Records Keeping Compliance Checklist for European Content Providers

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: 2257 | Response: 0

More and more European Content Producers are choosing to do business with American. webmasters. While citizens of foreign countries cannot be compelled to comply with United States’ restrictions on the creation of adult material, business realities are forcing foreign content producers to consider voluntary compliance. American webmasters, painfully cognizant of the increasing need to focus on legal compliance, consistently reject foreign content that is not produced in compliance with 18 U.S.C. §2257.  Non-compliant content not only increases the risk that an underage model could slip through, but failure to strictly comply is itself a federal felony, exposing those involved to a 2-year prison term.  Given the substantial compliance motivations involved, foreign content producers are expected to adopt the U.S. requirements as the global standard for creation of sexually explicit imagery.  The following constitutes a bare minimum checklist for compliance with the requirements of Section 2257:

1) Assume that all erotic images require Section 2257 compliance:  While the law only applies to actual “sexually explicit activity,” it is ill-advised for the content producer or the webmaster to attempt to guess which images require compliance, and which can be safely distributed without compliance. Since child pornography does not require the depiction of sexual activity to meet the federal definition, such distinctions can be risky business. And, in any event, a release given by a minor normally is not enforceable.

2) Obtain a signed compliance form created by a competent attorney:  Section 2257 requires that certain records be created containing certain information. The right form is the best place to start.

3) Obtain, at a minimum, the following information from each model:

a.     Date Of Birth

b.     Legal Name

c.     All other names, aliases, nick names, stage names, and maiden names

d.     Social Security Number

e.     Copy of Government-Issued Identification containing a picture; preferably 2 pieces of identification. Note the requirement that the producer actually examine the identification document, not just the copies.

f.       Address, phone and other contact information

g.      The model’s signature

4) Require the model to execute a binding model release prepared by a competent attorney.  The images are only as legal as the model release backing them up.  If all relevant rights have not been transferred and released by a valid model release, both the webmaster and the content producer are subject to claims once the content is displayed on a Web site.

5) Maintain the records so that they are cross-indexed by the models’ legal names and stage names and by web page. Alternatively, provide copies of all records to the webmaster if the webmaster will act as Records Custodian. You need to discuss the particulars of this with an attorney, because each circumstance may be unique.

6) The Records Custodian should maintain an off-site backup copy of the records: What happens if there is a fire or a government seizure?

7) Include a conspicuous records custodian disclosure on all CD’s / DVD’s containing erotic imagery, including the full legal name of the custodian and physical address where the records are kept.  The disclosure should also certify that all models are over the age of 18, and include the date when the content was first created, published or republished.  Placement of the disclosure on the product should be reviewed by an attorney.

Only through strict compliance with the mandates of Section 2257 will American webmasters fully embrace content produced overseas.  The right compliance procedure will open profitable markets for foreign content producers, and result in a wider variety of adult content for both webmasters and consumers.

Article written by Lawrence Walters

The Death Of The AVS – The Birth Of The AEN (Adult Entertainment Network)

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General, Promotion, Sponsors, WebDesign | Response: 0

Well after a long and tedious few months of speculation, rumors and facts being presented to those of us in the adult industry working on AEN sites (Formerly known as AVS sites) it seems that Visa has put a strain on AEN companies to start re-working and, renaming their sites to fall under the ‘Adult Entertainment Network’ name. What does this mean to us as webmasters and, more importantly to the industry as a whole? This is what we shall address in this article.

A Little Visa History Lesson.

This whole mess started in October of 2002 when, jointly, CCBill, Epoch and, iBill issued a new set of operating guidelines that had been passed onto them by Visa. In effect, this meant that 3rd party credit card processors had to be re-classified as an ‘IPSP’ or ‘Internet Payment Service Provider’ this also in turn meant that webmasters needed to start paying ‘fees’ to Visa (via their IPSP) in order to continue charging their surfers for access to products and services by using Visa issued credit and / or debit cards.

In addition to the initial $750 however, there is also a need to pay an ongoing fee of $375, two thirds of this fee goes directly to Visa and, the remaining balance goes to issuing banks and IPSP’s for administrative charges.

Shortly after this announcement was made the industry then got dealt another blow by the processing companies, this time, in the form of Paypal announcing they would no longer accept any adult orientated payment through their system. This went into effect on May 12th 2003 and, after initial speculations as to what could and could not be charged to Paypal accounts, it seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for some of the smaller webmasters.

