Amateur Seeking Advice after Almost 1 Year of Experimentation

[erotola]

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 I did not follow this advice because it looked outdated to me.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.

[erotola]

My questions now, as i am planning our next step in this business, which will most probably take the form of our own pay site:

1- I now make 60% when i sell my clips at clips4sale. If i open my own pay site, how do you think that the operating costs would compare with the 40% i leave to clips4sale? How much percentage do you leave in operating costs for your pay sites?

2- I would like to open a pay site that would offer individual clips download as well as membership. How does this model fit with the standard affiliate-sponsor model? Is selling individual clips interesting for affiliates?

3- What percentage of sales is coming from your affiliate programs compared to your own traffic?

4- What kind of percentage split do you experience or would expect between individual clip and membership sales? Do you expect that individual clip sales could match membership sales anytime soon?

I hope that 2008 will be as exciting for all of you as 2007 was for me ;-)

Best wishes to you all,

Dany.

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by erotola

My questions now, as i am planning our next step in this business, which will most probably take the form of our own pay site:

1- I now make 60% when i sell my clips at clips4sale. If i open my own pay site, how do you think that the operating costs would compare with the 40% i leave to clips4sale? How much percentage do you leave in operating costs for your pay sites?

2- I would like to open a pay site that would offer individual clips download as well as membership. How does this model fit with the standard affiliate-sponsor model? Is selling individual clips interesting for affiliates?

3- What percentage of sales is coming from your affiliate programs compared to your own traffic?

4- What kind of percentage split do you experience or would expect between individual clip and membership sales? Do you expect that individual clip sales could match membership sales anytime soon?

I hope that 2008 will be as exciting for all of you as 2007 was for me ;-)

Best wishes to you all,

Dany.

Clips for sale is one of the least talked about recent innovations to happen over the years. I myself am working on a project to provide an outlet for am videos. The first one will be in the form of a paysite that breaks all the rules.

Its a loing haul.

Specifically heres what you will be dealing with.
1. You will be making 100% of what you sell as opposed to 60% - BUT you have to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. You will need to pay for the design of a pay site. You will need to fork over the 750 Visa fee. If you dont plan on taking Visa then you have just shit yourself out of 80% of potential purchasers.

Dont believe me. Look at whats in your wallet. Most typically Visa.
But the most important thing you will have to rely on for yourself is traffic.

Which is the hardest to get these days and will and should consume a lot of your time and money.

Not percentages for operating costs but these are issues of major consideration.

2. The membership processing is pretty easy. However I dont know anyone that is processing by the download. They will try and tell you epassporte but thats another thread which I will sum up as STAY AWAY.

Then the affiliate issue is that most affiliates want EVERYTHING. There are many that think you should just depost the money in their account for free and do all the work for them.

I would suggest focusing on learning how to sell you site and build traffic on your own before offering an affiliate program.

Selling the clips will be interesting for the affiliate if you are paying a percentage on them. Again a processing issue... if you arent they will tell you that you have a traffic leak which means your sending out traffic to places that pay and they arent getting paid on it.

3. I would have told you in the past you would see more than 50% of your traffic coming from outside your own efforts but thats generally not the case anymore. Getting anyone to actually promote your site is a bit of a trick now simply because there are so many programs now. I will say again work your own traffic to get an understanding of how it works with a potential eye toward affiliates in the future.

4. Affiliates are going to tell you that they dont like a 50% split and would rather you pay them per sign up. Giving them all the money up front and you taking the risk of chargeback etc yourself.

While this brings in more potential sales it also opens you up to massive fraud as meany like to "card" sales - that means use a related credit card that the have access to in order to get credit for a sale - then once they have taken your money charge it all back.

Even a legit pay per sign up business model requires a fat stockpile of money to get started and once running a dedicated team to monitor fraud.

I do think 50% is a reasonable split and its honestly more money in the long run for the legit webmaster. Its like in the real world....some companies stress long term relationship as business PARTNERS.

Even if it just puts the idea in their mind most should react like they have some skin in the game.

I hope this helps you and some of our exiled ammasters friends.
With AM redirecting all of its traffic to Rude I am sad to say Ive heard of some interesting business practices there which I hope will be addressed in the future.

Its sad to think that my friends have resorted to using Zango to steal sales and are using stolen content to help the numbers.

I however cant pass judgement until they address it themselves.

