HardBritLads are considering adding a webcam section similar to what BelAmiOnline have, where our models do live shows.
But before we go ahead and have the third party webcam section we wanted to check what our affiliates thoughts are on this? Affiliates would be offered a percentage of the revenue resulting from their referral. The alternative is that the webcam section is hidden from affiliate traffic if affiliates are concerned about the previous option.
AFAIK if you go with a third party like Streamate they will run all the technology, affiliates will still get their share as it’s tracked (if you run NATS) and you do can do members only shows, public chat, parties or whatever else.
And as long as you’re putting the webcams inside the member’s area, I have no problem either. Please do not put them on your tour like Randy Blue did, I’m quite sure that move is responsible for their drop to abysmally low conversion rates.
Plus, maybe cams in the members area only would help increase rebills which I seem to be having a problem with. No complaints about the conversion ratios but for some reason the traffic I’m sending isn’t staying more than a month.
Michael, when you say inside the member’s area, do you mean inside the member’s area only? I suspect you do, but just to be sure…
When I discussed it with Simon I explained affiliates would not be too impressed to refer their traffic only to find it goes off to a revenue stream that is less profitable than the signup.
Plus, maybe cams in the members area only would help increase rebills which I seem to be having a problem with. No complaints about the conversion ratios but for some reason the traffic I’m sending isn’t staying more than a month.
What I wouldn’t want to see happen is the same thing Randy Blue did: they have littered their tour with pics of cam models and offers for free 10-minute chat packages, and the clicks are siphoning traffic away from the traditional join process. And as I have said a dozen times before: Why buy a membership to a porn site when you can chat with a guy for free? (If you look at Randy Blue now, on my 24-inch monitor half of the space above the fold is devoted to Randy Blue Live, which gives everyone some free minutes.)
Once a surfer buys a membership and logs in, I don’t care if you offer weekly live shows or try to upsell members to a chat program, it doesn’t matter to me, although it’s very nice to include us in the revenue – most sites don’t.
If you want to put ads on your tour saying members can talk to these guys live inside, that’s fine, it only heightens the tease and the appeal of buying a membership. But I think we’re all pretty sure that Randy Blue’s approach has killed our sales. They keep saying there are more opportunities to buy, but not much affiliate traffic seems to be.
it’s nice that you want to offer affiliates a percentage of any member area cam sales. i guess what i’m wondering is how this will affect rebills. after all, paying per minute for cam shows gets expensive fast. usually 6 minutes costs as much as a full monthly membership. any idea of what percentage you’d be offering? if a guy likes a cam model and goes for 25 minutes, he’ll have paid the equivalent of 3 months membership or so, but in the case of most cams, the affiliates gets a significantly smaller share of the proceeds. if that member would have spent only 1 month as a member, the cam money would be gravy, but if he cancels what would have been 3 recurring months as a result of the money spent on the cams, it could eat info affiliate profits.
i think it would take some experimenting to see how this works out.
Thanks for your views on this. Its a tricky one. The last thing I want to do is turn off affiliates. I was hoping though that it would result in more sales to the site for one thing, which affiliates would benefit from, as well as a share. Basschick makes a good point though, what exactly is the share the affiliate gets? I need to ask them. FYI the company I am talking to about this is AWEmpire. And they assure me that the way they have it set it, affiliates DO make extra money from it. But there is the other option of having the link to the cam section hidden from Affiliate traffic.
This is what AWEmpire said when I told him about affiliates concerns:
First:
As I may have mentioned, we can provide you an XML feed and ability for your affiliates to actually promote the WL and get a %, this is best cause you can actually get affiliates to help you make the site more successful.
Second Option:
your developers can create a menu item for live cams that shows both to users in the “members” section AND to your “type in traffic” & “marketing ad buys traffic”. ONLY the clicks that are sent by affiliates would not see the menu item.
Possibly we could do it so affiliates have the choice of both options? So the default setting would be that the affiliates traffic does NOT see the link to the cams, but they would see a banner advertising it as a free members benefit. (Free credits are given with the membership, and any additional time they want to spend on the cams they pay for) But then the affiliate wants to, they can also set it so that their traffic does see the cam section, and they can make their percentage from that too.
I will ask them what percentage the affiliate gets as this is key, and let you know when I hear back.
But so far the general consensus seems to be that you would prefer it if the link to the Cams Section was hidden from affiliate traffic, and I totally understand where you are coming from, and im very happy to set it up in this way, if I decide to do it. But please let me know if you have any thoughts or ideas on this. Cheers, Simon.
I think basschick makes some good points about spending limits of members. If I weren’t an affiliate and looking at porn all day, I’d certainly be willing to spend upwards of $30 joining my favourite site, maybe even two. But I wouldn’t be willing to pay to chat with someone.
I think chat sites appeal largely to guys who can’t get “it” elsewhere. Lonely older men who are longing for companionship and have the means to pay for it. Your regular 20-something-year-old guy with a low-paying job doesn’t have the money to throw away on a $6 per minute chat option, especially when there’s so much out there for free. We’re lucky if we can even get these guys to join a paysite.
There’s a reason that sales on chat sites aren’t the best converters and an affiliate can literally sit there and watch thousands of clicks go by with no sales. Anyone who spends money on a chat site has to have a fairly good income to support the behaviour or a credit card where they can rack up debt.
You’ll certainly get lots of surfers using up the free time gifted to them to try and hook them, but buyers are hard to come by. I recently watched a documentary about the adult business and they talked to one woman who was getting ready to do a live cam show. I think she did a two or three hour stint where she was chatting for free and trying to hook someone into buying a private session and when she came back to the cameras after doing her session, she said, “I made $100.” Not a great deal considering the number of men she was chatting with. And not a lot when you consider that she gave up three hours of her time. Still, what kind of a job could she get making $33 and hour?
But it kind of proves my point: she talked to and teased a lot of guys and only managed to hook one guy.The dozens and dozens of others were just tire kickers looking for a little titillation to get them revved up for the main event – jacking off by themselves.
I believe that the only affiliates who make lots of lots of money with chat programs are the ones running escort platforms where they have a steady stream of lonely, old, rich men who can afford to pay for companionship.