However, the adult industry is strong and rallied together getting as much information as possible about alternates to both of the above situations and companies such as Stormpay and off-shore IPSP’s started to see an increase in revenues from adult payments.

As The Waves Settled – The Next Blow.

Given all of the financial troubles of the previous 10 months in respect of online adult payments the industry as a whole started to settle itself again, of course there was the usual posting on forums, conversion ratio and shaving discussions happening on the main forums as there always was but, in addition to these conversations more rumors started, this time, regarding the AVS business model.

Almost as quickly as these rumors started however, they seemed to have fizzled out into nothing but a distant memory but, two months later after the first round of initial conversations on the adult industry message forums, the same AVS business model was dealt another devastating blow.

It seems Visa has its sights set on AVS (Age Verification Service / Systems) with a press release being issued first by Sex Key, then by Free Age Card, which was followed by similar announcements from Global Male Pass and Gay Passport informing adult webmasters that they had 2 days to make their current AVS sites conform to the new requirements set down by Visa.

These requirements were that.

1) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘AVS’ on their sites.
2) Adult webmasters can no longer use the term ‘Adult Verification Service’ or ‘Age Verification Service’ on their sites.
3) Adult webmasters can no longer state that surfers joining up to their AVS will have ‘Access to thousands of other AVS protected sites’.

As usual Adult Webmasters started to question the reasons behind this sudden and apparent change of AVS rules on almost every forum and, whilst most questions went unanswered the one thing that was answered (honestly) was that these new rules had been set down by current AVS IPSP’s who, had had these rules issued tot hem by Visa.

So, webmasters started to change out their tour page text to conform to these new rules and, for the most part, it seemed like that was all that was needed to be ‘safe’ working the AVS business model. Little did they know…

One Last Blow To The AVS Webmasters.

Several days after the initial press releases from some of the top AEN (Formerly AVS) companies was made it seems that in between all of the posting ont he boards yet another issues comes to light – That Visa is aiming to have AVS webmasters now pay a $750 fee for the benefit of being able to keep using this business model as stated by Craig Tant (Sex Key) ‘we believe is that every site will have to be registered and pay the $750.’

This beleif, although somewhat vague tends to draw conclusions that, through no fault of their own, the AVS / AEN business model in the adult industry as we currently know it is changing and, changing for the worse. If webmasters are forced to pay Visa a $750 registeration fee per AEN system or per AEN site then a lot of todays industry leaders are going to come unstuck, especially those that focus solely on the AVS / AEN model for the primary source of income.

Adult Entertainment Networks – What’s Next?

This is the question that is currently being asked by many webmasters and, the truth of the matter is simply that nobody knows – Except for Visa, the next few days, weeks and months are going to be telling on the industry as a whole from what happens to current sites inside the AVS / AEN companies websites to what happens when surfers start to propagate back onto the adult internet looking for their fix of high quality porn, two things however are definitive throughout all of this, Visa is homing in on the adult industry and, every webmaster needs to be concerned about what will happen next.

Article written by Lee

Adding Images To Your Web Pages

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The Basics

Adding Images To Your Web Pages – The Basics.

So you have just got into the online adult business but don’t know your ass from your elbow, you have the simplistic stuff relating to HTML down but, you want to find out how you can start adding banners and images to your pages here is a quick guide to help you on your way.

What Is An Image?

The answer, is, believe it or not simple, An image is a picture on a page of your website. There are however, many way to display images on your site from the size of it to the overall effect you want the image to have on your HTML page and from borders around the image and many other things.

However, I don’t want to blind you with information at the moment considering you need to actually know the basics of adding images before you can start using fancy styles and the likes.

Adding A Basic Image.

The HTML code to add an image on any HTML based page is a straight forward one however, before you can use this HTML tag you need to know where on your page you want the image to appear.

Now that you have decided where you want your image to display you need to use the image tag, the HTML coding to place an image on your page should be IMG. Also, you will need to tell your page where you want the image to come from or, in other words, you need to tell it the source of the image you want to use the HTML tag to do this is SRC.

For example, lets say you have an image called porn.gif (you need to include the extension in your SRC coding) you would display this image on your page using the following code:

<IMG SRC=”porn.gif”>

Simple huh?

Well, actually, maybe not, for example, what do you put if the images you are linking to is NOT in the same location as the page you want it to appear on? That’s not a problem, all you need to do is use the FULL location of the image in your IMG HTML tag like this:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif”>

You should now be able to include images on your pages without any problems.

