Now is the time to asset your right and know your responsibilities as part of the online ad buying equation and process! There are enough qualified, bona fide established sellers of online media and traffic campaigns to make the process of buying traffic on the adult web a vital piece of any marketing plan.

From Google AdWords, AVNads, Etology, ExpressPro Yahoo Paid Inclusion, to banners, video and text ads that we and other agencies sell, the choices abound! Some advertisers seemingly do well everywhere they run, while others test many sources and seemingly never find the high conversion traffic sweet spots being sought after.

In order to make best use of the online ad buying experience, here you a few ideas, from the perspective of a long time buyer and seller:

-Establish a relationship with your account manager from each venue where you run ad buys, whether testing or recurring. If you don’t have a staffer from the traffic vendor assigned to you, ask for one.

-If you don’t like the one you have, ask for another. It’s quite critical to have someone who comprehends your business needs working for the vendor, one who will have ongoing communications with you, after the sake during the campaign a few times, as well as when they want to sell you the next campaign.

-Talk to your vendor contact, even if for 5 minutes, regularly, as in every week or two, no less. The vendors need to know your view of how things are going to compare against the data they make available.

-Share your revenue stats data and even access with the ad source. While not all traffic vendors will do this, enough of the established sources will have your sales rep view advertiser revenue stats to compare against the ad spend data and measure your effective CPA easily. If a vendor is willing, don’t hide the stats. The vendors have a strong bias towards making campaigns work – advertiser turn over is no good for anyone.

-Make sure you track everything! And I mean, everything – every campaign from a single source, if buying on multiple sites. Most affiliate program software allows for sub-ID tracking by affiliates. As such, when using the affiliate system to create house accounts to track online ad buys, create a sub-ID and distinct tracking URL for every part of a media buy that can be separately identified – ad spot, type of creative, page or site from vendor.

-If a source you trust has multiple ad buying options/multiple networks or properties, set an overall budget to spend with that company which can be sliced up more easily among several options to test, versus buying campaigns from traffic vendors a la carte. A budget on account allows the vendor greater flexibility in placing your ads across properties they seek to fill ad space on with steady long term advertisers. Many traffic vendors will provide enhanced client support services when there are greater client resources for media testing.

-Expect increased focus on legal compliance requirements for advertisers. All credible sellers will require enhanced compliance from online ad buyers, with regards to site content, creative materials and record keeping requirements. While this is nothing new, it is our expectation that as media source compliance rules expand, it will have the trickle down effect, requiring online advertisers and the media suppliers to be more conservative with certain types of marketing efforts.

Do you derive professional satisfaction from your work, aka “job well done” thinking? Many in this industry have said that’s a strange question since many people work in adult for purely capitalist/financial reasons. Despite monetary gain, I think it is as important for adult companies and staff at all levels to ‘feel good’ about their work, how they handled particular situations, meeting clients’ needs, etc.

When you project the fact that you are satisfied with the work you do for people and the output of what your company does for an entire industry, this creates the energy that can drive morale in a company through the roof. Pride in service is a similar concept related to the theme being written about today.

Do you believe in what you are offering to others professionally? Do you believe in the products and services being sold to others, whether B2C or B2B? As an owner or senior manager, do you believe in the efforts and output of your employees, contractors, client, vendors, etc.? If you don’t, then it’s far more difficult to project that universal confidence in written and spoken form which drives industry buzz and growth potential for people and companies.

What’s the point of all this and how does it relate to the usual theme for my blog postings? Simple. Word of mouth marketing, also known as viral marketing is a concept that is not new or original. The application and management of word of mouth marketing is an area that people are speaking more about these days. I am a very big advocate of the concept that the most valuable promotion you or your company can ever benefit by and quantify is positive word of mouth.

