The Right to Choose

August 16 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

I just spent 20 minutes paying a $15 invoice at a VPS hosting facility. I had to click through several pages of their billing website until I was finally sent to Paypal. Then after I paid I got flooded by emails:

* Sale transaction has been accepted
* Receipt for Your Payment to {Host}
* {Host} invoice #xxx (ID xxx) dated 16-Aug-2010
* Your subscription #xxx (xxx.com) has been activated
* Payment #xxx (ID xxx) dated 16-Aug-2010 has been received by {Host}
* Payment received for invoice #xxx (ID xxx) from 16-Aug-2010

How many emails do I need? I put in a support ticket about this excessive spam, but they didn’t respond. Ce la vie.

Anyways, I’m using VPS hosting now for Porn CMS client accounts so I can isolate each install and manage my costs. I’ve automated the installation which makes things easy.

Last weekend, I signed up to my first Delimiter VPS account due to the frustrations and pricing of the host discussed above. To my surprise, the server was set up instantly. I received ssh login within seconds of submitting payment. Their billing is set up as a Paypal subscription, so I don’t have to think about it every month. First impression, way less overhead working with this host.

I have no idea whether Delimiter will work in the long run. Only time can tell if a host is any good – or will stay good. I’m just glad I have a choice.

What a nice capitalist world we live in that allows me to choose between that first mind-sucking, over-spamming VPS host and others like Delimiter.

The Western world wouldn’t have progressed very far without the right to choose. Even in this Internet Age, its unlikely that we would have progressed very far if we didn’t have the choice back at the beginning between UUNet, PSInet and later AOL. Most likely, the suckiest one would have dominated and slowly killed the net.

Come to think of it, without the right to choose, I doubt tecnology would have come far enough for me to even write this blog. Deep thought for a Monday morning. lol

History of the Internet

Traffic 101 v.2010

August 7 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

Traffic patterns in porn have definitely changed over the last few years.

I can remember a time, not so long ago, when a site could hit it big with some in-house TGP and links work. Way back in 2003, I sold 100 memberships a day with a simple design and packaged content (Mount Filth) by slamming the TGP sites with photos. On GFY, they call those the “golden days”.

header of old Mount Filth lol

header of old Mount Filth lol

And now, 10 years after the millennium, everything has changed..

traffic cop

traffic cop

Before mid-2008, attaining Traffic was mainly the work of in-house staff requesting links and banners on other websites. Success was based on man-hours and affiliates only played a small role.

In the last two years, the web hit adolescence. The stumbling, learning-to-walk years are over and things are starting to take shape. The Internet is now finally a true web of connected humans.

As a result of the socialization of the web, once-invisible websites gained power simply by being popular. Getting shared on Facebook, getting re-tweeted, or just simply getting mentioned in email is what makes a site successful. Yes, the web is now a popularity contest.

And just like high school, only the popular survive.

Few people own sites that serve 1 million users a week. Those that do make bank. Unless you own a very popular website or two, the choice for a paysite owner trying to grow becomes: 1. do i spend my time and money building a socially popular site; or 2. do I spend my time and money trying to get these popular site owners to link to me?

Since its nearly impossible to build a popular site (or all sites would be popular, hence none, etc..), we usually must take the 2nd path — get links on popular sites.

And that leads us to the sudden power of affiliates.

Affiliates own all of the heavy traffic sites — (because you don’t) — So the key to good traffic is to attract lots and lots of good affiliates.

Trying to get links on popular sites in your niche is the first place to start. Those sites are spending thousands a day for their incoming traffic. If you can convince them that your site is worth a link, you can benefit from their traffic efforts.

Review sites are also in the affiliate group and always the best converting. Reviewers spend time visiting your website, and their descriptions (even the bad ones) sell a lot of memberships.

When you finally attract a good crowd, don’t forget to keep in touch with them. The web is social, so be social. Email your affiliates and members regularly to keep them clicking back to the site.

For the sites, I manage (see MarketMofo) I do weekly member newsletters and monthly affiliate newsletters packed with all the new content.

Finally, I better mention, traffic sourcing in 2010 requires an affiliate program. If you don’t have an affiliate program, what are you doing online? lol

A picture is worth a thousand words, or about .00003 cents.

