This topic is something I actually know something about. While I was in grad school and for several years after, I use to build, run, and market 'adult web sites' for models I knew. The money was better than anything I ever made at any 'real job' and I have decided to get back into it in order to make ends meet and get my feet back on the ground after this unforeseen illness knocked my bank account out for the count.

I understand that many people have a problem with sites like the ones I run (NOTE - I will never post links to them here), but I am perfectly fine with them. I am a liberal and my objections to pornography are mainly because of the way it depicts women as sexual objects. Because of that, I personally don't deal in the hardcore side of it, just soft-core stuff like Playboy. I understand that some people will even object to that, but that is their problem. I am doing nothing illegal and can look at myself in the mirror. I do not feel that I am exploiting anybody and I am certainly not contributing to the corruption of minors. All my sites are child protected and have visible warnings on them and are 2257 compliant (2257 being a reference to the record keeping bill passed by congress regulating the industry).

That said, I have learned a lot about marketing from my experience in the digital adult entertainment biz. With all due respect to musicians and music artists, 99.999% don't have a clue how to utilize the tools of cyberspace to market themselves and their music. Even mainstream businesses don't know what they are doing compared to porn web-masters, who are absolute masters of getting and converting traffic for profit.

The mainstream world is still ten years behind the adult world in terms of cutting edge marketing on the web. Every new advertising idea that comes into the mainstream has been around for 10 years in the adult internet world. If you really want to market your music, become an adult web-master and send a portion of your traffic to your music sites. The same college kids that download pictures of naked women also buy music CDs and have ipods. People who like sex ALSO LIKE MUSIC.

Just affiliating yourself with adult web-masters and offering them an affiliate program that will pay them a % of the profits for downloading your music will generate thousands of $$ in sales and dramatically increase your fan base. One of the biggest reasons that mainstream web-sites fail is because they think that paying their affiliates a minimum of 50% of all sales is far too much, and for the mainstream world it is. But consider that the sales made on this kind of traffic are sales that you otherwise would not have made and that you will be making tons of them.

Consider the itunes affiliate program, which is a complete joke. I don't known what they pay to the artist per sale of a song. For the sake of argument, let's say that they pay 60% to the artist, which means that they will get 40%f for each download. They currently pay 5% to their affiliates. An affiliate is a website owner who uses a special promotion link to send people to the itunes store to buy music.

The software on the itunes site matches the code in the url ton your account and pays you 5% of whatever the surfer buys when he/she is there. It will also keep that customer in its database as your customer and pay you 5% on any other purchases that customer makes for a given period of time, as specified in their agreement. Some mainstream affiliate programs don't do this, and the ones that do often limit the time they will pay on purchases of a new customer sent to them via your link.

A lot of them will only pay for what they send you from direct links from your site. In other words, if a customer bookmarks itunes and comes back later to buy, you don't get paid. Adult web-masters are SPOILED because they have many affiliate programs competing for their traffic, and they generally only go with sponsors who will give them the moon.

I would personally never waste my time promoting itunes for a 5% cut on a single sale, when I can promote a pay site and get my choice of $50.00 for an initial sign up (which only costs the surfer five bucks to join), or 60% of initial and all recurring revenue generated by that surfer.

It might seem like the people offering $50.00 pay outs for a $5.00 are crazy, but most of the people who sign up for the $5.00 trial will stay as members for a year or more and keep paying $35.00 every month, which over a year, comes to $420.00/year minus $50.00 = $370.00 to the company. Now multiply this by 5,000 each month and you can get an idea of what these sites make.

I generally opt for the 60% option, which pays me less right off the bat but more in the long run, $210.00 per year as opposed to a $50.00 one time fee. Most adult web-masters promote a both types of affiliates, based on how well they retain their members according to their records and statistics, which they analyze every day.

Why do these pay sites pay so much for sign ups? Easy. Because the web-masters sending them surfers aren't just sending them a few clicks a day. They are sending thousands. You need to re-define the meaning of internet traffic when you are looking at things from an adult web-masters perspective. Adult content web sites get 25x the amount of traffic that mainstream sites do. 70% of all people who sit down to surf the web at any given moment are looking for pictures of naked ladies (or naked guys). What does that say about us? We like sex.

That is one reason I get so angry at the hypocrisy of the far right. Most of the people doing the complaining surf for porn when no one is looking. Believe it or not, there is a much higher % of people looking for porn coming from red states than from blue states. I can track that data every day in my stats package on my server.

Web-masters have to know where their traffic is coming from because of the high likelihood of BANDWIDTH theft, i.e., people linking to your content and not your advertising, thereby STEALING your BW. BW is by far the highest expense for any online adult web-master business. Most web-masters will block traffic from troubled regions like Russia, which is filled with thieves and crooks. US and Canadian traffic from search engines is the best kind of traffic because it is the kind that generates the most sales. But I always get a smile when I see the flood of traffic coming from the bible belt areas, areas where you're not suppose ta be lookin' at that kind a' stuff. Maybe that's what I have so much of an attitude when I post about religion in these forums.

Anyway, the point is that the people in the music business are missing a golden opportunity by not aligning themselves with this market. Taking the itunes example, let's say that 100 affiliates sign up, and each one generates 10 sales, which comes to $10.00 in total income per affiliate, or $1,000.00 overall.

50% goes to the artist - $5.00
45% goes to the itunes - $4.50
5% goes to the affiliate - $0.50

For 100 affiliates, the company makes $450.00
The artist makes $500.00
The affiliates combined make $50.00

Looking at this, you can easily see why an affiliate would not want to waste his/her time on this. Now let's consider the adult web-master side. The more you offer an affiliate, the more affiliates you will get. So let's say you offer the artist less and you take less yourself. You pay the affiliate 60% off the top and you split the balance with the artist. Because of that offer, you will likely get many more affiliates sending you traffic and they will send you 25 times the traffic than mainstream affiliates will send, which will likely translate into 25x the number of sales. Let's say you get 1,000 affiliates selling (modestly) 25 downloads each (more sales are likely because of more traffic). Now you are making 25k overall per affiliate.

The affiliate gets 60% - $1,200.00 = $15,000.00
The company gets 20% = $5,000.00
The artist gets 20% - $5,000.00

The profits are much larger and the sales figures are much higher. That in turn will make the labels look more closely at your band. You will also generate a larger fan base, to which you can sell other products.

Of course, the bottom line in all this is that you have a have a great band with killer songs that puts on a kick AXE show every night. In other words, the products needs to be something that people want to buy. But if you have that, using this kind of marketing strategy can kick your exposure through the roof. Go to where the people are. They are looking at porn, so go there.

Fisherman hook fish; songwriters fish for hooks

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