We always read about the potential and actual negative impact of viral marketing. It is true that if you have upset people or not fulfilled their needs as clients if you are a company, then you will definitely suffer from negative visibility from clients or peers with an active voice. For the moment, set that aside. Focus on the equally awesome potential for ROI-laden promotion for you or your company when you do right by people and they are happy enough and passionate enough about the experience to tell people on your behalf publicly.

This category of business or entity promotion can be tracked for ROI as well. While the notion of tracking cost and returns in this area may seem abstract, consider this: if you are a company that needs to spend money on staff and technology to maintain technical support, customer service or sales teams, you can spend company time, resources and money on lower cost or higher cost options. If for one category of need, you opt to invest in hiring and training talented people and matching them with higher end tech systems versus going the ‘budget” route, see how much positive buzz you get from satisfied customers or vendors.

The difference in cost between spending company resources more or less aggressively is measurable. Equally measurable are the following: how much repeat/expanded business you see from existing clients/vendors, how many new clients/vendors are sent via referral from existing satisfied folks, etc. At the end of six months or a year of testing this, you will have enough data to evaluate the ROI from this process. At the end of the day, it is almost always possible to track and evaluate ROI from any investment of time, money or other resources by companies and people.

Disclaimer: this is a topic where for conventional business reasons, I have a definite bias. Our company manages the sales of adult advertising on high traffic sites & domains. We feel that we are in a good position to help industry peers that have been or will be impacted by the Google AdSense adult domain policy change.

There are days when your brain gets thrown into action the minute you start reading your e-mails and industry news. The 18th of this month was one of those days for me. It appears that Google is no longer Kosher with letting adult domain owners and managers use their affiliate traffic partner revenue program called AdSense anymore. The immediate effects of this include various adult domain portfolio managers needing to find replacement income sources for the traffic generated by their domains to offset the loss of Google AdSense income.

The reason why AdSense works well for all online media verticals, including adult until recently, is simple. For companies and webmasters who have high quality & steady traffic flow, sending that traffic to an ad selling system versus affiliate compensation based offers is a reduction of financial risk. Advertisers pay for clicks or placement per day/month, impressions, etc. Measurable ad units that accountants can audit. Advertisers pay from an invoice, whether prepaid or postpaid. Affiliate programs pay for a share of the net effect of traffic performance, based upon revenue generated as determined by the technologies and program rules that govern each program.

The goal for most high value domain owners is straightforward – steady income. In some cases, domain owners are not looking to develop their domains into web site projects requiring technical and human resources, therefore overhead. If the traffic generated by a domain portfolio is solid, then making the income through an ad sales business model is more steady and premium value than just signing up for various affiliate programs and seeing what sales can be made through affiliate links.

To achieve steady revenue, a domain holder can: 1) sell the ad space directly, potentially requiring staff, billing, legal support, ad servers, contracts, liability insurance etc. 2) use an automated ad sales program such as AVNads.com, AdultAdWorld.com or formerly Google’s AdSense program to sell your ad space; as Google has demonstrated, if the policies of the automated ad network program change, you get a form letter and the urgent need to find a replacement revenue stream. Most people prefer to buy ads and have them supported by live, knowledgeable and courteous personnel in the long run. 30 hire an agency to sell your ad space, where the agency is accountable to do everything from sell, collect and place ads, to serving them, providing indemnity and having a track record/references you can call upon to validate what you hear.

In the long term, Google’s policy change for AdSense will only impact ‘how’ the adult domain holders will monetize their highly valuable traffic, not ‘if.’ These domain holders include some of the very smartest people in our industry and beyond. As such, whatever methods can be used to sustain or exceed the income the owners were seeing before the AdSense ruling will be tested and put into action. The quantity and quality of consumer eyeballs these domains see from interested type-in traffic has not changed, only the route to steady income has been altered.

An interesting issue has come up recently regarding the popularity of the web 2 user- generated content sites and marketing opportunities: tracking performance of video content submissions when used for promotion, traffic generation and customer acquisition.

