How to Slay Adult Dating in 2015 (51)
Hey guys, I've just released a brand new volume of Premium Posts -- The 2015 Edition (click to view).
In keeping with tradition, I'm giving away an entire post to STM members.
This is my guide to slaying adult dating in 2015.
(Make sure you read the follow-up posts as I can't fit the content in to a single post!)
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Adult dating is the entry point of choice for many newbies looking to make money in affiliate marketing today.
If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, then this is a good post to skip.
However, the strategy that I’m going to address doesn’t only apply to the adult dating space. It is niche neutral. You can adapt it for whichever market you choose to work in.
In this post I want to provide a basic framework for those of you who are struggling to gain traction with adult.
We’re going to re-enforce the choice all affiliates must make between out-communicating, out-hustling or out-innovating the competition.
Is Adult Dating Dying?
I’ve read a lot of forum posts about the so-called demise of the adult space.
The most common complaint is that campaigns are less profitable than they used to be, and less stable in the long-term.
While it’s 100% true that most adult campaigns would have been more profitable in 2012 than 2014, the sizes of margin that remain are hardly to be sniffed at.
If you can make even a 30% return on your money, said industry is not dead. Not even close. There are many businesses that would kill for a 30% margin.
Note: And that’s ignoring the fact that 100% and 200% ROIs do still exist.
The second point about campaigns being less stable is, in my opinion, a symptom of the affiliate who has decided to hustle for profit instead of focusing on greater structural advantages in his business.
We’ll address that later.
Industry Home Truths
If adult isn’t dead, then what is it?
Lop-sided is the description I’d use.
The majority of affiliate profits are generated by a handful of the affiliates operating in the market. It’s the Pareto Principle again: 80% output is delivered by 20% of the competitors.
For those who haven’t cracked the code of adult dating, it can be a rather demotivating sector to work in. Not only are you slapped square in the chops with more glorified housewife adultery than you could ever possibly digest, but seemingly every campaign you launch is destined for break even or a small loss.
Adult has the infuriating knack of handing out small profits to keep you interested, before snatching them away the very next day. This instability creates stress, and confusion, and – in my opinion – a lot of shortsighted decision making on the affiliate’s part.
Another home truth is that adult dating is more competitive than it ever has been before. The crackdown on platforms like Facebook and Google, combined with the now-maturing mobile industry, has created a situation where affiliates are looking for a new honey-rush.
Well, the adult sector is certainly full of honey.
To turn that honey in to money, you’re going to need a decent strategy. And that’s what this post is about.
How to Crack Adult in 2015
If there’s one thing you need to know about adult in 2015, it’s this:
You are never going to run 10-15 offers across 8-10 countries and get profitable in all of them.
Those days are gone.
The only exception is if you stumble on a to a traffic source where the cost of traffic is artificially lower than the industry averages. There are a couple of these sources I can think of, but for obvious reasons, there would be no point in me disclosing them.
What matters, more than ever, is that you use your eyes and ears to narrow the shortlist of affiliate offers on your radar to a handful of 2 or 3.
In my experience, at any given time, there are 2-3 offers performing head and shoulders above the competition. And these offers could be based anywhere: the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy, France, or even Turkey (a staple outlier of 2014).
Your primary job is to listen, watch and research.
You have to isolate those 2-3 offers that are capable of lining your pockets. Only the crème de la crème will suffice.
I’ve been talking to a lot of affiliates in the adult sector this year. One thing we pretty much all agree on is that without the best performing offer, you are dead before you started.
If you want to crack a primary market, like one of these juicy Tier 1s:
• United States
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• Germany
• France
• Netherlands
…Then you simply must have the best offer in that region.
Having the best offer isn’t a competitive advantage in itself (because most of the top affiliates are already capable of sourcing it too), but to not have the best offer is a comparative competitive disaster.
Not only do you need the best offer, but you also need it on terms that are better than most of your competitors. We’ll get to that later, but first, how do you isolate the very best performing offers?
