Andrew Conru is talking about the adult industry. He’s the CEO of Friendfinder. Stanford phd 1997. Cofounder of AdKnowledge in 1995. 180 employees. Started as a personals site. Huge traffic.
What really drives the adult business: scary, hardcore … mathematics. They know about short-term conversion ROI.
How can I get visitors cheaply? How can I convert visitors to paid members using any trick in the book? Separate companies: ones that get people to the front door, and other ones that do the conversion.
Tools for getting traffic: Affiliate marketing, popup ads, toolbars, spam and spyware, collaborative traffic networks.
Tools for conversion: subscription models, ID verification, traffic filtering, credit card processing and alternative payment systems, cookies and tracking, live streaming and audio.
What drove adult sites to be innovative? Hundreds of thousands — hyper competition among small operators. Traffic source owners determine what advertising is run, not the advertiser. CPA is the norm, not CPM.
Adult industry takes in $445 million last year online.
Trend: margins are getting tighter. Lots of free content. Hard for sites to differentiate.
I assume no one here goes to adult sites, you might not see these changes going on.
Shifting focus to longterm relationship with their visitors. Reduction of popups, adding registration and personalization. The pitch is becoming softer, less intrusive.
Lessons for the mainstream world? Adult webmasters often collaborate together — “co-opetition.” Mainstream sites are becoming more open to making money with adult content even as the adult industry is having a “self-regulated cleanup.”
Key takeaway: as people are optimizing every little bit of their web sites, you can over-optimize, hurt the user experience, reduce longterm ROI.
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