For those of you just looking into how best to market your adult content through the web 2 movement, here is some good news: in less than a year and a half, we have seen a growing number of user-generated content viewing sites which are now dominant in the traffic provider realm. Sites like PornoTube.com, Rude.com, Newsfilter.org and many others have many millions of users each month eager to see the most watched, most popular or otherwise newest video clips and still images on the erotic ‘net.

People can easily register for a user account at these sites for little or no money. Once you are registered, you can upload images or videos on a daily basis if you so choose. If you are a webmaster or producer of content always looking for new ways to drive traffic and sales to your own paid access content sites, this whole concept of seeding teaser content on the internet is not new. What has changed however is the sheer volume of users that you can post your video clips in front of in a very short period of time. Getting a popular video clip (as determined democratically by porn users) in front of a few hundred thousand unique users in a single day or two happens more often than you might think.

As a webmaster or content promoter, it’s easy to see that promoting your content properly in these environments can definitely help boost your business. That said, if you have a user account at a user generated content viewing site and upload your clips, you will notice that in virtually all cases, you are not allowed to post a URL that users who watch your clips on these well-trafficked sites can click on to head straight over to your site. Most content producers and promoters use digital watermarking software, which allows for the promoter or producer to stamp their web site name or commercial brand on promotional video clips so that users can ultimately get more of the content if they want it.

Here is the issue: while you can buy a video sponsorship ad on most of these sites that will allow you to post a campaign or tracking URL so you can see how much traffic and sales come directly from the posting of videos on a specific site, most webmasters don’t want to go that route. So what can you do to track the response rate and Return on Investment from posting your valuable video clips on specific sites?

My vote is simple. Domains, domains, domains. If posting sample video clips to multiple high traffic user generated content viewing sites is a viable way to make money, then it’s worth the cost of promotional domains. Your main site being promoted might be xyzporn.com. Of course you would prefer watermarking your video clips with that domain name, but then you won’t be able to track the response. Spend the money and register a handful of promo-use domains. If you are xyzporn.com, then register xyzpornvideo.com, xyzclips.com, etc. Watermark the video clips you will use specifically for the promotions on web 2 user generated content viewing sites with the promo domain names. For the promo URL’s that will receive traffic, just make the one page ‘receiving’ site into a full page ad for your main site and use an affiliate tracking URL.

The end result is that users watching your promo videos on the web 2 sites will see the promo site brand and start visiting that page if they like your content. You get to track incoming traffic to the promo domain as well as clicks and sales to your main site that happen directly as a result of a specific traffic stream. While this may not be an ideal or perfect means to track, the methods do work and are cost effective. Even if you use a different promo domain for each high traffic site where you are uploading watermarked video promos, you can gauge performance without breaking the bank or spending too much time.

Better tracking methods for this new wave of promotional opportunities are coming. In the meantime however, the opportunity is big enough to justify digging in sooner rather than later.

In prior blog entries, I’ve spoken about the education we are collectively getting with regards to internet traffic and advertising trends on social networking and user generated content sharing web sites. I have to take the time now and speak up about a great trend. After looking the breakdown of visitor traffic to many of the busiest adult themed social network sites online, I am intrigued to see that such a large proportion of the overall traffic on these sites is focused towards male erotica.

Whether looking at social networking sites such as XPeeps.com and others or the variety of user-generated content social sites, such as Rude.com, PornoTube.com and others, in some cases the proportion of male/gay targeted traffic volume can range from 40-60% of overall users. This is exciting new, from the perspective of supply and demand in the adult online business. Typically, there has been far less available male erotica/gay targeted traffic inventory available for promotion of other sites over the years. From a seller’s perspective, it has been frustrating to be oversold and not have enough qualified traffic in this arena to satisfy the demand of various advertisers. The gay market within adult online has always represented great economic opportunity for the merchant sites. This is due to the demographics of gay households and also due to internet sites being one of very few points of discreet access for male erotica for some men in society who do not label themselves as gay or even bi-sexual, just curious.

