there's 4 pearl threads currently active on the front page ... everyone seems to be really thinking hard this week about serious stuff after the san diego gathering!??!
Jim ... for all of the reasons mentioned here, "traffic" in general is just bored with the same old shit and the same deceptive practices. the surfer is smart, they won't be tricked by $49.95 auto rebilling in the numbers there were previous ... value for money is what shoppers look for in the real world and its now stretching to us.
the most successful experiments for us so far have been the things I've always done with purve ... 6 monthly subscriptions for heavily discounted rate, presenting a 'discount' for taking month upfront with no trial etc ... but no matter what we do with the pricing points, there is a portion of webmasters that are just NOT converting, but others who notice a huge difference every time we change ... we have enough doing well to not be totally disappointed but like you said, you can't just throw shit at the wall any more like you could before.
I'd be keen to give a public test a try on Celebrity Bling if you would like to work together on a search engine experiment ... our content is very text rich, so it makes a great search engine option. Our retention is not impressive currently for most webmasters, and we are rev share so its extremely important!! We've got some major new mainstream style features coming in july and a few new billing 'ideas' which will help this.
As opposed to the porn programs, we aren't interested in giving out free content and so on - our stuff is valuable, if a surfer wants to access it they have to sign up. We have no intention of giving away much content ... so far i've provided opti & gonzo with 100 pics each of various page 3 girls and uk glamour models for their team bling webmasters - they are in charge of who gets to use them.
So we intend to try to not make the same mistakes as was made with adult, and by sitting on the 'edge' of adult and mainstream there are a lot more options for where you can advertise this. Our most 'hardcore' photo on any of our tours is an upskirt with a wet patch LOL
http://www.celebritybling.com/sites.html has a list of mini tours with some basic keywords next to them ... we are trying to average 1 new tour per week so we can build a good archive of search engine keyworded sites.
A good niche to focus on for search engine traffic is movies/actors, our next tour to be launched soon is the most content rich site i've built so far ... its male celebrities ... 'hollywood hunks' ... every page is full of text. here's a sneak peek ;-)
http://www.hunkycelebs.com/hollywood_hunks/
http://www.hunkycelebs.com/hollywood_hunks/tour.html
2 of the 'hunk' pages are done - brad pitt and orlando bloom, the rest of the links won't work yet
btw, welcome back, the water is FINE!!! *shiver chatter shiver*
LOL