lot of our traffic – if not most of it – comes from the affiliates,” Thurmond notes. “We realize that getting traffic is where you make all the difference. You could have the best content in the world, but if you don’t have any traffic, no one can see it, [which means] you’re not going to get any sales.” A solution to that? “We try to make it as easy as possible for our affiliates to get traffic and to convert that traffic,” Thurmond answers.
When pressed for helpful advice and tips, Price purports modesty in maintaining that, “If you’re speaking in terms of getting traffic, that’s something [webmasters] have to learn through experience. We wouldn’t even suggest that we know it all.” For his part, however, Thurmond is a little more generous, commenting that it’s important for webmasters to “take the time to understand your traffic. It’s not just numbers.
“Having 100,000 uniques doesn’t mean anything [unless you understand where it's coming from],” Thurmond continues. “It’s really what you do with that traffic and what kind of traffic it is that counts. Anyone can get traffic from China, but if you’re not understanding what it’s doing for you and you’re not managing your traffic and taking the time to research it, then you’re just wasting it.”
Wasting traffic doesn’t appear to be one of SilverCash’s strengths. In fact, by following the trends that have led them down the path of success before, the program has only gotten stronger. And, according to Thurmond, that’s just the way it should be. “We truly believe that webmasters create the niches, and the surfers and webmasters accept them,” he posits. “If we all of sudden went out and released 10 of a certain type of site, then another large affiliate company [would do] the same thing after that, and you’d get two or three guys doing it. It kind of happened with reality sites; the surfer may not have wanted it, but we gave it to them.”
Of course, some trends can wear out their welcome. Of their recent decision to showcase solo girl sites over the reality sites they once featured on the front burner, Thurmond shrugs aside any “master plan” theories in favor of pointing out the similarities between the two types of content. “We have always believed that reality sites were just the [natural] progression from the old amateur girl sites,” he says. “Solo-girl sites are just another extension of reality sites, so it's basically coming full circle. So if you look at it that way, solo-girl sites are and always have been reality content.”
Meanwhile, SilverCash also has a few other ticks up its sleeve. For one, it recently purchased webmaster resource site WebOverdrive (www.weboverdrive.com), which offers tools, tutorials, workshops, and inside information geared toward increasing webmasters’ bottom lines. Thurmond promises expansions to the site, offering, “We plan to build and manage a broad range of resources and guides to help webmasters of all experience levels.” Pried for details about WebOverdrive or any of their other upcoming plans, the SilverCash people suddenly become rather cryptic, however: “When it comes to new projects,” Price says with a smile, “we always like to surprise people.”
A new content focus, mysterious future plans, following today’s hottest trends—it’s all a ploy to lure as much traffic as possible to their sites, of course. And the SilverCash folk aren’t shy about admitting it either. As Price notes, traffic is the key is a successful online venture—a lesson they learned early on. “We were in the traffic business before we ever were into the affiliate program business,” he says. “Moving traffic was never a problem; that’s where we got our feet wet. We started there, so everything we’ve done since has always been based around traffic. Content is great, but traffic is king.”
