What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Like TGPs and then MGPs the evolution of tube sites have been blamed for the economic downturn in this industry.

Outside of stolen content what would you list as your top concerns?

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

(1) Access is open to minors which will lead to --
(2) governmental regulation of content on the internet

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

The use of porn as a freebie to sell something else.

Tube sites, torrent sites, blogs... too often these days porn is used not to sell porn, but rather as a teaser or lure to get people to visit a site, where they sell something else. AFF and most of the dating sites have made their money almost entirely on being sold on free porn sites, usually using someone else's content on the pages they appear on.

Using porn in that manner really drops the value, which in turn leads to higher ratios and lower income.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

They're ruining the tour + join page business model.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

How do you think they differ from MGPs?

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

The concerns are the exact same as they were with TGP's, MGP's, and before those Picposts and even the old traditional "free site".

The key with all of the above is to make them a tease. Wet the surfers appetite with the sample tray but make him buy his dinner. A good paysite tour is designed that same way. The problem is there's always going to be someone who will offer up more content to gain the additional traffic.

That sets off the cascade. Joe Dumbass has more traffic because he's giving away the store, and his competitors then think they have to offer more as well in order to keep up.

Now what has made this possible is cheap bandwidth and the advent of flash video. The guy offering only the tease and focusing on a niche is going to have far superior conversion rates and make a lot more per visitor. But the cost of hosting a tube site is manageable enough to do the big box retailer model, make very little per visitor, but use the volume to drive sales to ad networks, dating sites, etc and still make bank on razor thin margins.

The reason people scream like raped apes about all of this is two fold:

1) Videos have always been the ultimate upsell. They've been protected simply because no one could afford the bandwidth to giveaway more than a minute or so for over a decade. Now all of the sudden you can go watch entire scenes all over the web.

2) Not everyone can afford to run a tube site or even if they can they're not willing to take the risk of managing that thin margin. You cant put one out and leave it on autopilot for any number of reasons including getting your ass sued off over piracy when a user uploads something they dont own. How many do you think would be whining if they could all run their own?

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

From what Ive been reading there isnt anyone that has a clue about running a Tube site other than to sell ads to Lars and the rest of the Zango fan club... other than the obvious.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

It isn't just a question of them not knowing how to run it right, it is a question of content owners, copyright holders, producers not controlling the use of their content. They have devalued their own product, and made it harder for everyone else to work the business.

Almost any move to try to make tubes more profitable would in theory involve less free content. My fear is that it is a TGP2 style concept, which won't be as effective because the TGPs won't go away.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

So a new product that wouldnt be able to be whored out on a Tube site would be effective?

Do you think thats why dating and cam sites are profitable using this business model?

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Both of those sell better than regular paysites on tubes for that exact reason. They're selling a product that cannot be given away for free. Dates with live women, cam shows with live interaction....you cant grab and post either of those. Pharm would likely sell well if someone had the balls to do it and didn't mind a knock on the door from men in dark suits.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Cams and dating sites can't be tubed or torrented very easily, which makes them good products to sell using porn as the freebie to get them in the door. However, the ever increasing payouts on these sites is a clear indication that most of them are market saturated to the max, and that it is likely that most of the traffic being sent to them is people who already have an account, had an account, or otherwise won't pay out anymore. It's easy to pay $125 or $200 a signup whatever when 90% of the traffic has no hope of being a signup.

So basically, you need a product that can't be tubed or torrented. Pills, hookers, or t-shirts might work.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Yup, saturation is a whole different issue.

And there's another one in regards to the payouts. The economic system with adult affiliates is broken, it has been for a long long time. If you want a program of a significant size, the pressure is there to pay at least $35 a signup. And if you want a really big share of the sheep, do the $100+ payout days.

Meanwhile, the economics and mechanics of a signup alone dictate that a customer is not worth anywhere near that right now.

What happens then is anytime anyone in adult anywhere gets a surfer to part with their credit card number, we pile everything we possibly can onto the card to feed the cash engine.

I have a pretty good idea how this corrects itself finally...

