How about a Modelcentro advertising program?
OK, I was looking at advertising recently, I checked out trafficjunky.com who is linked with porn hub, the whole thing looked complicated as hell and was completely off-putting, so I'm wondering if it would be in modelcentro's best interests (as well as ours) to have an advertising program where we can add credit or have charge taken from our revenue to cover fees for a modelcentro driven advertising option.
For example I might have $50 a month that I'm willing to pay for having my site included on a modelcentro banner advetisment on pornhub or xhamster for example.
it just feels like this should be easier than it is ! and if modelcentro can make this easier like it does so many other beneficial elements of this industry then it could only be good for models and modelcentro too.
just a thought....
Comments
If there was any media-buy, it would probably be promoting Models.xxx. Couldn't see a better way of going about it.
Adult traffic is insanely cheap. Primarily because it doesn't really convert. Everyone is looking for free porn. I was shocked to see customer conversions for some of the camming sites (Chaturbate, SkyPrivate, ect).
@busty_von_tease, if you ever want me to show you the ropes of publisher / advertiser networks, let me know. I'm not that familiar with trafficjunky, as they don't have a webmaster referral program, therefore I don't make any money off them, but all the networks behave similarly.
There's two main things to take into consideration with media-buy;
Bid-Optimization - All ad space is based off a bidding system. The higher the bid, the more ad placement an advertiser gets. You want to be bidding high enough to get traffic, but you don't want to be over-bidding. A real bid-optimization strategy includes monitoring the average bid across multiple networks for the niche / category of sites you want your ads to be displayed on.
Conversion-Optimiztion - Media buy is only profitable if there's a high enough conversion rate and a good dollar/conversion ratio. It's hard to determine the dollar per conversion, because subscriptions are residual in earnings. It is possible to benchmark the conversion rate and work towards optimizing it; whether it's split-testing different ad rtypes, playing around with direct-buy on different sites, playing around with different landing pages, call-to-actions, ect.
I personally try to avoid media-buy, only because I don't want to have to focus on all of that. That's why I focus on SEO. Getting shit ranked can be a bitch, but once it's ranked it's earned traffic, doesn't cost a thing and you don't have to monitor bids, what sites your ads are appearing on, traffic quality, ect.
SEO also has the highest conversion rates of any channel. It's the ability to self-serve the most relevant information.
I'm curious to see what others think about this..... thanks @busty_von_tease starting this topic
Thanks @WebcamStartup I'm all ears ! I'm just looking for further exposure I guess, I understand everyone whats something for free these days, but I guess that just makes it more important for us to provide something more personal and unique on our sites.
Any tricks of the trade or low-hanging-fruit we can take advantage of to get our stuff noticed the better !
@busty_von_tease is there anything in particular you're curious about? Social media and directory-style sites are the low hanging fruit.
Or are you talking about media buy in general?
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of media buy. But a lot of that's also because I'm an SEO. The time I'd be spending monitoring bids and benchmarking conversions, could be used curating and ranking content. I know that once that content is ranked, it'll generate revenue for free-ish (Bandwidth) and I'll have traffic without having to worry about a CPC or CPM.
I've dabbled more with paid search than I have publisher/advertiser networks, as a lot of SEO clients also wanted paid search. All of it, I really did under duress and the only advice for paid search I ever would give would be to bid for the competitions brand name.
If you're Ford, you're never going to get above-the-fold rankings for "Chevy". But you could bid for paid search results for Chevy-related queries and leach off their branded traffic and have a nice landing page on why they should by Ford over Chevy.
Doesn't really transfer over into the adult niche, but it kind of gives you an idea of where I stand on paid traffic like that.
@busty_von_tease You can also use Pornhub's Content Partner Program OR Amateur Program to help promote your own site.
If you follow those links you'll be able to read all the informtion on each program. I believe the Content Partner program gives you the most exposure, but it's particular good for large sites. It drives traffic to your website but it's then on you to earn money from sign ups. With the content partner program you get banners and other features on Pornhub that link to your site.
The amateur program is what I use and would recommend. It's similar to just having a profile and uploading videos to Pornhub, but you get paid for views. I have a few full length videos uploaded, but I prefer to upload previews to entice people to visit my ModelCentro site or ManyVids site-- depending on whether they prefer to stream or download. If you choose to use the amateur program, I highly suggest you Watermark your videos or include a link to your site at the end so people can find you, disable downloads for each upload as soon as the option becomes available, and don't upload anything that you might want to take down in the future-- as once a video has been paid for it cannot be removed.