We have been told that gay people (men and women combined) could be as much as 10% or more of the world’s population. If that’s correct, it’s interesting to see how many of the newer Web 2.0 social sites are defying this standard with over a third of overall traffic being interested in gay market products.

Beyond the social impact and meaning of all this, one thing is clear – there is and will continue to be a large proportion of user generated content and social networking sites that will generate a significant share of their revenue streams from users looking for male erotica. Industry friends, clients and others have asked me if the gay adult internet market is saturated. I have mostly answered no as there will always be room for innovative and original gay content access sites to claim their share of the limited pie. From a traffic availability standpoint, the gay market has been growing, but at a moderate pace with respect to other forms of erotica online. As of today, I would say that the market outlook for male erotica on the web has never looked better.

OK, so as of late, I have been studying the traffic patterns and consumer behavior on user-generated/shared content networks. There are already several of these, such as PornoTube and many of these sites are the fastest growing traffic hubs on the adult internet. The ability of these sites to grow their consumer audiences through viral marketing is incredible. The environment on these sites allow for a variety of monetization methods, while maintaining a fresh and interesting user experience on an ongoing basis. Overall, a reasonable means by which to generate, and presumably monetize traffic.

All that standard stuff aside for a moment, I looked further at the content in these networks and am working to determine what stands out from the crow. Consider that these types of sites may have tens of thousands of erotic video clips in their libraries. If you are buying a spot or submitting a clip to promote an adult movie, subscription site, products, etc., what makes your clip more compelling to watch than the thousands of others available for user enjoyment? I saw a sample of the answer a couple of weeks ago when a client provided a clip that got me to site and watch from end to end. The clip showed a woman dressed in lingerie (not slutty, but romantic in taste) sitting on a couch in a well groomed room setting with an upright vacuum cleaner, also dressed for the evening. It was dressed as a man, at least sort of. Whoever produced the video segment in question had created the almost believable illusion that the woman was on a full blown, semi-traditional date with the vacuum!

Admittedly, the subtle “touchy, feely” rapport between woman and vacuum in the video evolves into a more sexual experience involving the detachable hose graciously accessorizing the machine. All told, this 160 second video clip not only had the right stuff in terms of a hot model, good production behind the video, etc., but it also was funny as hell. In fact, watching even the first 6-7 seconds showed how unique the overall video clip was in comparison with the thousands of hardcore sex action videos (straight or gay) that appear in the libraries of the content sharing network sites.

By bringing in a moderately sophisticated approach towards humor in sex, the net result for the client will be attained for many months after the purchased campaign ends. Their video stands out and as such, takes full advantage of the viral marketing aspect of promoting web sites and content in these new traffic environments. Users will share and also post the links to said video which grabbed their attention to friends, co-workers, on blogs, social networking sites, etc. A successful promotion for sure.

The underlying issue here is to remember that consumers of online erotica are still human and can respond to humor. Where many marketers have believed that you cannot tie humor in with sexual content during the critical pitch/”get them to buy” phase of the interaction, this is exactly where a human touch can have a great impact. The next time you buy a spot or submit promotional video content to promote your site on a content sharing network, consider submitting any out take/blooper or tongue-in-cheek behind the scenes material you have rather than submitting traditional hardcore or overtly sexual samples. You are likely to be pleased with the results.

Happy New Year’s to XBiz readers and the industry overall! Personally, the holidays were spent digging out from rocky mountain blizzards, a couple of times. Professionally, December was actually one of our busiest months as well as a month of intensive learning about new traffic generation and sales management models. The opportunity to be ‘back in school’ so to speak with new concepts to learn has been exciting.

We have been getting familiar with the concept of social/viral networking sites from a ‘use of traffic’ or monetization point of view. We wanted to do this anyway, but the trends dictated that as a traffic management/ad sales company we had no choice if we wanted to be current and competitive. The combination of circumstances had made the process of new learning much fun.