August 5 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

I love erotic art. I think photography is one of the most important elements of an adult site (hence my nearly decade old site – dailynudesblog.com). Erotic photos set the mood of a fantasy and give far better detail than video.

Today I was thinking about the monetary and intrinsic value of erotic photos. TeenDreams.com claims to have well over 1 million photos on its website. A monthly subscription costs around $30, which makes their photos worth about 3 cents per thousand (that is, if you ignore the 2,000+ movies).

I don’t want to make this into an ad for Teen Dreams, since there are at least a dozen sites on the web with that content count. I was more interested in evaluating the usefulness of such a low value asset.

The whole point of the online adult industry is to satisfy the fantasies of horny visitors. I’m usually disappointed by adult videos. It seems every photographer wants to get as much zoomed anus as possible in each video. My taste is more about the teasing and tempting. So for me, the set up is the most important part of any adult photo set or video. I want to be driven into the heart and heat of my fantasy. Everything else is just sticky random skin.

sexy girl by a treeA good photoset can set up a fantasy in a surfer’s head much more vividly than actually showing every detail of the fantasy in a video. A photoset allows someone the luxury of adding their own details. But you don’t even need a whole photo set to set the mood, a really good single photo will do the trick too.

In site promotion, the goal is to trigger a fantasy and get the surfer interested enough to seek satisfaction. For example, if a guy sees a photo of a voluptuous girl standing by a tree in revealing lingerie, he may have a fantasy about being there with her. Maybe she’s the daughter of a neighboring farmer, or a friend who stayed overnight. If the fantasy is real enough to him, he will spend the time, energy, and money to seek more content of this girl.

Of course, this scenario assumes the surfer is intelligent enough to have fantasies. I’m not an expert in psychology, so I don’t know if all guys can have fantasies. However, I think we can safely assume that well-paid professional men with high credit limits have enough brainpower for it.

(and that’s our target market after all..)

Simple Dev Server Routing Setup

July 27 2010 by masteryan in servers |No Comments

I was trying to decide whether to build dev server capabilities into Porn CMS.

(dev server = non-live test & build server)

The plan was to make a script-based switch to push visitors to the dev or live server. That script would require at least a config page and some IP storage to manage the dev users.

Then somehow, as I prepped the whiteboard for the project, it came to me:

HOSTS file lol

Just go to the hosts file on your local machine and add the 2 lines below. One line points to the dev server and one line points to the live server. Changes to the hosts file are active immediately after saving the file.


# [dev routing example] #
69.175.85.202 alexander.fedorovhd.com #dev
#69.175.111.18 alexander.fedorovhd.com #live

The first line above points to the dev server for alexander.fedorovhd.com – a new site I’m building. The second line points to the live server. When I’m working on the dev server I comment out the ‘live’ server. And when I want to view the live site, I comment out the dev server.

The only thing missing is a few lines of rsync code to push the updates from the dev server to the live server. And maybe also a nice script to manage the local hosts file (other than notepad).

——–
dev serverThe example above is a working example. You can use it in your own local hosts file. When you visit alexander.fedorovhd.com you will see a yellow DEV SITE tag at the top left of the page if the dev server IP is active. Comment the dev server line and uncomment the live server line, and the DEV SITE tag disappears.

This is a permanent dev server so the IP shouldn’t change. If it does, come back here and I’ll post an update.

FURTHER READING

EDIT HOSTS FILE – MAC OSX 10+
EDIT HOSTS FILE – WINDOWS XP / VISTA / W7

Pricing Yourself Out

July 26 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

chinese-beggarThe recession of 2009 affected the entire world. There are very few (if any) businesses and households that didn’t feel the strangling effect of the worldwide credit crunch. With less credit available, many households slashed spending. As a result, many companies were forced to slash prices to attract customer.

Then we look at the porn business. Sales of adult paysite memberships are the lowest they’ve been since at least 2002. Yet site owners refuse to lower prices. In fact, some even raised their prices to try to make up for the loss of sales volume.

Take, for example, my ex-client (who stiffed me for $18k) – Matt’s Models. When sales started their rapid decline in mid-2008, Matt raised the monthly price by $10. In his mind, this price increase meant that it would take fewer memberships to make the same money. As a result, sales declined at an even faster rate and his revenue plummeted.

Clearly, raising prices in a recession is not a smart move.