It's hard for me to say what my converstion rate has been from pornhub, but I know I've gotten a few members from there and of course, a few paychecks from pornhub views. I highly recommend the amateur program.
It wouldn't be millions of dollars for models or anything like that, but if MC put in a field for HubTraffic, models could monetize any traffic they send to PornHub via video embeds. It'd be a nice hybrid strategy uploading the teaser scenes to PornHub and embedding them in an MC blog post as a teaser for the actual video content behind the paywall.
Don't even know what the CPM is. Can't be too epic, adult traffic is cheap as fuck. Still, money is money. Hell, if I was in your guys's shoes, I'd probably be rocking a HubTraffic account across all the MC sites and I'd personally by banking off any embeds unknonst to the models, but that's just me
I guess the going CPM is $1.28 for top-tier contries. That means $1.28 per every 1000 referrals a model sends PornHub via links or embeds. Like I said, nothing epic, but you're allowing for tube embeds, so might as well NOT leave mney on the table.
I'm into internet monetization though, so I guess I freak out about pennies knowing that they compound over time.
@busty_von_tease To use trafficjunky is very easy. They even have a tutorial on you tube. But MC sites don't give you a chance to track conversions so i can't say if it is usefull or not. And you can't use html long video banners like brazzers has there - usual customers can use only 350kb gifs or static banners. The best respons you get in content partner publish on pornhub rathen then with ad spaces.
There's a really good thread on XBIZ about using media buys/traffic marketplaces/advertising platforms.
Here's the link to thread:
http://www.xbiz.net/index.php?c=discussion.view_thread&id=18126
And I'll post some of the useful info for those who won't bother to get on there (Please do go and read the whole thread when you get the chance and get approved on the forum there):
About the main steps of the process:
"Indeed, there is no creative input from traffic networks. Like Oscar said: their business is basically selling banner space. The creative part, filtering, planning, etc is up to the advertiser.
The most important thing to remember is that all traffic makes a loss until YOU make it profitable.
Marketing, HTML, Photoshop are some of the required skills to make this work. Besides that you'll also need:
1) A budget you're willing to burn just to be able to generate enough data to find out where the money is. $10k should do it. It will allow you to bid high so you generate data quickly. Bidding high will also get you better quality traffic because popular traffic sources within the network will have a lot of bidders, if you bid low you won't really see much traffic of the best sources within in the network. You need to accept that you will lose a good chunk of this money. It's for testing and finding out what works.
2) You need a professional tracking solution. I personally prefer iMobiTrax because of it's ease of use. It only allows you to track one type of conversion event but we custom coded a new backend for it that allows us to track as many different types of conversions as we want (e.g. Sales, Leads, Email Submits, etc...)
3) You'll need lots of banners, if you don't have an internal photoshop guy just go and scrape some from the tubes. (10 banners is good for starters)
4) You'll need some pre landers to get the users excited about your product. (create 2-3 pre landers)
5) You'll need a good angle and good marketing copy. And it needs to stay consistent throughout your whole funnel (!)
How to filter and make the traffic profitable:
Upload your banners for a CPM campaign, set your bid higher than average so you generate data quickly, don't miss out on the good quality and let it run for 24 hours. The next day check which traffic sources didn't convert and block them. Check which banners made money and which didn't. Stop the banners that have a bad eCPA.
Try to find the best banner/pre-lander combinations.
Note: banners eventually stop working because of banner blindness, nothing you can do about that so you need to keep adding and testing new banners daily.
Look at which OS's converted, which GEO's, which handsets, etc and keep cutting things that don't work.
This is a very simplified description of the process of media buying but it will give you an idea of what's required to make media buying campaigns work..."
Short and true:
"It's not up to the traffic networks to find out which banners, geo's, handsets, carriers, etc convert best for your product. That's really entirely up to you."
About starting small
" Ok - this 10 Grand figure is something I heard so often that it kept me from even attempting to buy traffic for nearly a year.
But guess who was throwing that figure out? People who would make commissions if they got me to commit to that figure. People who were not spending their own capital to buy that traffic, but were using other people's money to do it. Brokers used to working with companies that were cash flush and able to throw spaghetti against the wall until something stuck....
Now, it is something that is repeated so often that everyone has come to believe it. I doubt that the broker reps are lying, just that what they believe and what they repeat is just not true.
