I can't make money in Adult - Heres why (52)
Been working with a tonne of affiliates lately and everyone of them is struggling to break into profits in adult, but in all seriousness there is still money to be made.
How do you make this money then?
CHANGE THE GAME.
Well, a quick look at the spytool you will find EVERYONE is virtually running the SAME STUFF. Ripped landers, the exact same images on landing pages have been there for MONTHS on end, and you're telling me that ripping one of them and just sticking it up is gonna make you money, I'm sorry but affiliate marketing weeded out this option a fair time ago and now if you want to make money you have to really stand out.
It literally blows my mind, how similar or exact the stuff being run on adult is now to what it was 6 months ago. I'm sure you know the images I am talking about, how about them rules landers, YES they do work, but even 1 different landing page style could make you broke to millionaire in as little as half a year with the tsunami of traffic available to you.
Personally, I've been able to maintain campaigns for a very long time, because I constantly change up images that I gather myself from websites so I know for a fact that is a fresh image, keeping my CTR's high and ROI even higher.
The same offers that worked 2 years ago, still are plugging away to this day, many people will back me on this you don't need better offers then the bread and butters you simply need fresh content, fresh landers, images you name it!
Please stop being lazy, there is INFINITE amounts of money to be made on Adult, it just takes a bit of pioneering to make it work.
Change UP Traffic Sources!
Step out of your comfort zone, TJ and EXO aren't the only sources to make money on in adult. Trafficforce, Trafficfactory, Juicyads, Star-advertising are GREAT places to make a killing, especially in non-english countries!
The people who create a whole new style of landers/creatives is going to make some serious money in adult, its dying for change.
Adult is not for the Faint Hearted
Also, Adult is not for the low budgets, to make $500 profit a day in adult, on weekly payments you're going to need at least $1000 a day to spend, its quite difficult to keep your ROI high as you continue to ramp up the volume.
Emphasise Quality and Long Term
Another factor is that people treat their campaigns like fly by nights, not emphasizing quality of their campaigns. Do you know much some advertisers will bump you, if you focus on quality for week? Payouts ALWAYS start low, but you can treat your campaign like a long term investment. You may be breaking even in the beginning, but when the paybumps and increase caps come, you're laughing because you've changed nothing and boom you're in profit. This is super super important for WAP campaigns, you can get $1-2-3-4 bumps on your offers, if you focus on quality and run at slight loss to break even for 1-2 weeks. Is it worth it to wait for the bumps? Just ask anyone running adult wap, I'm sure there shiny Benz will make you motivated to get going!
A common trait amongst all the BIG adult players, who have been making money for years on end in this dirty industry is they are constantly creating new angles, new landers, split testing split testing split testing.
MOTIVATION ALERT:
One dude I have been speaking to lately, brought in an entirely new angle to adult that I had never seen before, and has now made over $500k profit in the past 5 months. Insane considering he was a $200/day affiliate not to long ago in March.... THERE IS MONEY to be made, stop excuses and get to real work, affiliate marketing will rip your insides out otherwise its not a simple copy paste environment anymore.
//RANT
Stand out dudes!
I haven't ripped an angle in months, but it's a bit frustrating creating your own unique angle, they always seemed to get ripped inside of a month. 
So, what is this secret 500k angle? 
It's probably that car-insurance-brings-in-panties angle that we saw posted a while ago.
me and I know a few others do it, make an easy buck each week of redirected traffic from people ripping you can be clever, you can't stop people ripping entirely but you can make it hard for them to compete against you still Yeah, I've used a few of the tricks, such as one that was posted here (and a few super secret ones). But, some people just ripped my videos without the sneaky code. I see some of you guys have ripped my silly magic bean angle from ages ago and I see Mr. Green's GF angle is back up and running everywhere, so it's good to see the affiliate industry recycles
Adult has become quite competitive, I've been able to get profitable quite easily with new angles, but I just can't seem to scale at the moment. Any random tips?
