Adult dying out? (36)
For the last 2 years I ran profitable adult dating campaigns without doing "much" work.
However, for the last 2 months I see a significant drop in conversions for all countries I'm targeting and I'm experiencing a decent loss, something I'm not familiar with...
Are other people in the adult dating scene seeing this trend?
All aspects on my campagins remains the same (CTR on banners and landing pages) , and even on SOI offers there's this huge drop.
It almost seems the advertisers are scrubbing heavily these months.
I've always had days that conversions would drop and come back up in a few days, but 2 months is completely new for me.
Check this thread out http://stmforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19033
Originally Posted by dennis
lots of people I talked to who are doing adult had the same complaint, including myself
I was told it will pick up again come January.
I was also converting better during the summer than Im now in adult dating, but Im stil doing just fine. During my 15 years in adult marketing, Ive seen many periods when things simply went to shit, then recovering again, or not 
If its a general trend, the market will push bids down and it will even up on its own. The bids are ridiculously high now anyways, a correction is needed for sure.
Many sites that promise stuff and when people paid for it and are inside they instantly get annoyed with fake profiles and stuff. Its good with a trend down, alot of bad apples in the adult dating sene will for sure close. Everyone rush into same thing..But not everyone really doing a good job when the user is inside.
It's mostly a lack of decent offers.
It's been a few years everyone has been pushing adult hard so converting these leads into sales for advertisers is harder now.
At the beginning leads to sales were super high because these brands were new and they were starting with a clean database.
That's why the scrub, advertisers need to turn a profit on the leads and if they don't the offer will die.
This brings me to the question I always had: how consistent is this business model (adult dating leads)
Originally Posted by rafa13
Dating sites are here almost as long as there is the internet and I doubt they are going anywhere. Its true that there werent that many dating sites until a few years ago, now there are 1000s of them, including a ton of whitelabels and god know what clones and types. Dating is actually responsible for the rise of adult tubes, when nobody wanted to advertise on sites full of pirated content, adultfriendfinder happily took the spots and financed the growth of the tubes while hosting fees were still an issue. Its probably true that the dating market is saturated by now and there is not much going on it the field, I also am afraid that some regulations will put a stop on the most shady dating sites filled with fake profile, but the concept as it is will prevail for sure. Right now, there is nothing that can replace dating in terms of monetization of these huge adult tubes, so if it goes away, there will be a huge shakeup in the whole adult industry, or at least in the tube part of it.
Are any of them even real besides Adult Freind Finder?
I really doubt it because a girl can go on any mainstream dating site and she will get 50 "adult" type messages in her inbox from the guys EVERY SINGLE DAY. Even if the girl is huge, she will still get like 10.
@Matuloo You sound like a GFY old timer haha!
Where you around when LegendaryLars was still the owner of AdultFriendFinder?
Originally Posted by rafa13
I wonder how many more of these will follow?
A couple of days ago there was a thread here about mobile app installs dying. The way you guys are going, by the end of the week affiliate marketing will be dead.
Originally Posted by fishinseo
new opportunities will come around
Originally Posted by rafael
I remember when Lensman owned it and all these "show your car" threads
BTW : as angryoldlady said, these kind of threads are showing up again and again as time goes by, someone always sees the sky falling
Things are changing all the time, its just a matter of adapting.ims2014 : there are more real ones, I think fling, sexsearch are legit too, plus those semi-adult sites like ashleymadison etc ... there is more of course.
This hits a nerve with me specially because, as maynzie and rafa13 can attest to, I've been working on trying to make adult dating work for quite some time with no success. I now wonder if all the time and money I've spent is wasted.
This business has been SO inconsistent to me, I can't even get a campaign to be profitable for more than 3 days straight. Very frustrating. And I get it. The guys surfing these porn sites see the "Single mothers looking for cock" add 500 times a day. I wonder how anyone even clicks on those anymore unless it's their first time sitting down on a computer.