[MRock]

Welcome Erotola, this board is a great place to seek advice. The folks here are friendly and trusted webmasters with much experience. I have just recently entered the boards myself and have found Gonzo and Oprano to be a good source of solid advice.

You guys sound like my partner Jill and me ... we too have been involved as amateur content providers, but we've been doing it for about 10 years now. We started out with a 7 cam voyeur house website in '98 and have been "experimenting" ever since. I try every new site that launches as a distributor for amateur content. I've tried the ones you mentioned and many more. In my opinion, this is where it is all going. How many of these sites will the market support? I'm not sure ... but we're content producers and I put our product on the shelf at every 7-11 I can . I do agree with you about the aversion to placing our stuff with programs that only offer 20% ( you know which VOD sites ) The split just seems offensive when it's your own naked ass in the stuff, LOL. Do you run "replays" at Ifriends? Just curious. Back in '99, we ran 7 rooms at Ifriends on their replay system with a 2 hour VHS tape looping the feed and pulled down about $100 a day. Ah, the good ol' days, hehe. It doesn't make that good anymore of course. Mostly because they changed the replay system to VOD style with uploaded movie files. It does amaze me how little money the VOD sites charge for movie viewing. I'll run the same movie clip as a replay at camsites and not only get a better split ( usually 40-50%), but also charge a MUCH higher per minute charge and get it ( .69 per minute). I just wish I could set up 100 computers running replays!

The advantage to being an amateur content producer is you can create more content at no cost. I think you're on the right track by seeking as many outlets for your content as possible. I would recommend you launch websites too. My current portfolio has 8 membership sites, 2 TGP's, 1 toplist, 15 clipstores on three different platforms and 1 mainstream music site. Jill still works live cam on 2 platforms under 6 names ... and we're still expanding. Since my involvment with C4S and the single file download sites, I have adjusted how I run my websites. It has given me a value now for my content that had never been established before. Neil set the bar, as far as I'm concerned , at $1 per minute for video, and I really appreciate that. My websites have about $400 worth of content by the C4S measure, and I always update with enough content to make the member rebill a value to stay. I do retire content with each update too.

Not sure why your money has dropped at C4S. You need to analyze that. I have made steady money with them for 2 years. Very consistent for me. How many stores do you run? How often do you update? How many niches do you cover? How many movie file formats do you post? Review those things ... C4S makes as much money for me as my websites each month. I'm trying to improve my website money though, because the cost is only 14% instead of 40% ...

Again, welcome to Oprano! Listen to these guys about building websites. Maybe we will learn together

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by MRock

I'll run the same movie clip as a replay at camsites and not only get a better split ( usually 40-50%), but also charge a MUCH higher per minute charge and get it ( .69 per minute). I just wish I could set up 100 computers running replays!

This is ingenious! Thanks for passing that tip out.

I can tell you a little of whats involved from the other side of a VOD system that might help you understand.

You send a DVD as a producer to AEBN and thats the LAST thing you ever do. The company encodes it, they store it and they multicast it.

And thats where other companies end but AEBN also aggresively markets your titles and all you do is cash a check.

Sinclair from Kandi Peach felt the same way you did but I had him just send in his older titles as to not impact his new sales.

He agrees that hes recieving a nice check from titles that have seen no action in years. Not bad for the investment of postage.

I think youd benefit from a discusssion from one of the reps on here about what VOD can do for your pocket book.

I know that there are some VERY exciting things coming for the am market in 2008 designed to put money in your pocket as a producer and in the pockets of others that promote your videos.

Thank you for your kind words also. Im overdue a trip to Tampa and I have a few friends down there. I think I will make the trip soon after vegas and round up all yall for a night of fun.

[KevinG]

Great thread with lots of intelligent discussion.

Why are downloadable clips a processing issue?

[MRock]

Originally Posted by erotola

My questions now, as i am planning our next step in this business, which will most probably take the form of our own pay site:

1- I now make 60% when i sell my clips at clips4sale. If i open my own pay site, how do you think that the operating costs would compare with the 40% i leave to clips4sale? How much percentage do you leave in operating costs for your pay sites?

hosting is cheap now, bandwidth too ... get a domain and build a site yourself ... CCBill will only take about 15% of subscriptions ... the content is free You said each customer for you spent about $20 at C4S? Is that after C4S charges? Each new customer at my website is worth $25 initial, and then there's the rebills ....

2- I would like to open a pay site that would offer individual clips download as well as membership. How does this model fit with the standard affiliate-sponsor model? Is selling individual clips interesting for affiliates?