Hey, I'm pretty new here and just started adult marketing, just spy. what is the new angles, have any examples? I just know change the images colors, add border and text, any others?
Ripping: one thing that might be worth trying is encoding your LPs/images as Flash. Decompiling Flash is a total pain in the ass - I've tried and failed to do it in the past - and that way you can insert programmatic elements like calls home or automatic redirects.
You'd still be vulnerable to someone really hardcore who's willing to hex-edit your pages, but there's a much smaller percentage of affiliates who are comfortable with a hex editor than the ones who can hit Save As
Of course, I don't know what the conversion rate implications of having everything Flash-based would be. It'd rule out running on iOS devices, for starters.
What Josh said , all very true.
1 year ago with just copy-pasting you could get a 100% or higher ROI.
Now , to make money you need an advantage.
This might be a higher payouts , direct buy deal , better technology , better lander , better banners.
If you have none of these don't waste your money and time in adult.
I think that final point about emphasising long term/quality is key.
Nothing will stall your momentum like building some nice profits only to have them disappear overnight when the advertiser gets round to shafting you. You really have to design your angles and landing pages with lead quality in mind.
With the Rules lander in particular, I've stopped asking if a user is over age X and started asking them to choose their age.
If the user answers under the required age, I'll load a page that says the offer is now closed but memberships are still 'available to buy'. You don't want to tell them that the offer is only open to users over 25. They'll just go back and answer your original question differently...
Talking about quality, is quite disturbing the amount of banners that state "NO CC Required" of the word "FREE". o'rly?
Here is some great news, there are men with money willing to pay, but if you tell them is free, they might not convert when the websites ask for a paid subscription.
The user might feel upset because you LIED to him.
Originally Posted by Finch
friend of mine was BANKING on his own offer in adult... he said now ad costs are like 4x from a couple of years ago and his profit margins are thin.
Hah I'm one of these guys maynzie is talking about.
I've been stuck for quite some time trying to make adult work. I just can't seem to manage to make an offer go from $1x daily profit to $1xx.
I've been adding new traffic sources, new banners, new LPs (but I really suck at it hehe) etc, but I'm just stuck. Plus now, some of my best offers are going down making matter worse.
I was getting really close to my $100/day profit goal (which is all I need to be able to go full time on IM) , but I just got knocked down again to $1x 
Maybe the problem is simply that this is getting too crowded and only the guys with financial muscle are actually making real profits? I've been staying away from the usual traffic sources because I just can't pay $1/CPM.
Are a lot of guys just testing the waters with Exo and TJ these days and then buying the same placements for cheaper through FSA's?
I'm a total noob when it comes to adult, but maybe this is a more viable option?
This is cute and all but let's look at the facts:
-> Prices went up.
-> Competition went WAY up.
-> Industry is currently SATURATED.
-> No new influx of BIG dating companies/offers (Adult Friend Finder just filed for bankruptcy btw..)
That's what IS. Of course, you can talk all day about new banners, landers, angles and etc...but that won't change the fact that it's a new game being played. I don't like giving people false hopes. It's much more difficult to make a solid ROI today than a year ago, can it still be done? YES. But let's not try to compare yesterday to today.
I am in uncomfortable position the be stuck in this low $xxx profit per day zone ..trying to reach the next level has been proven to be more difficult as expected ..
the baffling part for me is how hard it is to systematize the process . There are only so many moving parts to this, i.e.
network offer
placement
banner
lander
cpc
ctr
conversions
so one would think ( me ) with systematic testing it shouldn't be that hard to get them all aligned ..
offer : absolutely amazes me how the same offer can completely tank on one network and take off on the second... that also seems to change up from offer to offer .. fair enough >> let's rotate offers to start
placement, banner, lp :
struggling here with the following : looks like there is no such thing as a good banner , a good lp, a good placement ... there's only a good combination of the 3. That why I have the hardest time to cut banners and or landing pages .. a banner with absolute mediocre ctr on one placement proved to be superstar on the other ctr wise .. but got virtually no conversion .. yet coupled with the right landing page became profitable on a third placement ( but never worked on the first 2 )
So success seems to be more a function hitting the right combination .. which is fine ( more campaigns launched ..more combinations tried ) but not really scalable and it still feels like that there's a large element of luck involved
Yes, prices have gone up, competition went way up, adult industry is "saturated" now with affiliates, companies go down etc... Isn't that comparing yesterday to today?