@matuloo haha those were the old days when you could throw up a blog with a bunch of pics and make 5 paysite sales with zero effort.
Originally Posted by rafael
So it's defnitely possible... However, you need to understand your traffic source.
I myself prefer to get huge traffic from one site instead of a lot of traffic from multiple sites.
Way more easier to handle.
However, when the traffic is gone it's gone.
Therefore , and I've read this somewhere yesterday for the 10th time...
It's not about what you know, but who you know..
Also very true here...
Originally Posted by dennis
I've tried almost all of the adult traffic sources and I keep going back to Exo, it's the only one I can squeeze out enough volume from. I'm concentrating mostly on smaller countries now and Exo has a huge range of localized sites in almost every language.
I'm not even trying to get $5k days. I'm just trying to reach the $1k to make weekly payments with my network and get enough cash flow to test some more.
Originally Posted by dennis
Adult has intensified to the point where you're not going to be able to run a spread of 10-12 offers in 8-10 countries and have all of them ticking along profitably -- not without a crap ton of work.
What matters these days is getting a couple of very good offers, bolstering your payout with good quality, and then letting rip on a large scale to the point where you have some bargaining power (with both the advertiser, and the network).
Ironically one of the very best offers in the adult space over the last few months has been... AdultFriendFinder.
That's proof that the sector is pretty timeless.
Yes, people are exposed to the ads every day.
But there are underlying reasons why a guy would sign up -- maybe he's just had an argument with his GF, the relationship has busted, or he hasn't gotten laid for a few months. You've got to remember that there have always been more non-converters than converters.
There isn't an affiliate alive that converts more clicks than he loses.
It's the same reason a site like POF continues to grow. If it was a static proposition, then all the singles in the world would sign up on January 1st and that would be that. That's not how it happens though. And the same with sites like AFF.
These sites are often escapism for guys. The user might see your ad 1000 times but only decide to convert on the day that his relationship ends and he wants a rebound.
Originally Posted by rafael
so i guess this is not the case? wheres all the traffic going? i cant imagine people have stopped looking at online porn lol
Who said the traffic was going down? General internet usage and therefore porn watching is likely to increase until the male population recedes.
Originally Posted by zeno
he stated he can only squeeze volume out of exo
Well, maybe in particular geos for certain campaigns. But overall adult ain't dying!
The traffic is there, it's just fragmented and brokered.
You need to be looking at flat rate buys, or working with sources that aren't self-serve.
Exoclick's marketplace does have some good volume available. But to get the insane traffic, you'll need to contact them about flat rates.
It's the same for many other sources. They are all quite capable of offering private deals to guarantee a set number of impressions.
Generally the public marketplace is just a back-up auction of what hasn't been brokered privately. That's why even a top bid will struggle to shift a high percentage of the available impressions in premium placements.
If you want to see how scalable adult is, go and let rip with a top bid in the United States on somewhere like Reporo. Volume is not an issue if you're prepared to go hunting for it.
Originally Posted by gts6
TrafficJunky is huge, but I can't compete with the big guys there. I'm also on other traffic sources where for some reason I cannot get enough traffic on my Geos.
With exo, I can usually find a huge site in every language.
Completely dead? Maybe not. But it did take a HUGE HIT. I Have been hustling like never before and haven't seen 1/10th the numbers i'm used to. It's a bit scary (very scary) but I guess it's on me to get creative/find new alternatives/negotiate deals/find different niche to run....
Originally Posted by Rosebudd
even if there are double the amount of people running adult offers nowadays,
isnt there still shitloads of traffic available? maybe its the style of campaigns... they all seem the same and people are burnt out of seeing yet another banner with image on the left, text ont the right, leading to a lander with the rules...
ive been looking around a lot lately at adult stuff trying to decide if i want to get into it, and this is one of the first things i noticed.. every campaign is virtually the same and interchangeable. yes, sometimes the picture is different or maybe the colors, but the funnel is the same.
