Why Adult Affiliates can no longer afford to ignore Pay Per Click - By: Tom West

The age old adage is that affiliate marketing eliminates risk from online businesses as money only changes hands when a purchase has been recorded. However, like many myths this ignores a number of hidden costs that can cripple an affiliate campaign. The site traffic measurement company, Alexa, purports that the largest adult website in the world is a tube site, dedicated to showing free online video. The stats suggest that in excess of 1% of the online population make at least one visit to that site in any given day which is around 21.5m people. Some of these large sites rely on affiliates to supply traffic. However, without ruthless management of these affiliates big adult sites like these could destroy their own business from the inside. How come? The answer is bandwidth.

Video content, especially adult video, craves bandwidth which means whopping bills for the websites webmaster. If you are unfortunate enough to have an Affiliate who quickly needs to pay for a new kitchen them you might suddenly experience huge volumes of low value traffic to your site. You might spot this junk traffic and boot the affiliate from your adult program, but in the meantime your costs have gone sky high and the ISP will come-a-knockin’ for their cash. Sometimes only a small fraction of your affiliate membership can punish all affiliates by diluting the quality of the overall traffic of the network, leading to a reduction in affiliate payout rates. Those honest affiliates, the majority, then are left with an even more difficult time trying to create a positive return on their time spent. And those sliced payouts will force dodgy affiliates to work even harder, pushing even more bad traffic at the merchants site to try and account for the drop in revenue share.

A further punishing element is that some of the largest adult websites give large swathes of their adult content to surfers for nothing as they try to pique interest in a fully paid up membership. By doing this the adult industry has forced down conversion rates to historic lows. The average ecommerce site may convert their traffic one time in twenty, whereas an adult site will let 99.9% of their visitors leave without making a sale. Affiliates who work with adult sites are struggling on two fronts; slashed affiliate payouts and severely reduced conversion rates. The tide has turned against the adult affiliates who helped built the online adult industry.

The adult affiliate industry has a stark choice; change or die. Swarms of adult webmasters have now flocked to other methods of monetising their websites and pay per click is a notable example. Advertisers can create their own ads, which means more realistic representation of the actual content on their site, increasing the likelihood of a sale. Additionally, rather than hoodwinking visitors into going to a merchants site through a traffic trading script, a PPC ad requires a genuine click from a real, human user for a visit to a merchants site to occur. That means pre-qualification which means much higher instances of monetisation. These trackable, honest sources of traffic can provide a real future for the adult site owner and affiliate, which means the adult industry can look forward to a brighter future if they are prepared to seize them.

About the Author

Tom has an interest in adult pay per click afiliates.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Tom-West/49396

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