Cherry-Picking the Best Performing Offers
To find the best performing offers, it makes sense that we carry out our research on the best performing adult placements (or the most competitive).
There are tools you can use to get a birds-eye view of what creatives and landing pages are running in a certain country – tools like WhatRunsWhere.
WhatRunsWhere is great for scoping banner ideas. But what it throws up in piles and piles of data, it often misses in context. And this is important.
You don’t want to research what’s happening in the entire adult market. (You’ll be gone for fucking months, mate.)
You want to focus your research on what is happening at the very top of that market.
The best way to do this is to visit the premium tube sites where the biggest advertisers and their campaigns are clear to see.
What are the highest quality placements in the adult world?
These are the sites we’re talking about:
• Pornhub (Available on ExoClick and TrafficJunky)
• YouPorn (Available on ExoClick and TrafficJunky)
• RedTube (Available on ExoClick and TrafficJunky)
• Porn.com (Available on TrafficForce)
• XHamster (Brokered all over the place)
• XVideos.com (Available on TrafficFactory)
• WorldSex.com (Available on Exoclick)
You could study what’s happening across the rest of the adult sphere until you are blue in the balls, but these placements will give you the entire signal you need to make some pretty accurate assumptions – for much less work.
Touch wood.
(I’ll stop it with the dick puns now.)
What are we looking for on these sites?
Three things:
• An idea of what offers are being promoted.
• Who is promoting them?
• Any funnel consistencies: big or small.
Okay, go check the wife is out, close the door, and let’s bust open each of the premium tubes above.
You will want to record your findings in Evernote (or whatever you use to store notes).
On each tube site, you will find a variety of banner placements. These usually include:
• NTVA (Next-to-video spot A)
• NTVB (Next-to-video spot B)
• Three footer spots (usually 300 x 250)
• Video overlay spot
• Homepage index cube spot
Bear in mind we are only talking about the web version of these sites. You should also browse their mobile versions, where you will find:
• Mobile header (300 x 100)
• Mobile middle spot (300 x 100)
• Mobile footers (usually one 300 x 250 spot)
Another advertiser paw print is the popunder.
If while accessing the website, you notice a new tab popped in your browser, pay attention to what it includes.
(Unless it’s LiveJasmine for the umpteenth time.)
CONTINUED BELOW
By using our premium pool of websites and studying the ads that appear first on each of the placements above, we can very quickly gain some useful insights in to what the biggest advertisers are making their money from.
The reason we want to do this manually, instead of relying on catchall data from WhatRunsWhere, is because we are specifically interested in the advertisers occupying those very first impressions.
The first page that you load correlates to the highest bid that an advertiser will place.
Obviously, the higher the advertiser is willing to bid, the greater the trust he is placing in his ability to monetise the user.
This information separates the great funnels from the weak.
What I suggest you do is comb through every single placement (without reloading the page) and record:
• A copy of the banner used.
• A link to the landing page.
• The offer that it promotes.
• Whether the advertiser is likely to be an affiliate.
This last point is important.
It’s important to distinguish affiliate activity from merchant activity.
If an affiliate is using RedTube to promote Adult Friend Finder, then that is relevant to us – he is direct competition.
If Adult Friend Finder is using RedTube through its own media buying team, then we know for a fact that there’s a big fish operating in the market and he is likely to continue to occupy those very top bids.
It isn’t always easy to tell the difference between an affiliate and an in-house media buyer, mainly because the in-house media buyers copy the type of creatives and funnels that affiliates use.
The biggest giveaway is hidden in the tracking link on the landing page.
Get the tracking link for the final jump to the offer, usually an “I AGREE’ button or “Continue >>” and put it in to a tool like RedirectCheck.
This will list off all the redirects that take place before the user gets to the offer.
If one of those redirects looks like an affiliate network, or a third party broker, then it’s likely you’re spying on an affiliate.