Why not satisfy your customer’s need to save money by lowering prices? If a cash-strapped father of three needs a porn fix, is he going to choose a $30 site or a $15 site? Of course he’ll choose to save $15. The savings may even allow him to subscribe to another site at the same time.

I tested this theory in the real world on two of the sites I manage for EroBabeCash. The main site, EroBerlin, had a reasonable monthly price of $19.95. However, seeing the summer slowdown take effect, I suggested that we lower the price to $14.95 a month.

We saw the effects immediately. This small discount resulted in a 50% increase in the new sales daily average (from 30 a day – to 45 a day). It also affected the rebills, which increased 10%.

On EroBabeCash’s other paysite – Jan Nudes – I didn’t change the price so much as changed the price psychology. We launched the site with a price of $19.95 for 60 days (2 months). Sales were slow – at between 0 and two a day. In an attempt to change the fate of the site, I adjusted the price to $9.95 for 30 days. Same price just shorter time period. The result of this test was also immediate. Jan’s site had more sales within hours; and new sales shot up to 10+ a day.

The rebill volume on both sites increased due to these changes. To me it says that members are more likely to rebill if the price doesn’t gouge their wallet.

 

tom greenSubscription pricing affects the non-porn world too. I am a big fan of Tom Green. He’s a funny guy and very innovative. He had his own show on MTV several years ago, but TV work is hard to get. So rather than beg for a network TV gig, he now broadcasts his own late-night style talk show from his house.

I respect the fact that Tom bypassed the network TV racket and launched his own web-based TV show, so I became a member of his site about two years ago. Membership to TomGreen.com – with access to his broadcast archive – is only $5.95 a month. A reasonable price by anyone’s standards.

I only have time to visit his site a few times a year, but I happily let the subscription rebill every month. After all, $5.95 doesn’t even register as an expense.

What would have happened if Tom Green had charged $20 a month for a membership? Would I have stayed a member for two years? Its unlikely that i would have allowed that high price to rebill even once, let alone 20+ times. By setting a reasonable and affordable subscription price, Tom has earned $120 of my dollars (and counting).

Considering that most people are looking to save a few bucks these days, less can really be more. Guys don’t need less porn than before. If anything demand for porn is higher than ever. They are just more weary about spending money.

The demand today is not for more (or better) porn, the demand today is for better pricing. Lowering your prices will improve customer satisfaction, increase new sales, increase rebills, and help your site grow during this period of global decline.

NOTE: If you follow this advice and lower your price, add a comment below and get some attention. One more backlink never hurt anyone.

Where’s the Eyeballs

May 14 2010 by masteryan in marketing |2 Comments

I don’t think its a secret that the adult industry has gone through massive shrinkage in the last year. Many people are blaming the tube sites and the credit crunch economy, but it looks to be a lot more than that.

The main and only problem with adult sales is lack of interest. Between 1999 and 2007 most adult sites saw massive, easy growth and many site owners made a lot of money without much effort. It was easy because there was very little to do online. Guys checked their mail, maybe read some news, and then there was nothing to do but watch porn.

Today there are thousands of sites vying for your online time. Facebook, Youtube, and more small niche sites than you can count. Even my wife spends a couple hours a day on a Thai gossip site that didn’t exist a few years ago.

So the problem is not the economy or free porn, the problem is that porn isn’t interesting enough to attract eyeballs anymore.

I know I focused this post on the adult industry, but this is a global Internet problem. Ever since I started building and marketing sites over a decade ago, every client and every marketing book said their goal was eyeballs. Its not a new concept, now its just a lot harder to achieve.

In today’s oversaturated web it takes a lot more than a gimmick or a viral video to attract a loyal audience. Sure you can find some traffic with a good viral video, but if you want to succeed on the web, you have to get that audience coming back daily – or better yet hourly!

In theory the solution is simple: loads and loads of unique and interesting content. Easy in theory but not so easy in practice. After all, content is not cheap to produce or to publish.

Many of the web leaders have relied on user-generated content. Look at Youtube, xHamster, Facebook, and Myspace. Visitors come back daily – and some actually never leave – because those sites are constantly refreshed with new content.