I started with a budget of 25 dollars a day - when it wasn't converting well, I talked to my rep and asked him what sort of CTR a good campaign gets. When I found out - I quickly shifted and tested a few new banners. And my CTR more than doubled.
Once I had some ads that were better converting, I started upping my budget... creating new banners often, and then scrubbing anything that didn't work. I used those same ads that I knew were working, and used them on a different network - so that testing there was far less risky.
Honestly - if you have some decent photoshop skills, an hour or so a day for a couple of weeks to build banners and check stats, and 25 dollars a day to spend for a month or so - you can do excellent testing. You don't need to pony up 10k that may or may not work - especially if you don't know what you're doing. And honestly, I think ad brokers and others do a grave disservice by telling folks who are just learning to go all-in. "
About testing:
"Testing is a mandatory part of media buying. There is no way a campaign goes straight into profits. It's simply not realistic. It's about finding the right funnels and filtering correctly. Any experienced media buyer will tell you what I'm telling you right now. Right now you do not have data on which you can rely to make the right filtering decisions. You do not know which banner/lander combinations work and which don't. Your initial load allows you to generate that data. You would start out broad and then narrow it down till you're in the green.
And indeed, if not done correctly, media buying IS a bottomless pit. Also, be careful with anybody advertising to do your media buying for you. The only merchants that I know that are successful at it are doing their media buys in house.
I also agree with Ross' initial post here, ad networks are not here to make a fast buck and there's quite a few of them out there that give excellent support to their clients but there is a learning curve and it does really take some money to become successful even if you've got the best product in the world.
I can understand your frustration but if you want it done right hire yourself an experienced media buyer and don't outsource it."
A bit of black hat thinking:
"This is exactly what I was talking about. I'm the first to admit that I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to making ads. When I hear someone tell me that I'm on my own and that I need to make a huge investment to "test" I think (after about 10 minutes of silently swearing) "great... test what, where, and how? Did I not just say I have no idea what I'm doing?" It bothers me to no end that they don't take responsibility for their own product and aren't full service.
But this thread has made me realize why that is. Traffic brokers are more concerned with selling vast quantities of cheap traffic that they don't have to back, rather than provide a full service and make more money per sale if they need to be responsible for it. And frankly, that lowers my opinion of traffic networks by a considerable amount. You just don't care about the product you're selling as long as you can move a lot of it. But you know what? I don't want to go to Walmart to buy my traffic. I want that concierge service with a personal shopper who's job is to make sure that I'm getting what I'm paying for. That's worth money to me. I want an advertising firm who's going to say "don't worry about a thing. We'll take care of it," and it just gets done, not someone who's going to tell me that I'm on my own. Yeah, it creates conflicts of interest... so don't accept clients who create those conflicts. Problem solved. But no, it's more important to sell shit traffic, bot traffic, and vaporware than actually stand behind your products. If I did that in the toy industry, I wouldn't be able to stay in business very long. Shame on you. Seriously. "
And some more:
"Before there were traffic brokers there were affiliates.
Affiliates would promote sites that had the content they believed their traffic wanted to pay for. If the sites they promoted didn't convert, they would move on and promote another site.
As for my 90% offer, why should the advertiser eat the $10K up front while the publisher and the broker make money regardless?"
But it does work:
"I work with more than a half-dozen different people/companies that CURRENTLY make a fortune buying traffic and placing ads on an affiliate basis. I don't own any ad network, but I can substantiate the claims from personal experience working with whales.
Most of them never post on message boards or go to shows or speak to anyone in the industry. When they want to do that, they have me make a post or ask around on their behalf. They do exist, there aren't just a few of them, they work their asses off day and night... and they have built up massive budgets to be able to leverage the data they get from each ad buy they make.
When I create content for them I get very specific notes of exactly what they want, how they want it, any changes to be made, a huge list of variations for multivariate testing versions and all the rest. They aren't guessing, they aren't 'throwing up a banner on a lark' - they are professionals and they do quite well.
What seems to be happening in the industry now is that most people have no idea how big the gap is between 'throwing $50 at a banner ad with zero tracking' and actually being a professional media buyer with tracking, testing, data and a budget.
You can get into it with $50, but if you do, you should be figuring out how to build that investment into a 6 figure revenue strategy long term, rather than trying to figure out how to get $51 back right away."