If there are no affiliate network redirects, then you are probably dealing with the brand’s in-house media buying team.
The reason we want to collect this information on each placement is because it helps us to distinguish the spots where affiliates are active at the top of the chain. If there is a lot of affiliate activity, then clearly there is a lot of money to be made.
Note: Just because you’re competing with an in-house media buyer, that doesn’t mean you have to concede defeat. There are plenty of impressions up for grabs on these big tube sites. Also, we can draw certain conclusions about the lead quality of a placement if the merchant is scooping traffic from it direct. This is golden information – especially if the media buyer isn’t working for the best performing brand in the business. We can use his selective buys against him by promoting an even bigger fish.
I recommend going through all of the placements on all of the premium sites and recording what you find up to 5 impressions deep on each.
That means once you’ve gathered the campaign funnels from NTV A, NTV B and each footer ad, refresh the page. Do it again. Do it five times.
What we hope to achieve by this is the re-enforcement of any signal in the data.
If one advertiser has booked out the first 5 impressions on PornHub’s NTV A spot (unlikely given the way traffic is distributed across networks), then you need to be taking some serious notes on what exactly he is doing.
BIG. FISH.
The rule here is that the more you see of a single advertiser, the more credibility you should lend his funnel.
If you see the same affiliate smashing the top bids across all of those major tube sites, then you’ve found the very pinnacle of what works today.
(And this can be applied across all niches, and all traffic sources)
By the end of your intelligence gathering, you should have a pretty sizeable list full of creatives, landing pages and several different offers.
At this point, we can start to analyse what we’ve found.
But before that, let me stress the importance of having a VPN in the research phase.
Carrying Out International Research
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) lets you access websites using an IP in a different country.
Why would you want to do this?
To spy on foreign ads and affiliate campaigns, of course.
As I said in our introduction, you’ll be lucky to find 2-3 affiliate offers that can be promoted profitably. These could be in any market in the world. If you restrict your market research to just one country – your own – then you are likely to miss the most important signals.
By grabbing a VPN, you can research affiliate activity all over the world.
For this purpose, I use HideMyAss. It has servers in over 128 countries, is pretty reliable, and works on mobile phones.
You simply load up the software, choose which country you want to browse from, and then access the websites above.
Do this for each of the Tier 1 countries and you will soon have a metric crap ton of data spilling over in your Evernote.
Which Countries Should I Focus In?
If you were to record affiliate activity in over 128 countries, you would be a master of detail and a model of inefficiency.
Research is important, but let’s not get carried away, aye champ?
When it comes to choosing which countries to focus on, there are several intangible variables I use.
1. Network newsletter outliers
Most affiliate networks send out weekly reports of their top performing offers along with their current EPCs (earnings-per-click). It is worth saving these and keeping a week-on-week record.
Why would you want to keep a record?
Firstly, let’s say you are successfully promoting Offer X in Germany, and the network suggests that its current network-wide EPC is $0.50. You can record this metric as a benchmark figure.
If you know that you were profitable with an offer that pulled $0.50 network-wide, then you can use this to gauge the relative success of new arrivals in future newsletters.
Note: I would always take network EPCs with a pinch of salt. They can be massively skewed by the activity of one heavy-volume affiliate. Especially if he is using a different type of traffic, i.e. the popunder or redirect variety.
The second thing I look out for on newsletters is a single offer monopoly.
Now what I mean by a single offer monopoly is that you will usually find Tier 1 countries with a number of offers appearing in the newsletters.
Germany and the Netherlands are prime examples of countries that regularly have 3-5 offers bunched around the same $0.50 to $0.75 EPCs. All of them may be ‘top network performers’ at the same time.
Sometimes, however, an outlier country will appear that only has one offer in the charts.
If I see an offer that has suddenly caught fire in Russia, or Turkey, or Spain, or Italy, without any notable competitor, then I will investigate affiliate activity in that country. You will sometimes walk on to a deserted battlefield where one affiliate is making hay in the sunshine.