User-generated content is good for traffic but it doesn’t do anything for sales. Nobody wants to pay a site to see content that the site didn’t publish. So the problem (or maybe the solution) to massive online sales becomes ‘how do you create constantly refreshed content for your visitors?‘

This of course depends on your niche, interests and audience, but if you want to survive on the web in the future, you better figure it out!

SEO is dead.

March 28 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

The idea that some search engine optimization “expert” can come in, tweak your website code, and get you listed on page 1 of Google for your keywords is no longer realistic. Many SEO companies sell page rank as their product or end result, but optimization should be separate from page rank.

To optimize a site for search engines, you: 1. put keywords in your text; 2. make useful meta tags; 3. generate a sitemap; and 4. submit the pages to the search engines.

These steps are what SEO experts physically do when they sell you optimization. However, PAGE RANK requires much more than editing the HTML of some pages and auto-submitting to the engines & indexes.

TRAFFIC is the key to search engine page rank. The only real SEO experts are traffic managers. If some SEO “expert” wants you to hire him, make sure 90% of his plan is getting inbound links to your site. Without those links, he is just blowing smoke up your ass.

the perfect media server

March 2 2010 by masteryan in servers |No Comments

in february i did 6 remote installs for Porn CMS (on client servers). in nearly every one of them i had problems with the way the server was configured. so i thought i should write a post on my blog about how to set up a great streaming video server – that converts your videos too!

the box itself
start with a quad-core server with at least 8GB of ram and a 500GB minimum hard drive. these can be rented for under $300 a month at several hosts. install either fedora or CentOS as the operating system (64-bit if the server has over 4Gb memory).

install the basics
here we remove and clean install the basic LAMP setup. i like to uninstall whatever the host put on the box and reinstall it. this way i know for sure what is installed and the version. also, at least in the old days, server hosts would reassign a server without doing a clean OS reinstall.

yum -y remove httpd* php* mysql* sendmail
yum -y install httpd httpd-devel php php-gd php-devel

NOTE: remove sendmail only if mail not needed. if you are purely storing and serving content (like a tube site) then you may not want sendmail running. on Porn CMS servers i only run sendmail 5 minutes every hour to push out notices. running sendmail 24/7 is a waste of resources.

if mysql is needed:

yum -y install mysql mysql-server mysql-devel php-mysql

restart the server

/sbin/chkconfig httpd on
/sbin/service httpd start

NOTE: i won’t cover php.ini and httpd.conf configurations here. they usually need to be customized for the software you are running.

install ffmpeg
ffmpeg is the easy part these days if you are running Linux or CentOS. that wasn’t the case a year ago so a big shout out to Admin-Ahead. they created a simple menu based installer that takes only a few minutes.

registration and instructions: http://scriptmantra.info/ffmpeg.html

i’ve tried different methods on various servers and what seems to work best is to install the older version first and then the latest. this way all required libraries get installed at least once.

as of this writing, you would want to install 5.0.2 first, THEN install 5.0.6b.

yum -y install dialog

cd /usr/src
wget http://scriptmantra.info/scripts/AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.2
chmod +x AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.2
./AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.2

cd ..
wget http://scriptmantra.info/scripts/AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.6b
chmod +x AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.6b
./AAST_ffmpeg_installer_5.0.6b

/sbin/service httpd restart

install h264 streaming module for apache
the h264 module from code-shop allows you to pseudo-stream your video files. this means visitors can seek forward in the video and it also improves the buffering. it also allows you to access videos directly from your web docs folder rather than having to move your files to a media folder like pure-play streaming servers.

streaming videos with the h264 module obviously requires h264 encoded videos in order to work. you create those using ffmpeg and whatever software you plan to use on the server.

fedora instructions

yum install httpd-devel

cd /usr/src
wget http://h264.code-shop.com/download/apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gz
tar -zxvf apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gz
cd mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7
./configure --with-apxs=`which apxs2`
make
sudo make install

add this to bottom of httpd.conf (check library path in install dialog)
LoadModule h264_streaming_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/mod_h264_streaming.so
AddHandler h264-streaming.extensions .mp4

centos instructions

sudo yum install httpd-devel
sudo yum install httpd mod_ssl

cd /usr/src
wget http://h264.code-shop.com/download/apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gz
tar -zxvf apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gz
cd mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7
./configure
make
sudo make install

add this to bottom of httpd.conf (check library path in install dialog)
LoadModule h264_streaming_module /usr/lib64/httpd/modules/mod_h264_streaming.so
AddHandler h264-streaming.extensions .mp4

restart apache
finally just restart apache and you are done!

service httpd restart

next just find good software – like Porn CMS – to run on your new highly efficient server and start publishing videos to the world!