And realism:
"My response was to the people saying that only ad brokers claim people are making money as media buyers or that nobody is making money doing this.... I know from first hand knowledge... nothing anecdotal about that. You may not know from first hand knowledge, but you are being told by a witness that it is true. By all means, take your time and evaluate the credibility of the witness. If you don't believe me... that doesn't bother me a bit. If you do believe me, then listen to the advice in this thread, and in the Skype chat Ross started. There is plenty of it worth noting.
The biggest thing of all is, if you get in with $50 be sure you are working toward a long term strategy with tracking, testing and an actual plan of action... not just trying to immediately earn back $51.00. The former may succeed or fail and then recalibrate to try again, the latter always fail and whine loudly when they do - even after being advised to take a different path ahead of time.
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Originally Posted By Dr. Clockwork: Now some may make the assertion that this is more art than science, and there's no formula to how to make a successful campaign that gives a positive ROI.
No. Idiots and amateurs think it's an art. Professional media buyers do not. Yes, at the start there are a lot of variables and educated guesses to be made. The number of guesses gradually decreases as the data from those guesses and your own test results replace those unknown variables with actionable facts. There is a formula to get a positive ROI. That formula has been explained many times. Some people dislike the formula so they ignore it, or they claim its complicated, or they whine and forget what the question was to begin with in the first place.
Here is the 10 step BASIC formula:
1 - Set up MEANINGFUL tracking before you buy a single click.
2 - Look at what others in your niche are buying repeatedly to get anecdotal evidence of what may now be working and useful to you.
3 - Acquire traffic in small lots from a number of different sources based on # 2 above.
4 - QUICKLY track the results and evaluate them so they do not become stale.
5 - Make a 2nd round of buys in small lots with more from sources that did well and less from sources that did not.
6 - Begin testing slight variances of your landing pages, ad creatives, text, price points and pretty much every other thing that might affect the outcome.
7 - Track ALL of those tests.
8 - Further calibrate your ads and sites based on #4, 5, 6, and 7
9 - Buy more traffic from sources that did best to creatives that did best and less from sources to targets that did not do as well.
10 - Repeat thousands and thousands of times over the course of years.
* Keep in mind, steps 1 to 10 above require a significant budget to bankroll all of it if the initial buys do not pay out well. Steps 1 to 10 require a herculean amount of time and effort on a seven day per week 24 hour per day basis for months if not years. Steps 1 to 10 have a significant amount of risk and require constant recalibration to avoid ads that become stale, niches that become oversaturated, content that loses its efficacy and so on. Steps 1 to 10 are NOT FUCKING EASY... if they were, everyone would be doing it and driving in the Gumball Rally rather than sitting around bitching and moaning on a message board that the people who succeed at it are somehow doing something disingenuous.
What I just wrote out above saves you countless hours and dollars of waste. It doesn't do any of the work for you. I've long said that I don't mind telling people how to succeed... as most who can succeed are already so busy that they don't have time to copy someone else, and those who can't succeed won't succeed even if you tell them precisely how to go about it. Those 10 steps will get you started... there are countless other steps of optimization beyond this basic 10 and I damn sure do not know most of them.... which is why I have so much of an appreciation and sense of respect for the people who do and are willing to share some of what they have learned along the way."
About evolution and current state of affairs:
"The fact remains, people will buy *something*, they will always buy *something* and marketing is as much about figuring out what they will buy as it is about figuring out the best ways to sell it to them.
The thing that has changed the most isn't the marketplace, it's the analytics available. When the web started, porn wasn't free... but more importantly people knew fuck-all about figuring out what consumers wanted, which ads worked well, which traffic was the most valuable and so on. These days there are companies running 1000s of multivariate tests every day on their networks, there are products like Khepri that apply machine learning to those massive data sets, there are granular tracking software options like ItsUp to make sense of the data... and then there are people who are still 'guessing' when they spend money.
Guessing is a good way to START, but it is only useful if you can turn those initial guesses into information that improves your next round of guesses and leads to a point where you are analyzing and acting rather than guessing and reacting. Put simply, some people are playing texas holdem with four up cards, and others are playing roulette.
Free porn isn't the problem... many people are making money in the free porn era. Guessing is the biggest problem plaguing people in this industry today. I watch companies guess about what content to shoot, while others use user-metrics to know what viewers want to see next. I watch companies guess about who to work with, while others have a strong set of allies in place and can easily vet consultants or outsourced entities before giving them a single penny. I watch people guess on ad buys and not even bother to track the results.