Getting a sense of outlier markets is something that comes from experience. It no doubt helps if you can leverage our next variable.
2. Source promising tips from your affiliate manager.
My inbox is always open to affiliate managers who want to drop me a tip that Offer X, Y or Z is picking up steam in Country A, B or C.
While I appreciate these pointers, I like to research using my own view from the trenches. The best way to do that is to use our pool of premium sites to monitor affiliate activity first-hand, using a VPN.
While not every tip from your affiliate manager will translate in to a profitable campaign, I find they are often good pointers for which markets you should be researching first.
3. Proven brand, new country.
This is my final variable for choosing which countries to investigate further.
If I have already had success promoting Offer X in Country Y, then I will always be interested in hearing if the offer is now available in Country Z or Country X.
When a proven brand scales in to new territory, you should be sniffing around said territory looking for signs of affiliate life. And even if there isn’t any, don’t be put off. This might just mean that you’re one step ahead.
(A pretty fucking surreal sensation on the rare occasion that it happens.)
At this point, you should have chosen a few countries to research. You should have gathered intelligence from the premium placements in those countries, and you should have vast swathes of landing pages, creatives and offers to compare.
We have the data. Now what about the signal? How do we find that elusive offer that is capable of hitting the sweet spot and generating heaps of cash?
Unpicking Data, Extracting Targets and Nailing Them
Now that you have a backlog of campaigns, across a bunch of premium sites, and in a variety of countries, the next step is to make sense of that data.
Are there any observable patterns?
For example, is there a single offer that appears time and time again in Germany? Is traffic split equally between different offers? Is one tube site seeing more affiliate activity than the others?
What types of creatives are you seeing used by the top affiliates?
Are they traditional banners with amateur models, a headline and some basic text?
Like, this:
Or are they chat windows designed to make the user think that he’s pulled without even trying?
Like, err, this:
CONTINUED BELOW
Whatever recurring theme you can discern from the data is a benefit at this stage.
The most important step is to narrow down exactly which affiliate offers you are seeing in the prime placements.
Ideally you want to grab the most common offer, the second most common, and any offers that appear only once (these could be exclusives, and worth researching further).
Your next task is to check across multiple networks and find where these offers are available. Sign up to each network and ask for the best possible payout so that you can 'buy premium traffic'.
(When asking for payout bumps, it helps to give the network an incentive. Premium traffic is one such incentive.)
Note: Never restrict your testing to a single affiliate network. The same offer, promoted on two networks, can have completely different results.
At this stage, without actually running traffic, there is only so much payout ‘bump’ you can hope for. Most networks want to see good numbers and good quality before they'll take the time to badger the merchant about your individual performance.
In the meantime, assuming we have the best offer on the market, what’s the next step?
I suggest you rip (or 'model') the most successful landing pages and creative that you’ve seen during your research.
You might wonder why I’d encourage ripping, and the theft of other people’s creatives, but the bottom line is that it happens all across the industry. If you think that your own creatives would somehow be immune from this effect, then I’m sorry but you are mistaken.
There’s another reason why you’d want to copy, though.
Keeping as many consistencies as you can during early testing is a good thing.
It’s impossible to innovate if you don’t know what the standard performance is across your industry.
And the fastest way to do that?
Benchmark existing creatives.
Once you have your chosen offers, and you’ve adapted some proven creatives, we reach the crucial stretch that will make or break your career as an adult marketer.
Success depends on what we do next.
Out-Communicate, Out-Hustle or Innovate?
If you run traffic to even the best offer in your chosen country, it’s unlikely that you’ll break even straight away – let alone make a profit.
Replicating the model of the top advertisers is a good way to establish industry benchmark metrics. But it’s a lousy way of getting profitable.
To bid alongside the top advertisers, you need to replicate the element that makes them successful: you need to establish a competitive advantage.
As I’ve mentioned throughout this volume, there are three competitive advantages you can seek to leverage.
