Amateur Seeking Advice after Almost 1 Year of Experimentation

erotola · 01-02-2008

If you are short in time, you can skip this introduction message and go to the next one where i put my questions. ;-)

Hello, for the past 9 months i have been seeking information on several boards to help me start my own business. One of my favorite was AmateurMasters. I miss it, even if i discovered it when it was slowly dying. I noticed that many among you guys gladly share their experience tips with newcomers. I did not write many messages on Boards yet, but reading those from others helped me a lot. Thank you very much.

It is obviously not an easy time for starters in the adult business nowadays. The amount of porn available has grown exponentially during the recent years. Not to mention that the industry is experiencing many structural changes. There is the recent explosion of the web 2.0 model (users feeding content). The high speed internet is now widely used. The European and Asian Markets are catching up. Also the affiliate-sponsor business model was shaken by many abuses. I guess that our business is simply getting more mature. In any case, i do believe that the opportunity level is still comparable with many other types of commercial activities on the Internet.

As a part-time Amateur Content Provider, it was not easy to plan an entry in the business. Most advices for Newbies were to start by operating a Free Site with Purchased Content. The idea was to understand how the business operates before getting into it, while building a traffic base. I did not follow this advice because it looked outdated to me. Indeed, message boards showed many established webmasters making jokes about any money coming from newly established Free Sites, TGPs or Link Lists.

Anyway, we first tried by performing live shows on webcams. It looked pretty crowded for singles, but as a couple, the live cams market was a very valuable experience for us. It enabled us to understand both the workings of the business and the needs of the clients, while making some reasonable income. We collaborated with Ifriends and ImLive. I think that i would give LiveJasmin a try if we would do it again. Sometimes, we did have to wait a couple of hours before making any money. But as part-time starters, showing on average 10 hours a week, i can say that in our worst weeks we made probably around 10$ per hour. During our best weeks we could cash-in 25$ per hour. That is nothing extraordinary, but not bad either. I do believe that if we would have played the traffic game a little bit more, we could have doubled these numbers after a few months. Webcaming is also crowded, but being live, it has the advantage of not being flooded by the dumping of some old content from the past...

We decided to enter the content market by selling our clips on an individual basis, until we build enough content to supply our own pay site. We opened a store at Clips4sale and operated it for almost a year now. The beginning numbers were very exciting. If every day would have been like our first day of sales, i could have gone full-time right away... But there was a significant drop in sales during the following days. It became soon obvious that the exciting results were beginner's luck.

I tried the PPM (Pay-Per-Minute) model at watchme.com but the results were very disappointing. I did try to drive some traffic to my page at watchme.com but there was no significant increase in sales. It did not even worth the time i took to upload and manage the content on this site. It probably depends on what you have to offer, but i do not believe in this formula to generate income for a content provider. May be it could be profitable as a marketing tool to bring some future sales on a pay site.

I did not try to sell our content elsewhere yet. One reason being that the split offered elsewhere (often only 20% for the provider) was not appealing enough for an individual and fresh content provider. I can believe that the owner of a massive content stock may be interested to recycle it at 20%. Not me.

I now drive my own traffic to my store at Clips4sale (1,5K to 3K unique visitors daily). My clips are pretty much mainstream so i do not get much sales from Clips4sale own customer base. I keep some stats since the beginning. Here are the most interesting:

A unique visitor is worth 0.0124$ (or 1.24 cents). It was still worth more than 4 cents at the end of the first month of operation. Driving external traffic to the store pulled this stat down but it is now pretty stable.
The average sale is $9.66. There are some repeating buyers. Unfortunately, i cannot yet put an average value on a customer. I would guess that it is close to 20$. This does not compare well with the value of a member on a pay site. However, one could argue that there are much more single clip buyers than members...
You can see some customers purchasing one clip and coming back a few minutes after to purchase another one, which is a real pleasure. But the real excitement comes when someone purchase a bunch of clips at once.