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Rumor has it in the billing circles that Visa has laid down warnings and fines. I suspect all this fake altruistic moving of the pre checked links above the submit button are a direct result of it.

Not the change of heart they all claim theyve had.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Great post. There are now other elements to consider.

The economic downturn is going to effect porn. It will make more surfers who do buy less likely and more wary. There will be some who will simply stop buying porn/Adult and there will be those who will stop chasing the dream of meeting a woman on AFF. The revenue all of us are suffering will effect the dating and cam sites ability to pay the bills of the Tube sites, without all those who did buy still surfing the Tubes to get their kicks.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

The whole affiliates system has been broken for years. It has led to sites and sponsors putting 50% or more of their turn over into traffic generation. Often the only place they could get the money from was content. The trend of most of the Internet is to deliver a poor product and send as much traffic as possible to it. The competition was who could pay the most to get traffic. Rarely was it about who could produce the best porn, give the members the best experience and retain the longest.

The result is the surfer not being able to see the value of signing up to a site that will likely make it hard for him to cancel, bill his card beyond what he wanted or thought and deliver a product that simply was not worth it in his eyes.

So the solution of many is to pay the affiliates more to send more traffic and give the surfer less. Good long term plan.

Many many sites could afford to have online webcam of the girls in the scenes on the sites. Many sites could afford to invest in great content shot by people who know what they are doing. And many site could retain longer and keep the surfer buying porn. If they were not paying out so much to affiliates. You can't keep paying out 50% of your turnover to get people to pass your shop window which is full of stuff that does not sell.

I have a pretty good idea how this corrects itself finally...

It has already started.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Well, Paul, at some point, when the AFFs and whatnot (still paying $950 a signup or whatever they will get to) run out of people to signup, or are not longer able to generate signups, the problem solves itself. Tube sites in particular as they are right now are incredibly sensitive to a loss of sales, because these guys are often taking in $x+25 dollars and day and paying out $X for hosting and such. When that number slips down $50 a day, suddenly they are paying out their pockets to run their sites, and then they die very quickly.

I have noticed a few real tube sites converting into fake tube sites pretty much directly. That means they look like tube sites, but they link to sponsor galleries or directly to sponsor sites. I have seen a few just hotlinking other tube site's content (and doing a bad job of it).

The economics of the deal keeps moving... :)

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

There comes a point when the people who will sign up have already signed up and no gain, the people who got conned won't sign up again and the people who will never sign up cost the Tubes too much money for them to keep giving away unlimited BW, then they limit the number of views and the surfer looking for something he likes gets blocked. Happens to me, LOL. Or as you say they just link straight to sponsors.

Well that's my hope anyway.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Devaluing of paid content with too much free content. Simple as that.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I didnt know you had a tube site.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I don't. Nor a paysite for that matter. Only site I have is the one in my sig. But what happens with those type of sites certainly affects my business as well.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Paid sites need to worry less about tubes and examine how they are doing business.

First off do they offer the customer recurring value instead of relying on the "pay and forget" business model we have now.
Theres always a chance that Visa or Mastercard wakes up one day and says fuck it . If someone wants to renew an adult membership they they have to do it manually.

If you havent given your customer any value Im certain that they wont bother. Tubes got nothing to do with that.

When site owners start being just as concerned with whats in the members area as they are on tour pages then they will have made a step in the right direction.

In most cases I see a lot of effort and/or money spent on tour pages to maximize that sale. Now its become not enough to be satisfied with the pay and forget model...now we have sites that bury prechecked cross sales squeeze every dollar they can out of the surfer from the onset.

In this economy my educated guess is that when the customer goes to cancel the extra sites they also cancelling the primary member too.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Gonzo, the (pay) tubes offering a 1 time membership can do it because they have taken the biggest expenses of the business (buying, encoding, tagging, sorting, and maintaining content) and forked that over to the user who is paying. The only ongoing expense is hosting / bandwidth, and they all run more than enough advertising and such to cover that, plus I can imagine they aren't shy to push their members onto cross sales and such.

