[RawAlex]

Truth is that adult has been absolutely gutted by people who are interested in making high volume, low dollar business. It costs a ton to do, but when interest rates are low making 5-6% margin is more than enough to keep these guys going.

The idea is to use porn as a draw to get people to do other things, but as it goes along the next step up the chain that was suppose to pay for it all is getting turned into a freebie as well. So TGPs upsold to videos, tubes made the video free, so they upsold to cams, and now the cams entertain the masses for nothing as well - and they are upselling dating to make money. You can guess what's next to be "free!" and used to upsell to something else.

So now adult is about getting an audience and selling ad space, it's not really about affiliate sales per se, only that being an affiliate generally gets you the right to a lot of content to use to attract an audience.