Originally Posted by gts6
*Banner/Lander blindness as you said (Same angles, same banner types, same old "send a message and ask to fuck", Same landers)
* Every AM forum you go to, what's the one thing they recommend to newbies? Adult Dating. Used to be POF/Facebook but after the dating blackout on FB now Adult Dating is #1 this means a shit load of people flooding the markets running my banners. Is there a lot of traffic? Yes but there are lot of people buying it, bids go up, exclusivity goes down ....
*Lack of interesting offers. It's very rare to have an offer do good for over a week nowadays, again linking it to over saturation, every AM in every network tell all their affiliates to run the same offer, same landing page and etc... what happens? It becomes stale.
So nah, adult isn't dead, it's just a whole lot of fucking work for little pay, it's the McDonalds of Affiliate Marketing at the moment
Hmm, so what is working for adult these days ? Sounds like it's only media buys ?
Honestly, I see traffic performance from a birds eye perspective and I can share some valuable insight.
The best advertisers/affiliates know how to focus on a specific niche, a specific geo, and optimize until they get their highest performing banners and landers working. They don't stop working. They will filter and send leads to hit their caps on each network, cycling the unique user IPs to the right offers. Moving beyond bidding systems and into direct deals is also super important. It takes all day to manage bids on certain networks, but you can avoid that hassle using a network like the one we offer.
For example, I have big dating affiliates that specialize in the US market only. This allows them to take on VOLUME due to the size of the market. Volume = Money. They will lose on some campaigns just to hit their caps, and higher payouts, but overall they are winners. I will sell them high % chunks of US only geos across the entire network (Run of Network) or on publisher specific placements direct (XHamster.com). The less energy they have to spend competing for traffic, the more they can optimize and move onto the next deal, and so forth.
Targeting new sources, taking chances on new opportunities ("The Fappening" celebrity nude leak would be a prime example from recent memory; a huge spike in traffic and capitalizing on it as it happens.. ie. creatives targeting users who were interested in this event), and being aggressive while lacking complacency and a narrow scope is key to success.
Skype: AndrewGSMI
Originally Posted by matuloo
Dating sites are here almost as long as there is the internet and I doubt they are going anywhere. Its true that there werent that many dating sites until a few years ago, now there are 1000s of them, including a ton of whitelabels and god know what clones and types. Dating is actually responsible for the rise of adult tubes, when nobody wanted to advertise on sites full of pirated content, adultfriendfinder happily took the spots and financed the growth of the tubes while hosting fees were still an issue. Its probably true that the dating market is saturated by now and there is not much going on it the field, I also am afraid that some regulations will put a stop on the most shady dating sites filled with fake profile, but the concept as it is will prevail for sure. Right now, there is nothing that can replace dating in terms of monetization of these huge adult tubes, so if it goes away, there will be a huge shakeup in the whole adult industry, or at least in the tube part of it.
A month and $12k in traffic further now and things have gotten worse.
New banners/new angles/new images/new CTAs/new landing pages , nothing sticks!
The CTR on banners that convert are dramatically low.
I've seen this all before, but that was only for a week or 2 maybe 3.
It's now about 2 months.
What I don't understand is:
1. Why is this happening in all GEOs for me
2. People visiting tube sites now are the same type of people who visited 6 months ago. So what exactly is different?
3. I've always learned that you can't "sell" when the visitor isn't ready. But somehow a LOT of them aren't ready.
The person who can get me out of this issue will be presented on my whiteboard of fame 
Big brands buying up media in Q4?? Lol probably not. One day on adult. One day.
I had a horrible day today. Granted, I'm not a huge affiliate by any measure (I'm not even a little affiliate haha), but I was having a couple of semi-decent days and all of a sudden today everything went to shit. 3 offers I'm running all stop converting??
I checked and double checked my LP, tracker,etc. Same amount of clicks sent to the offer. But it just won't convert today.
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