It’s your job now to choose one of them.
Out-Communicate the Competition
This is the realm of the super affiliates.
It is the competitive advantage that every big affiliate hopes to establish, because it is the easiest to maintain.
The key to out-communicating your competition is to prove yourself as a reliable affiliate, and then use that leverage to get a high payout — or access to better offers.
This may require a blast of unprofitable leads to get a seat at the negotiations table.
After all, there aren’t many newbie affiliates who can buy traffic at PornHub and get it profitable on a street payout. Don’t let that stop you though. By trying, you’ll mark yourself down as an affiliate who delivers good quality.
Ultimately, if the advertiser wins, then you will be in demand.
Affiliates chasing this communication advantage seek out direct relationships with the merchant where possible.
They pass as much data as they possibly can and actively chase up the subids.
If you are running traffic across all of the premium placements, you will want to track each individual placement with a separate subid.
This way if 50% of your traffic is acceptable quality, and 50% is great quality, you have a chance of pinpointing where the quality is peaking at the advertiser’s end. Once you have this information, you can ask to run the best performing subids to a separate version of the offer on a higher payout.
(You can cull the average traffic as an incentive where necessary.)
Understanding the exact science of which banner, on which placement, on which website, creates the most revenue for the merchant… is not to be underestimated.
It gives you massive bargaining power.
Remember: your network’s payouts are rarely illustrative of the best available payout.
The best payouts are reserved for those who deliver the best lead quality. Street network payouts are ‘averages’ based on projected performance from their entire group of affiliates: the good, the bad and the ugly.
If you represent the good, your payouts will increase and so will your standing with the network. Most networks reserve their top converting exclusives (and larger caps) for those who are proven in the quality department.
These are the true Big Swinging Dicks of the adult vertical.
If you want to out-communicate the competition, transparency is a must.
Don’t be afraid to share your sources (although you shouldn’t have to if you are using subids effectively), and always seek direct input on where the offer converts in to sales most effectively.
This can be taken much further in to which cities/states are most likely to turn in to sales, and so on. The possibilities are endless when affiliate and merchant come together and start sharing their data. That’s when the magic happens, and it is mutually beneficial to all.
What about buying traffic in general?
Is there a secret source where the top affiliates place their orders whilst lounging around the pool?
Well, I hate to be a tease — but yes.
Yes, there is.
That source is not called Exoclick, or TrafficJunky or AdBucks.
It’s called your inbox.
By networking closely with the people who work at these major adult platforms, you gain access to flat rate deals that aren’t available on the open market.
There are platforms offering managed buys which scare away most affiliates but act as safe havens for those seeking to out-communicate the competition.
Ultimately if you want to move away from market prices, you need to be moving away from self-serve traffic sources and pushing direct buys, or flat-rate deals.
It’s a simple sacrifice: convenience for margin.
Let the hustlers compete with their auctioned CPM bids.
I have included an extensive list of recommended adult traffic sources in my Resources Section at the end of this volume.
Out-Hustle the Competition
Assuming that you are now armed with the best offer in the market, one way to get profitable is to put it to work in parts of the market where your competitors aren’t as dominant.
And there could be a number of reasons for that lack of dominance.
Here we are talking about smaller traffic sources, RON placements, less popular banner sizes, popunder traffic, redirect traffic, and even non-Adult traffic sources.
If out-hustling is your objective, then you need to gain an excellent working knowledge of the smaller players in the adult industry.
You need to be trying brand new traffic sources that aren’t yet saturated with larger but less nimble advertisers.
The key to your success will be moving fast and cutting under the competition.
Those who try to out-hustle are also more likely to pioneer new creative angles.
Instead of attacking with an engine of scale, the hustler uses the engine of fresh appeal.
He designs banners that haven’t been seen before. He targets pockets of profit from sub-segments of large markets — like BBW, interracial dating, and so on.