If I could run a paysite with all the income and none of the expenses, and still be able to charge a going rate for it, then yeah, I would be dumb not to. Unless of course I was putting myself at legal risk for doing it.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Looks like there has been a broadstroke applied to the term Tube.


Id deliniate them this way.
Paid Tube
Legal Tube
Thieving Tube

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I dont have a problem with legal tubes. I have a problem with illegal tubes giving away full stolen scenes peoples sweat and blood. I also feel the more free porn out that's very easy to access the more of a chance of governments cracking down. The net giving away so much much free shit killed the porn is recession proof model. I had worked in adult during recessions and it was recession proof but on the net its not.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I largely agree at this point now that we have 6+ months of data. But there's more in play here than just a recession and free content.

First, this is a recession with a credit crunch. I remain convinced that we're going to find out that the number of college freshman getting peppered with student credit card offers and actually obtaining one is way off from years past. Others who carry large credit balances may now have found their 10K limit dropped to 5K....and they may be maxed now.

The other thing is cross sells and other credit card shenanigans in our biz continues to erode the trust factor. And along with it an ever growing customer base is becoming an ever shrinking number of actual qualified buyers. Lots of eyeballs, fewer and fewer willing to trust us with a credit card number.

We're in a perfect storm of all of this coming together.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Although I agree with this, the reality is we're all lumped together.

It's kinda like trying to put an Armani store in the projects between all of the pawn shops, liquor stores and rib joints.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I agree with you on that. I see rebills not going thru and the sucky part is since we combined the site retention has gone way up.:(

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

I think that would be appropriate internally to us, but not to the end user. All they see is porn.

The differences they see are:

free tubes
free tubes signup for more
free tubes join for free and get nailed with pre-checked cross sales
free tubes with content hotlinked to other tubes
free tubes with no content just jack your ass round.
free tubes that install spyware
free tubes that install spyware and try to get your credit card info too
free tubes
free tubes
more free tubes.

It doesn't matter how it appears to us, it's how the public sees it.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

If a free tube site is using promo content...I submit to you that they are a glorfied MGP.

If you think that offering 5+ minutes of a video is profitable then we will see you on the for sale block.

Alpha Red is gone...no where to host your bullshit.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

And Red Tube is offline as well, even though the DNS still points the Ch00pa.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

Again, you are thinking like a web business guy. Think of it as a surfer, what do they see? If you present the clips in a certain manner, or you accept user submits, or whatever, then there is potential that you have clips bigger than 2 minutes. Heck, some sponsors are putting out 3 minute clips at this point. Throw in a few purchased clips that are longer, accept some user submits, and off you go. Like many sites, you can put up a 5 clip or 10 clip per day deal and block most people out.

From the business side, many of the tube sites are now predicated on getting the punter to sign up "for free" or for a "special download priority pass" or whatever, so either collecting money up front, or cross selling the "free" signup until the guy's credit card goes into shock. Plus many of them are stacked with ads, and sites like megarotic basically force click every viewer to adult friend finder (their play button triggers a new windows with AFF in it).

So yeah, the absolute cheapest bandwidth provider has left the building, but there is plenty more cheap bandwidth around if you look for it.

Re: What Are you Top Concerns with Tube Sites?
 

This is like deja vu all over again. Just when the surfer was beginning to trust us, scumbags pile on and blow it for short term gain. However, what I do see at tube sites is a lot of the same old same old and it gets boring. Some companies will soon find they are shooting themselves in the foot delivering masses of free product to these sites and not getting the numbers in the long haul. And as more and more tube sites hang out their dubious shingle, they water down their own market. It is another first adopter makes the dough scenario, and the rest suck the hind tit. I think the legit tube sites are here to stay but there will be casualties as the weak and useless and incompetent crash and burn.
I think the only solution to this problem is to maintain strong honest business principles in the middle of all this grifting and hope and pray that it shows. In my case, so far so good and I hope any of you with an honest business do well. The rest of you can fuck off and die as far as I am concerned.....My name is rhetorical and I endorse that last thought.