01-02-2008	#1
erotola Still Waiting Tables... Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 9	Amateur Seeking Advice after Almost 1 Year of Experimentation If you are short in time, you can skip this introduction message and go to the next one where i put my questions. ;-) Hello, for the past 9 months i have been seeking information on several boards to help me start my own business. One of my favorite was AmateurMasters. I miss it, even if i discovered it when it was slowly dying. I noticed that many among you guys gladly share their experience tips with newcomers. I did not write many messages on Boards yet, but reading those from others helped me a lot. Thank you very much. It is obviously not an easy time for starters in the adult business nowadays. The amount of porn available has grown exponentially during the recent years. Not to mention that the industry is experiencing many structural changes. There is the recent explosion of the web 2.0 model (users feeding content). The high speed internet is now widely used. The European and Asian Markets are catching up. Also the affiliate-sponsor business model was shaken by many abuses. I guess that our business is simply getting more mature. In any case, i do believe that the opportunity level is still comparable with many other types of commercial activities on the Internet. As a part-time Amateur Content Provider, it was not easy to plan an entry in the business. Most advices for Newbies were to start by operating a Free Site with Purchased Content. The idea was to understand how the business operates before getting into it, while building a traffic base. I did not follow this advice because it looked outdated to me. Indeed, message boards showed many established webmasters making jokes about any money coming from newly established Free Sites, TGPs or Link Lists. Anyway, we first tried by performing live shows on webcams. It looked pretty crowded for singles, but as a couple, the live cams market was a very valuable experience for us. It enabled us to understand both the workings of the business and the needs of the clients, while making some reasonable income. We collaborated with Ifriends and ImLive. I think that i would give LiveJasmin a try if we would do it again. Sometimes, we did have to wait a couple of hours before making any money. But as part-time starters, showing on average 10 hours a week, i can say that in our worst weeks we made probably around 10$ per hour. During our best weeks we could cash-in 25$ per hour. That is nothing extraordinary, but not bad either. I do believe that if we would have played the traffic game a little bit more, we could have doubled these numbers after a few months. Webcaming is also crowded, but being live, it has the advantage of not being flooded by the dumping of some old content from the past... We decided to enter the content market by selling our clips on an individual basis, until we build enough content to supply our own pay site. We opened a store at Clips4sale and operated it for almost a year now. The beginning numbers were very exciting. If every day would have been like our first day of sales, i could have gone full-time right away... But there was a significant drop in sales during the following days. It became soon obvious that the exciting results were beginner's luck. I tried the PPM (Pay-Per-Minute) model at watchme.com but the results were very disappointing. I did try to drive some traffic to my page at watchme.com but there was no significant increase in sales. It did not even worth the time i took to upload and manage the content on this site. It probably depends on what you have to offer, but i do not believe in this formula to generate income for a content provider. May be it could be profitable as a marketing tool to bring some future sales on a pay site. I did not try to sell our content elsewhere yet. One reason being that the split offered elsewhere (often only 20% for the provider) was not appealing enough for an individual and fresh content provider. I can believe that the owner of a massive content stock may be interested to recycle it at 20%. Not me. I now drive my own traffic to my store at Clips4sale (1,5K to 3K unique visitors daily). My clips are pretty much mainstream so i do not get much sales from Clips4sale own customer base. I keep some stats since the beginning. Here are the most interesting: A unique visitor is worth 0.0124$ (or 1.24 cents). It was still worth more than 4 cents at the end of the first month of operation. Driving external traffic to the store pulled this stat down but it is now pretty stable. The average sale is $9.66. There are some repeating buyers. Unfortunately, i cannot yet put an average value on a customer. I would guess that it is close to 20$. This does not compare well with the value of a member on a pay site. However, one could argue that there are much more single clip buyers than members... You can see some customers purchasing one clip and coming back a few minutes after to purchase another one, which is a real pleasure. But the real excitement comes when someone purchase a bunch of clips at once.