What I tell them over and over and over... is stop guessing. Invest money and time and effort in things that will help you guess less often, make better guesses, learn from the results of each guess, or help turn the results of your guesses into follow-up actions faster.
"Guess Less... Earn More."
If I started my own ad network today, that would be its slogan
"
Some very good questions answered:
.1 Google Analytics is NOT a good tracking solution. I personally use IMOBITRAX to track all my media buys but as I mentioned they can only track one type of conversion (example: only sales OR only leads OR only newsletter register, etc) which is clearly a handicap. It is the only thing not good about their product so we coded a custom backend for IMOBITRAX where we can track as many different types of conversions as we want. It's not exactly a cheap solution at around $180/per month but there are other cheaper solutions out there that will do the trick as well. The only reason I use IMOBITRAX is because I just really love the workflow, I'm used to it and I run profitable campaigns with it. Whatever script you go with MAKE SURE IT CAN TRACK MOBILE!!!
- If you think IMOBITRAX is too expensive I suggest asking the ad network people in here if they know some other solutions you could look at. IMPORTANT TIP: SET UP TOKEN TRACKING. MAKE SURE THAT YOU STORE ALL INFORMATION THE TRAFFIC NETWORK MAKES AVAILABLE TO YOU (EXAMPLE: SOURCEID, SOURCEDOMAIN, BANNERID, CAMPAIGNID, ETC) - YOU SHOULD NEVER RUN WITHOUT MAKING SURE THAT'S BEING STORED BY YOUR TRACKING SCRIPT.
.2 Niches are easier to convert because you're starting out more targetted. Advertise a BDSM product (example bdsm cams, bdsm dating, bdsm membership site) on a BSDM site (example a bdsm tube, a bdsm blog, ...) for the best results.
.3 I personally don't target by keyword but in your case if you want to run BDSM campaigns just follow the advice above. (advertise BDSM on BDSM). The amount of traffic source to advertise on really depends on your budget, if your budget is small just pick a very large traffic network with lots of volume and try their premium spots in the BDSM niche. Most traffic networks will allow you to set that niche when you setup your campaign. Then, once traffic is running check the SOURCE DOMAINS that are sending you traffic, you can see them in your tracking solution if you've set up tokens properly. Open all those domains in your browser and double check to make sure it's a site you want receive traffic from for your product.
.6 Firstly, you should always start with more than landing page. I usually start a new campaign with minimum 2 landers. You can either test completely different designs and layouts or if you have a nice design that works you can optimise it further by changing things like images, header texts. Even by changing things as simple as an image or a text you can see conversion differences of 100-300% or more. If you see you've found an improvement cut the old landers and keep trying to optimise. rinse and repeat.
You need to do the same thing with banners too, you need to try to improve them on a daily basis.
This optimisation process should be a daily task, just make sure you don't change things too quickly either. Make sure you generate enough data first. I personally wait for at least 5 to 10 conversions for any banner or lander before I evaluate it. This means that if you have 10 banners and 2 landers you'll have meaningful data as soon as each combination has at least 5 conversions. That means in this case a total of 100 conversions (you might have banners that just don't convert - If you see one with 500 clicks and no conversions and another with 500 clicks and 20 conversions you'll have to cut the first one).
Note: when I speak about "conversions" those can mean free signups, sales, trials, whatever. The more conversions you have the more data you're generating. It goes without saying that free signups will happen more often than sales and thus they generate you more data for less money than sales will. TIP: Track free signups to generate your data, as this data is a lot cheaper to get YOU WILL NEED LESS MONEY INVESTED before you make a profit simply because you can make the right decisions more quickly.
9. Free signups, Trial signups, Trial conversions, Full sales, EVEN ATTEMPTED sales, Free signups with validated email address etc. Each represent a different level of visitor quality but all should be tracked...
10. Some campaigns can get into profits after $500 some after much more. Start with a budget you are comfortable with and make sure you track and optimise. If you follow the advice in the original post you'll be able to see improvements very quickly.
TIP IF YOU DON'T HAVE A LARGE BUDGET: Instead of running 10 banners and 2 landers start with 5 banner and 2 landers (which is really the minimum I recommend, I personally don't run anything new with less than 10 banners and 5 landers but that's just me). The more banners and landers you test simultaneously the more budget will be required to generate meaningful data.
So, in short, people without big bank roll can test with lower bids, less banners, less landers (with a minimum of 5 banners and 2 landers). Once you optimise INCREASE your bid to get more traffic. Rinse and repeat. Daily."