Social networking and viral marketing sites, such as PornoTube.com and XTube.com (whom we do work with, for the record), as well as all of the hundreds of smaller sites entering into this market segment represent an interesting shift in the balance of power, as far as ‘who controls the traffic’ questions are concerned. Within a short number of months and years, the aggregated control of targeted traffic (from the point of view of traffic buyers and sellers) will shift from a handful of large sites and networks to thousands of these networking sites, inclusive of blogs, where many more individuals and companies will benefit from the value of targeted traffic than so far throughout Internet advertising history.

Personally, I find this exciting news. Beyond the fact that my work has me in the middle of all this, on a higher level, control or ownership of traffic resources by more parties can only help us all. Part of the reasoning is that many of these blogs, social networking and content sharing sites will be operated in such a way that the traffic can be priced on a fair market basis, rather than being driven exclusively by large companies, including those listed on various stock exchanges.

Further, the operators of many of these sites, especially blogs will be moderate to extreme ‘experts’ in their respective areas of interest, hobbies, professional disciplines, etc. That means that these sites will carry enough compelling content as determined by people with passion for their knowledge areas to ensure that traffic quality from repeat visitors will be superb, in terms of both loyalty to the sites, as well as profitable for merchants and marketers who have products and services that are a solid match up to the content and users on each of the sites.

The opportunities we’re talking about are huge in scale, even by some of the high traffic standards already in place on the adult side of the Internet. Opportunity costs to create some forms of social/peer networking sites such as blogs will be moderate enough to allow many people to get into the targeted traffic business. Best of success to all who jump into the fray! It will be a wild ride.

Every year around this time, I always get an intellectually satisfying grin on my face when I think about unusual stats bits that materialize around major calendar events, such as observed holidays, etc. The first year in this business I actually took a look and saw how many consumers were looking for erotic fulfillment from web sites on Christmas Day, New Year’s Day, the US-observed Thanksgiving Day, etc. I was quite intrigued.

While overall traffic counts on the holidays were not as high as they could be on other days of the year, they were still much healthier than I had imagined at the time, circa late 1990’s. I looked at raw traffic counts as well as performance data from multiple affiliate programs and could clearly see that regardless of what the community of the rest of the world might be doing on holidays, there are millions of people looking for other, more personal forms of comfort at the same time. Being a bit of the curious type, I went and chatted with a friend who works in and has been academically trained in the economics profession.

My friend was no at all surprised by my data. She noted that during the worst of times emotionally and economically (as individual and as a collective society), personal satisfaction products and services are in their greatest demand. Sex, fine foods, sweets/chocolate, alcohol, tobacco, etc., in many cases where the consumers may not be able to afford these luxuries on a practical level, are nonetheless consumed in greater volumes where life looks uncertain.

This discussion happened during the December holiday season of 2001. As such, I was asked to look my stats and see what I could find for that most somber day – September 11th of the same year. As the economist thought, while many people may have spent that day in sorrow, but consuming other personal satisfaction goods and services, there were most definitely people on the ‘net, surfing porn and buying access to web sites that could satisfy. While this may seem disturbing to some, I take comfort in knowing that in the best and in the worst of times, the merchants in our field are inadvertently doing their part for the human satisfaction cause.

Present versus future efforts has been an interesting topic to me for many years now, as it relates to adult internet firms. The issue of building for the present versus investing in the future creates lively debate among many people in the adult industry online. No doubt, I admit that I was taken in during the early years by the concept of all advertising and promotions for adult consumer sites generating immediate response and relatively immediate ROI. Collectively, the industry always has to set time aside to refine what you have now in terms of web sites, software, affiliate programs, content production, etc. On any given day, there are many types of fine tuning that we all apply to the sites and traffic/marketing efforts in place. Whether it’s SEO work, optimizing what is seen where on a page, such as buy/join buttons, what promo materials are used, etc.