He will focus on neglected segments of mass-markets where going the extra mile in the creative process can add valuable percentage points to his ROI.
The downside to this approach is that every other hustler is quickly on his tail. And if a strategy truly takes off, it may soon be adopted by the big fish communication-centered affiliates who will weld his winning formula in to their bigger, sprawling campaigns.
Of course, by that point, the hustler is already pouncing on his next gap in the market.
Such preeminence is the key to his success – and the beginning of his downfall.
The day the hustler slows down is the day his profit margins begin to shrink.
While I encourage this path of out-hustling the competition to anybody entering the industry today, and anybody on a small budget, I believe it is a dangerous and tiring game to play long-term.
Those affiliates who complain about the industry lacking stability, or profits altogether, are likely those who have staked too much on out-hustling the competition… whilst slowly falling behind it.
Steer towards the structural advantages of out-communicating your rivals instead.
It is a longer game, and ultimately a much more flattering game for your hairline.
CONTINUED BELOW
Innovate
Finally, we have the ballsiest of strategists.
There are affiliates who focus solely on innovating to stay profitable.
One look at the same landing pages (most of which have been in place since 2012) and I’m lead to believe that Mr. Innovation is on hiatus.
The innovation model is appealing, aspirational even.
Most advertisers competing in the adult space are armed with the same creative weapons. Ultimately, these are tied to the same bidding ceilings. Nobody can monopolise the market because nobody has a clear-cut advantage. Nobody can afford to push up bids that far.
Every now and then, an affiliate will let loose with a truly innovative campaign that can airlift him away from the fixed ceiling bidding used by the rest of the market.
This is usually in the form of a creative idea that nobody else had thought of, or an unexpected trend.
The Fappening is a good example of an unexpected adult trend.
The affiliates who took advantage of this sudden interest in leaked photos saw a massive jolt in ROI.
The Fappening lent itself to some innovative angles, but as you’d expect given the curve associated to sudden trends, the decline set in quickly after.
I’m sure the guy who coined the term ‘Better Than Tinder’ can attest.
A good example of creative innovation was the affiliate who created the 'Rules Landing Page’ and its trifecta of promises:
(God bless his soul.)
1. If you see someone you know, do not publicise it. Do not spread rumours.
2. You must wear a condom.
3. It is your responsibility to protect yourself from STDs when having sex with our members.
This was an explosive innovation that made a lot of money for its author, and the early adopters.
It has since become so widespread that even Adult Friend Finder can be seen using it on its branded pages.
Any competitive advantage associated to those infamous three rules has been gobbled up by the playing field.
And that’s the big problem.
You can use creative innovation to get ahead, but you can’t use it to stay ahead.
Not in 2015.
If you are going to rely on innovation to secure an advantage, it is more likely to come from technology or a solution that allows us to generate further value from non-converting clicks.
Whatever advantage that is, it can’t be easy to replicate.
Or it won’t be one.
These three strategies — out-communicating, out-hustling and innovation — are the only ways to make money from adult dating in 2015.
You can’t be average and profitable.
Average is in the red.
Defending Your Profits
If you are lucky enough to carve out a position where you are making money from adult, what do you do next?
This is arguably a subject of even greater importance than actually getting profitable.
To keep making money, you have to be able to defend your profits.
This is a million times easier when your chosen objective is to out-communicate the competition, rather than out-hustle or innovate.
Why?
Because relationships last longer than CTRs.
And because once you have a structural advantage, you can spend time researching what the great hustlers are up to, and replicating what the innovators have rolled out with their great minds.
From the opposite side of the fence, defending profits is increasingly tough for the affiliates who have neglected bridge building and networking.
The hustlers are up against a tidal wave of new competitors, and the immense waves of creative desperation that these new hustlers are using to get profitable – all in the short-term, of course.
While there’s an argument that innovating is dead in adult, I think this is wholly untrue.
Innovation will only appear dead until somebody comes along with a model that surpasses us all.