SimpleCDN Screwup Causes Data Loss

February 26 2010 by masteryan in servers |No Comments

So we have a SimpleCDN plugin on Porn CMS that allows customers to store and serve files from the CDN. It works great as long as you don’t have any technical problems that need support.

For the last few months I noticed in the transactions reports that they hadn’t been billing for storage. File transfer charges are debited daily but I saw no storage fees for months. I emailed them several times about this but there was no response.

Suddenly, on February 23rd, 2010, all the accounts I oversee were billed 90 days of storage. This huge debit caused most accounts to be locked. What does it mean when an account is locked? Well according to their system that means you have 24 hours to pay or they delete all of your files!

No problem if you are online 24/7 and can pay immediately upon receiving the suspension notice. But what happens when you don’t get the email or aren’t online? This was the case with one client and I have spent the last 24 hours working on recovering nearly 500GB of files (and not sleeping).

Fair warning to all SimpleCDN users in the world – watch your account balance every day and make sure your storage is being billed. Also make sure your contact email in their system works because they are ruthless.

Here was their matter-of-fact response to my ticket:

Thanks for your email. If the account was locked – then all files and buckets were deleted.

I show that since payment wasn’t received after 24 hours, the account went into a “lock” state, and the buckets were removed.

I apologize, as you should have received emails regarding the negative balance.

Please let me know if there is anything I can do…

Thanks,
Tony

Bottom line: SimpleCDN doesn’t care about you, so make sure your account is paid and up-to-date. Even mistakes on their end can lead to deletion of your files.

corporate produced content

February 22 2010 by masteryan in marketing |No Comments

The big deal in content over the last few years has been the dramatic loss of revenues due to peer-to-peer filesharing. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into lawsuits, from the first RIAA lawsuits against customers, to lawsuits against torrent giants Pirate Bay and Mininova. Dozens of torrent sites have been shut down, only to see new ones popup up in their place days later.

On the more or less legal side of free content is the tubes – Youtube, Funny or Die, and of course hundreds of adult tubes. Hours and hours of freely available video watching pleasure is only a couple clicks away for anyone with a decent Internet connection.

carmen electra drinks cokeThe one valuable lesson we’ve learned over the years is that free content is not going away. Fighting to stop free content distribution is a waste of time and money. Its also a very backwards way to look at the problem. Drivers speeding on the highway is a problem. So do you make cars slower – or safer?

Product placement in movies and TV shows is prolific. From Coke & Vitamin Water’s blatant sponsorship on American Idol, to BMW’s Mini Cooper placement in The Italian Job.

Beyond product placement, we’ve seen many companies buy the rights to promote a movie. Coca Cola paid $150 million to be the sole promotional partner for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. That $150mm doesn’t include the campaign costs Coke incurred during this promotion, which likely brought their spending on this marketing project well over $200 million.

This amount is a mere fraction of the over $1 billion US that the movie generated, but it more than covered the studio’s production costs (estimated at $130 million). Considering Coke paid more in licensing fees than the total production costs of the movie, why didn’t they just become the movie’s producer?

Owning this movie project would have generated profits of over $1 billion for Coke. Did they sell $1 billion worth of Coca-Cola products during this campaign? Unlikely.

Traditional production studios are earning less money with every project. Can they continue to produce indefinitely if their only revenue stream is being stolen by the ever-growing pirate public?

To overcome piracy obstacles, I think we will see a surge of corporate produced content in the future. Shooting a movie, TV show, or even producing a popular music album is much cheaper than the average marketing campaign of a Fortune 100 company. A profit is also much more likely because they rely on product or service sales in addition to Theater, DVD or CD revenue.

These days, when less than half of all movie projects fail to produce a profit, corporate sponsored content projects can’t be ignored as a viable marketing campaign.

Further Reading:

Hollywood Studio Profit & Market Share Report 2009
Hollywood Accounting Defined
Hollywood: The Ad (from The Atlantic)

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