... as per Gonzo, the problem is with processors.

3- What percentage of sales is coming from your affiliate programs compared to your own traffic?

0%, but I'm just developing this area myself

4- What kind of percentage split do you experience or would expect between individual clip and membership sales? Do you expect that individual clip sales could match membership sales anytime soon?

see my previous post ... it has doubled my sales

I hope that 2008 will be as exciting for all of you as 2007 was for me ;-)

Best wishes to you all,

Dany.

Wanted to pop back in and address Dany questions each. My first post was more of an intro of Jill and I.

PS. Gonzo, let me know when you're heading to Tampa. I owe you a dinner at Berns.

[erotola]

Thank you Gonzo, MRock and KevinG for your replies. I am very glad to have some feedback from you guys. I have read several posts from all of you during the past months.

Gonzo i recently followed many of your posts regarding the Zango case. They were very interesting. But i cannot count the times i found your writings helpful. You are obviously a monument in here. So many thanks to you.

MRock i indeed related many times to your inquiries and findings on boards. We certainly share some interests. You are among the rare fellows who did write openly about C4S. And, euh, i almost quoted you from another thread when i wrote about the 20% split. ;-)

KevinG i recently came across your concerns about your content being stolen. And while your point did not seem easy to make that time, i did share your concerns. It is nice to see that you appreciate the content of this thread.

Gonzo i was very happy to read your comment about C4S. I am eager to see how your project materializes. From what i read here it looks quite promising. Since i started to operate a store with C4S i kept telling myself: Why is there so few postings about that model? I mean as a newcomer, i must admit that i am not a great fan of the membership model.

Why should i stop a guy who is willing to spend more dollars on my site during a given month? And why should i stop the guy who has only a few bucks to spend either? I had many sales of 3$ from customers who were interested in only a specific part of a clip. And some who ordered for more than 100$ of clips that they found appealing enough. I feel it so rewarding to have someone order a clip, and to have him order another one later on, especially if the second order is for multiple clips. ;-)

I will follow your advice and MRock's about continuing to expand my own traffic, while keeping affiliate programs for a later phase. I will certainly try to solve the processing issue for downloadables, and keep this operational model. I guess that the only solution will be to get my own merchant account.


I know epassporte and have used them in the past. I have read some threads about them and understand why you do not favor its use. I do not see that as a viable option for downloads either.

MRock my customer value may be 20$ and yours probably 75$, if your sites match the average retention rate of the business, which is about 3 months from my readings. But what if the clips download model allows you to reach a 4 or 5 times larger customer base?

Our customers want to have some fun immediately. The membership model forces them to be sure that they will want that same kind of fun later on, before committing themselves. Or think about the girl who asks you for marriage before going to bed with you…

I like to dream about porn being as legitimate as restaurants. It fills an immediate physical need (it may not be as vital though - but that can probably be argued upon) while its experience can be designed in very different manners, depending on personal tastes. Do you know restaurants that do business using a membership model?

Anyway, thank you very much MRock for all those practical tips. I will try to apply these ideas as much a possible. I did not try to run replays on cam sites yet. To be honest, i did not think that it could be an interesting source of income.



I want to concentrate on clips production for the moment. I still have my regular job so i cannot put more than say 10-15 hours a week. This is the reason why you will not see me very often on boards. This is also why i was not able to experiment as much as i wanted yet.



Last year's experience for me was mainly to verify that this can be a reliable alternative to my regular job, both in terms of possible income and self-commitment. I now know that it can be the case. I plan the switch to happen progressively starting next year. I will take the coming year to prepare a solid ground for that to happen.

[gonzo]

Originally Posted by MRock

Wanted to pop back in and address Dany questions each. My first post was more of an intro of Jill and I.

PS. Gonzo, let me know when you're heading to Tampa. I owe you a dinner at Berns.

You dont owe me a thing. You can do me a favor though and tell all the amatuers they can hang out here.

Do you have any plans to go to Cybernet Expo in June?

Im trying to help my friend Jay out with his great show.
Theres a rumor of an amatuer roundtable.

[MRock]

Originally Posted by gonzo

You dont owe me a thing. You can do me a favor though and tell all the amatuers they can hang out here.

Do you have any plans to go to Cybernet Expo in June?

Im trying to help my friend Jay out with his great show.
Theres a rumor of an amatuer roundtable.

Definately tell other ams to come here

Afraid we have no plans to make the show, but that could change. If we do make it I would love to see the roundtable.