Comparing yesterday to today is the only way of judging if what we're doing is worth being called an improvement. The reason people are having a hard time with adult is because they're spoon feeding people that same shit they've seen over the past year. Sure, it'll work in a new market but the first ones to innovate and aren't afraid to test new angles are the ones that make the most money the fastest.
I've seen it happen with diet and sweepstakes offers over the past 5 years. It's nothing new.
just my 2 cents
More regulation on fewer verticals with more competition. Sounds like lots of 9-5s in the future.
Nice post maynzie, very true
I think main problem is, this is a BUSINESS, and most affiliates don't threat it like one and just read success storys , go rip banners and landers on spy tools and expect to be making $1000 profit a day ... money is there, no matter how saturated, for god sake we got into porn 10 years after everybody else in france, everybody was crying about saturation, and tube sites killing the biz ... well, we still made millions, just depends on how smart / innovative / hard you work at it !
Mehdi
This holds true for all big niches. Web and WAP sweeps has this exact same issue.
With a new angle/landing page a user can 3x their profitability vs using a rehashed weekly winner page.
Re-invent your campaign!
Originally Posted by pokersensei
I think it's definitely smart to actively discourage younger users from signing up if your model is built around grabbing the high quality leads and profiting from pay bumps. Most adult merchants out there get little $$$ out of younger users.
I've no doubt that some of the affs using these banners are the same ones bitching about getting culled from offers.
It's not even shooting yourself in the balls. It's worse than that. It's getting your best friend, handing him an AK47, and asking him to unload an entire round in to them.
Originally Posted by Finch
ya I'm a bit torn on the "no cc required" as being the devil, because I know some of the guys doing it, and they do massive numbers. Granted it doesn't say that on all their ads, but I'd wager they're one of the top 3 biggest adult affiliates so I'm sure there's some method to what they're doing.
Originally Posted by Finch
Just a quick tip , younger demographics for some countries perform better than 40+.
This is from my own experience working closely with advertisers.
There are so many variables involved in determining what may be considered an 'acceptable' lead quality that you'd literally have to get incredibly lucky to have a strong enforcement of 25+ actually make the difference in keeping you on the offer.
How well an advertiser prices base-rate leads, whether they implement publisher or network-level scrub, the country in question, the placement the offer is being run on, how strict of an optimizer the advertiser is, publisher lead volume (more volume = more leniency generally), and your banner (what constitutes a high quality vs a low quality banner is not always logical) all play into the quality equation.
As others have mentioned there are potential psychological benefits (e.g. feelings of exclusivity) that could potentially cause a light 25+ enforcement to help conversions, but I don't think it is as important as others may imply when it comes to actual lead quality.
What is the solution? Just don't do anything absolutely deceptive or that will obviously lower quality significantly. Beyond that, focus on volume.
Try to figure out which placements produce a higher quality than others, and if you're running a new offer said to be strict, run on the highest quality placements only at first and see what happens.
Originally Posted by maynzie
me and I know a few others do it, make an easy buck each week of redirected traffic from people ripping you can be clever, you can't stop people ripping entirely but you can make it hard for them to compete against you still Here's a good thread on some tricks that you can use to make your landers harder to steal.
Personally, though, I wouldn't recommend spending much time on making your LPs harder to copy. It's very hard to do well and not terribly hard to get around. Better to spend the time on research or more campaigns.
