This business was never easy. Oh sure, there were the golden years when you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a new adult Internet millionaire. A lazy media, always primed for a Cinderella story, buttressed their fables of "overnight success". By the time 2000 came along our industry was fully established as a quick-money myth by the non-adult press. Our ranks swelled with eager pups who completely bought into the story line that all it took to create a fortune was a website and a few dirty photos.
| "This is an incredibly challenging time to be an adult webmaster. It’s lazy to blame our troubles solely on the current economy. People have less money that they did just a couple of years ago but our industry problems were evident long before the collapse." |
The legend was never true and thousands of webmasters found this out the hard way. Internet heaven houses the souls of countless newbs who swore they would "revolutionize" online porn. They refused to listen to sage advice. They blinded themselves to constructive criticism. They ranted and raged but when it came to doing the actual work, they failed and now they are gone. The webmasters that survive are the ones that worked their asses off and adapted to change.
This is an incredibly challenging time to be an adult webmaster. It’s lazy to blame our troubles solely on the current economy. People have less money that they did just a couple of years ago but our industry problems were evident long before the collapse. The insidious truth is we may have done the damage ourselves. We flooded our own market with free porn and enough sites and pages that there’s no way to count how many are out there. We took a good thing and turned it into an Internet version of Kudzu.
As well, all our effort to quell the "scamming porn site" panic of skittish surfers has resulted in a fearless audience. It isn’t just sex sites. The net is simply not intimidating anymore. Users have clued in to the fact that no matter how exciting the content, there’s always a no-cost alternative. There’s always a way to find what they want without having to pay a penny. They’ll turn to tube sites, download files via bitorrent or P2P and they’ll do it from the safety of their secure browsers, anti-virus software, firewalls and spyware blockers. They’ll find just enough free porn to bring them to orgasm and they’ll move on to the next distraction, until the urge to watch fucking on the Internet returns.
As individual webmasters, just trying to make a buck selling sponsor memberships, this is our challenge. It is damned daunting. How do we promote sites and programs in such a way that our surfers will choose paid content over free porn? When we’ve saturated our own market with enough free smut to last a lifetime, what can we do to convince our visitors that shelling out cash will give them more satisfaction?
As I said, blaming the economy fails to address solving a problem that began before the bottom dropped out. Blaming sponsors is as equally misguided. Today’s sponsors offer more marketing tools than ever before. We can build entire sites with their hosted galleries, video clips and RSS feeds. We can create our own tours. We have, at our fingertips, almost unlimited access to sponsor-provided content, banners, full-page ads and scripts. As Far as niches go, there’s practically no limit to the imagination. Whatever kink or fetish our surfers want, we can readily find a sponsor that owns such a site.
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The best way to overcome the challenges that face adult webmasters is to continue to offer surfers something they can't get for Free.
I’ve written before about the advantages found in interactivity, such as webcams, dating sites and social networking.
This doesn’t mean you join Facebook or Twitter only to spam your adult site. Doing so violates the TOS of those companies and gets you nothing but blocked and banned. What I suggest you do is what I talked about at the beginning of this article -
Build free sites that aren’t meant to be forgotten. Build free sites that you actually nurture. Set up a blog. Post daily entries that involve more than, "Whoa! Look at this hot chick!" Sure, mention your sponsors but put a little thought into it. Give your surfers a place that they want to re-visit. Forge a memorable presence on the net. Make them remember your name. Open your comments so your surfers can interact with you. Invite your webmaster friends to submit guest posts and don’t forget to blogroll.
If you built a site that’s worth bookmarking, then you can fill the sidebars with sponsor banners and pepper your posts with mentions of sponsor sites. You can create several of those free mini-sites and link to them like a proper hub. You open that Facebook or Twitter account and have your friends and followers come find you.
The main challenge adult webmasters currently face is the one we made ourselves. We gave away too much and our surfers got greedy. We have to give them sites that are worth remembering and promote sponsors whose content can't be had for free.