For that reason, even the affiliates who rely on great communication to defend their profits, must also invest in innovation.
If we stop trying to improve our campaigns, they might as well be dead already.
Finally... Adult Traffic Sources for Reference
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Juicy Ads – Lenient, self-serve adult dating platform. Cheap. Good for learning the ropes. Lots of bot traffic, though.
Traffic Junky – One of the most popular sources of adult traffic in the world. Big volume. Equal competition.
Exoclick – More adult dating by the bucket load. Probably not quite as good quality as TJ, but offset by cheaper traffic.
AdBucks – Don’t be fooled by the minimal interface. This display source packs a donkey punch.
TrafficForce – Home to the high-quality Porn.com inventory. Difficult to get volume, but a good way to boost lead quality.
TrafficFactory – Home to XVideos.com inventory. It uses a bizarre CPC bidding platform that favours short-term rather than long-term campaigns. Traffic seems to be split between two sites, with one better quality than the other – but no way of targeting separately. Frustrating.
Ero-Advertising – European network with a lot of flat rate buys available. Mixed experiences here – ROI can sway to both extremes.
Star Advertising – Mobile adult traffic. I have been meaning to test this one for ages but cannot seem to get my account active. Oh well.
Reporo – Massive volume, managed buys. Some of their sales offices run much more efficiently than others, to say the bloody least.
PlugRush – Got to love PlugRush. All sorts of traffic: pops, plugs, redirects. Lots of volume available. Needs a whitelisting option.
Adult Ad World – I found it difficult to get volume but the trickle of traffic I received converted well. Need to look in to this one again.
AdultSense – Super high quality traffic, but expensive and difficult to get volume. Use your own adserver for best returns.
AdXpansion – I haven’t tried it, but it’s in my saved folder of sources seen regularly whilst surfing.
Grand Slam Media – I found this brokered in my Exoclick sources. Looks like managed buys. Will be testing it soon.
Adamo Advertising – Another new kid on the adult block, but gaining traction fast. Some good banner and pop traffic here.
TrafficHaus – Tons of US traffic, not the friendliest interface. Mixed results so far.
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Check out the Premium Posts launch post here.
And remember to use the STM 20% discount code (STM20) if you place an order!
Special thanks to Adsimilis for sponsoring this volume!
Quality Finch. Pure quality! I was reading through your premium post earlier today, good work man.
Thanks for the share too!
Absolute gold! SO many useful tips here. Thanks!
You the man Finch!
IS it all adult or mostly adult? I dont do adult.
WOW ! Ty man
I am impressed. Top quality
Originally Posted by fishinseo
It's actually mostly non-adult.
2 of the 10 posts are dedicated to adult, although one of them is a 97 page monster. To be honest though, a lot of the concepts in the adult posts are universal.
It's no secret that the adult industry is about 2 years ahead of every other vertical when it comes to innovation.
Got mine this morning , nice nuggets in there , was feeling iffy about adult and you explained exactly what my problem is. No competitive advantage or building to one , and not maximizing in any of the 3 areas . Innovation, hustle , or communication
Quality is a understatement!!! Excellent Post Finch
solid Finch knowledge missles!
This is so fucking great. I don't do adult but picked up some good tips. I am def. buying the book!
If you are new and never heard of this, buy all the volumes, you won't regret it!
Ahhh man, soooo good!!!
GOLD
I'll add one more gem source to the list
http://www.bitterstrawberry.com/
I got the book immediately after release. Read the 1/3 so far and took notes/created task in OmniFocus as well.
Many golden nuggets there for the one who can read between lines.
And those crazy expressions like "doing the tango with the shits" keep me laughing all the time 
Surely the best reading for the upcoming holidays and ideas for the next year!
Great work Finch!
Awesome insights Finch!
Will be setting aside some comfy time tomorrow to get through this beast!
Originally Posted by maynzie
Originally Posted by Finch
Originally Posted by maynzie
http://www.webmasteraccess.com/ -- Like this, right?