Wasn't someone (rat alliance I think) talking about a way to make your lander appear to be different to people using proxies?
I think this would make a big difference, because I'm not that concerned if someone rips my lander from a spy tool and takes it to another platform. Its the asshole using a vps to spy, that rips my exact campaign (banner and lander) and then puts it on the same traffic source that I want to stop.
I can confirm that the guys running the "FREE" "NO CC" "NO BULLSHIT" are quite big affiliates (if not merchants).
I would differ on the age though, young males can bring good quality, depending on the traffic source, country, etc. Remember there are rich young males and also ass broke older men.
@clubdrock - I've certainly talked about the possibility of showing different landers to people on proxies before. The new MaxMind database claims to be able to detect people on common proxies - you could simply use that to redirect suspicious clicks to your favourite terribad lander. If there's lots of interest in doing that I could knock together a quick script that would redirect anonymous proxy users.
However, I'd recommend tracking that pretty closely - the usual comments about Maxmind databases not being 100% accurate apply. And you might end up redirecting more people than is good for your conversion rate!
Originally Posted by cosmeivan
However, I don't think it's good advice for smaller affiliate sending under 200 leads to an offer a day. Smaller affiliates can be axed from the offer and it's a drop in the bucket for the advertiser.
Originally Posted by clubdrock
Originally Posted by caurmen
Originally Posted by caurmen
I know your always stacked to the gills with tutorial requests haha, but that would definitely be a tutorial that I would be interested in.
No worries, it's what we have a big Spreadsheet O' Article Ideas over here at STM for Added.
Yep using MaxMind's proxy detection should be a pretty simple piece of code.
It would provide an additional layer of protection by the determined guys would still be able to rip it
Originally Posted by bbrock32
^^ Not even on POF. There's a lot of competition on POF too, you need to work hard, come up with something unique, have more data or just any type of advantage. Just copying will likely make you $0.
copying established affiliates doesn't work. I've gotten 6 affiliates optimized from their offer this week for copying my stuff
awesome thread Maynzie
OK, so POF is still the recommended way to start for a newbie, even if it's extremely hard to make money there?
I've just met a countryman who has started directly on Facebook with promoting gaming stuff and he was able to achieve 100% ROI pretty soon.
Originally Posted by hendrix
POF is better for beginners with a limited budget , but not good for scaling.
If you have a decent budget I would go straight to FB.
Nope, I have a small budget. It's 1000 USD or 2000 USD at most. So off to POF with me.
Originally Posted by Finch
Is age the paramount variable to better leads that result in sales for our advertisers?
And if so, what is that age floor and ceiling?
@kevins: Age is actually usually being used as a way to guess about likely disposable income amongst other things. We're trying to guess who is most likely to sign up to a dating site, and age is one of the semi-reliable indicators there: all things being equal, older people have more money (and may also be more desperate).
It's not a 100% workable rule: sometimes younger audiences will convert better. But it's a decent rule of thumb.
Originally Posted by kevins
Originally Posted by kevins
As the other guys have said, older tends to suggest more income.
Some of the more snooty merchants make it clear that only leads earning over a certain income will be counted. You might have to deliver users earning at least $35,000, otherwise you don't get paid.
I've seen some merchants only accepting leads from certain zipcodes. Presumably those in more affluent areas...
What traffic source affiliate network you recommend for Asian country's ? i can spend 1k day for this but i have no idea where to start, could you give me some tips please?
Thanks
Originally Posted by prasanna
You dont find any profitable offers for asian countries, maybee japan and hentai-anime stuff. Some low paid CPA dating maybee. Even if asian generaly has ( roumor) small toy downthere, i cant sell a single penis enlargement product. maybee i am promoting it wrong lol
If you have 1 k per to spend to test, you shuld try some dating offer , traffic sources : trafficforce, evo advertising.exo clicks
Affiliate programs i recommend
kimia.com ( Everyone i know succed here)
Together network
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