Although I have met many organized long term thinkers over the years, it’s interesting to see how many people are actually building and investing for the future. This is more than an issue of going for the ‘quick’ money or not. In other industries, building for later means not just building the infrastructure at a short term loss, such as web site construction, servers, staff, billing systems, etc. More to the point, there seems to be mixed views about promotions and traffic/marketing efforts for the future. On the B2B/webmaster side, there is no question that people know you must build and spend in order to acquire a following for affiliate programs, content sales sites and billing. What’s interesting is seeing how many people and firms are building up marketing resources and traffic on the consumer side for the long term.

This gets into issues such as what your goals are for time and money you invest in promotions. Less firms seek to brand their consumer offerings versus promote in order to generate direct response. We (obviously) fully support the concept of all ad/marketing dollars being accountable. That said, it was only recently that a large pay site/affiliate program company noted that for their newest consumer site offering, they expect to operate in terms of marketing costs at a loss for 18 months. 18 months? Wow. This was truly one of the few times that I have seen cost conscious adult merchants willing to spend at a loss on consumer marketing/advertising in order to reap the rewards that are almost two years away. The concept is great and reflects the ever- evolving maturity process for our industry as a whole.

On some level, SEO efforts are about building for the future. Beyond this, will the average company buying ads and deploying promotions for consumer sites allow for the ROI to come through six-nine months out, a year out? In some ways, we see a bit of this with the ever growing popularity of low cost membership sites and low cost VoD sites. It can take a much longer period of time to generate the profitable returns, but is it worth it? Look at ISP’s, entertainment services (think NetFlix) credit card companies, etc. In some cases, they can spend hundreds of dollars to create customers. The end result: think about retaining customers for years, not months. Better quality, loyal customers acquired with a lower sense of urgency. Back to the question of whether this approach has merit, I think so.

Happy Autumn. A great time of year visually in many parts of the world, including my fair Southern Colorado front range. I can remember a time in the late 90’s when the industry used to salivate at the thought of the fall season arriving for exciting business reasons. At the time, the second biggest rush of new PC’s hitting the market (and therefore multitudes of new internet users) annually was the back to school season. Lots of college age folks unpacking new machines bundled with AOL, CompuServe, AT&T Worldnet and other lightning fast dial up ISP’s. Lots of curious new users typing in domains for the first time and gaining access to the world of the safest sex possible, online from home.

Maybe a strange segue, but I like to reminisce about these times as I get ready for a busy season of trade shows. I do like to plan ahead to make best use of face time, one of the most valuable resources to help your business. I just returned from the Island Gathering in Curacao and the 1st ever Gay Phoenix Forum. Both events seemed like a tremendous success on the whole. Personally, I found the days spent at these events to be fantastic.

The value of face time when doing business on behalf of web sites and internet companies cannot be ignored. If you know the products & services you represent or own well and you can take the time to learn how best to fit what you have within the needs of potential clients and partners, trade shows in our industry can be your best friend.

Putting aside the issue of sponsorship, having booth space, etc., focus on the value of going to shows yourself or sending staff to ‘work the floor’. While I can excitedly remember my first show in January of ’99, I also remember feeling overwhelmed not knowing who to start talking to and how to understand each person or company’s element of involvement in the industry food chain. While the show was still productive, I have made it a point since to come prepared, researching people, companies, industry trends, etc. to have something new to discuss with people as often as possible. All these years later, it still takes some planning and prep to accomplish the goals set for a specific trade show.

While many people in the industry believe in the value of the show, many also perceive that you cannot get any substantive business done. I disagree and in fact have generated some of the best deals I have ever worked on specifically at the shows. As we get into the season for the bigger shows again, I recommend highly that you sit with your team or in front of a pad of paper and a pen to determine what goals can be set for your time away from the office. There is absolutely no doubt that virtually any business in this industry can yield great benefits from face time with industry peers, but there is no such thing as something for nothing. Expect to invest some time to be best prepared for the output of your time spent at these industry events.