Whenever an adult conference is announced, I trawl through the list of companies attending and look out for any I don't recognise.
Speed networking!
Awesome. Buying it as a X'mas for myself
Rofl yep thats one of the good ones!
Just get it, I'll start reading on my flight to Phuket right now !
You should try to fill the form with a non US address, because I'm french and I've try 8 times to buy the ebook, but each time I was stuck with this message :
Please note: Shipping rates have been updated based on your new "ship to" address. Please review then resubmit your order.
I've buy it using a US address, but I'm sure you will be loosing sells here :/
Thanks !
thanks Finch, very good article. However, it certainly does sound difficult to survive running adult dating these days.
Originally Posted by maynzie
How do you guys do your translations for Adult for the various GEO's as I would imagine it's a bit awkward asking someone to translate "Come Suck my P*ssy tonight"... and who knows if they even translate it right... as they may come back with "Come Mouth my Vagina tomorrow" which just doesn't have the same pizazz - lol... and you wouldn't know as Google Translator isn't all that accurate with this kind of stuff.
Fiverr and oDesk and so on... just be up front about the adult/explicit nature of things. It's not uncommon so there are plenty of people out there who will do it.
I was thinking about Fiverr, have used them before... mixed results but it was for stuff other than translating... translating, for what we need seems like it would be hard to "F-up" for a fiverr dude. What about that one hour translation site? Any luck with them?
Not sure how appropriate they are for adult translations.
yeah. ive never had an issue with people refusing work due to adult.
OHT are fine with adult in my experience, provided you flag it up front.
Originally Posted by webworx
Originally Posted by matuloo
I've had a couple of job postings pulled in the past on Odesk because they apparently didn't allow them.
I think there was a misunderstanding over the issue of 'adult content creation', though.
Excellent guide and a good read Finch! 
Excellent post, absolute gold mine for determined people who will soak in this knowledge and go out there and use it.
While you guys are dropping traffic sources, traffichunt.com is a new self serve one to test out...
Originally Posted by webworx
Originally Posted by Finch
Make 2015 count!
if creating adult landing pages etc where do people soucre the images ? do you just freeze a vid and take a screen shot ?
Also I tried to get an idea of what iI shoud be expecting to see in term soy banners appearing by going to some of the sites mentioned at the start of the post . I didn't see any. ..not sure if the pc I'm on has a blocker or maybe the vid I tried to see it on just had no banner smayeb ?
I am a noob and planning on going down the adult path……too dangerous ? or do it ?
For images think amateur. There's really too much to choose from... but I'd recommend amateur forums/sites rather than the high volume mainstream stuff.
Re: the ad spy, yes you will need to turn off ad blockers. You will have to do this on most of the advertising platforms you use and on sites where you want to spy properly.
Adult's not a dangerous path to go down but as a newbie I would recommend focusing on lower volume, low CPM geos i.e. tier 3 countries.
Very good post Finch. From an affiliate who runs a lot of adult dating volume, a lot of your analysis was bang on. The playing field is not level, and becoming less so every year. I am not sure why there is this surge of newbie interest in adult now. I sure wouldn't want to be entering the arena today.
Originally Posted by mark_b
The reason I got started in adult was because I was sick of other traffic sources where creative guidelines were so strict.
You have a ton of self-serve platforms with low minimum deposits and plenty of case studies too, which is always a good formula for attracting newbies!
Wow this thread is golden....
Cheers
Great post, thank you for sharing.
You mentioned that we should rip other people funnels (Banners, Landers, Offers) and use them as a benchmark, but my question is should we run them on the same placements they're running them on or go to new placements/sites and test them out there?
Originally Posted by victor s
Thanks for this informative and very thorough article Finch The adult market has become very competitive & at times, oversaturated. As an Ad network I believe the future goldmine of adult niche will lie in mobile and tablet traffic based on market & industry trends so far.
Have a good day!
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