Image Sizes.

Ok we can now include an image on our pages but, what if we want to make this image fit the feel of the rest of our page / site, how do you manipulate the graphic to ‘look’ right?

There are a number of ways images can be manipulated for example, if you want the image to be 100 pixels wide by 100 pixels high you can add the WIDTH and the HEIGHT tag to your HTML coding like this:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″>

That will now resize your image into a square that is 100 pixels wide and high.

Now we have the image on our page in the right size we require what else can we do with it? Read on..

Borders + Colors.

In addition to placing the image and resizing the image on our pages we can also add a border and, a border color to the mage to make it stand out if needed for example:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDER=”2″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>

As you can see we have now added the two tags ‘BORDER’ and ‘BORDERCOLOR’. The first ‘BORDER’ tag tells your HTML what size of border you want around your image and, this can be any size you want to make the image stand out on your page. The second ‘BORDERCOLOR’ tag tells your HTML code what color you want the border to be again, this can be any color you like to match the rest of your sites pages.

Linking An Image.

In addition to resizing, adding borders and colors we can also link our image to a specific URL (the most common form of this is with banner advertising) and, if you want to link your image to a URL you would use the following coding:

<A HREF=”http://www.sponsorsurl.com”><IMG SRC=”http://www.domain.com/images/porn.gif” BORDER=”2″ WIDTH=”100″ HEIGHT=”100″ BORDERCOLOR=”FF0000″>

This will create an image that is 100×100 pixels in size, with a border size of 2 pixels in the color FF0000 that is linked to http://www.sponsorsurl.com

Also, the order of the HTML tags we use is not important however, you should try to get used to arranging them in a certain way to make your work easier if it ever comes to editing your images.

Hopefully this has been of use to you and you can now see that adding banners and images to your sites isn’t as daunting as you first thought.

Article written by Lee.

Over The Rainbow

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

So why is the gay community over the rainbow? As promised today I’ll finish up on the symbols that are prevalent in the gay community. Last week I mention the Pink Triangle and it’s political emergence. And technically, the rainbow flag has a similar political beginning.

I always love answering a question with another question (it is one of those annoying habits I have). So, when I am asked the “what does the rainbow flag stand for?” I look forward to the response when I ask, in turn, “what do YOU think it means?” Here are my top three favorite answers:

1 – “It’s colorful and gay people like colors.”

2 – “It’s a dance party thing”

3 – “Judy Garland sang Over the Rainbow you guys loved her a lot.” (This has to be my all time favorite.)

Well like any political symbol, it is a way to distinguish ourselves. But this time we look not to a place in history but we look at the world in general. No matter where you are, whether it is on 8^th street in NYC or Rue du Champe in Paris, there will be a gay person somewhere. Now, some may argue that not all cultures and societies will have homosexual present. And I say, “BULL”. They are just in the closet somewhere.

So in essence, gay men and women cross every racial and religious culture around the world. We come in all shapes, sizes and colors. So what better symbol to show that with than a rainbow, all colors coming together as one – as one community. No matter how culturally diverse our world is, the gay community is made up from a piece of each.

The rainbow flag and the uses of the rainbow, in the gay community, are diverse. If you see it flying outside on a restaurant wall, and it means it is a gay or gay friendly establishment. See a set of rainbow rings around a friend’s neck, it’s gay fashion accessories. And see a political march with rainbows on posters and flags, it’s a gay assembly.

Last week I insinuated that the pink triangle was not a symbol to over use in design. Well, in my opinion, the opposite is true with the rainbow and the rainbow flag. I am NOT saying run out and re do all your sites with rainbow backgrounds. No! But, I am saying that the nature of this political symbol is somewhat more flexible. We ourselves took the rainbow and made jewelry, publications, tee shirts and such. And just as the pink triangle, the rainbow will say that it’s ok to be here, you have friends inside or you have nothing to worry about here – be yourself, this place is for you.

So what have we learned? What some people think as silly symbols that gay people use, actually have an origin – and, a potent origin at that. I still ask, for your own good, that you use them wisely and not over do it. The more you throw symbols around willy-nilly, the more people will think you do not know what you are doing. And the more that the surfers thinks that, the less likely you are to make the sale and get your business to grow.

Article written by Gary-Alan

Viral Marketing – Catching The Marketing Bug

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Viral Marketing | Response: 0

The term viral marketing is offensive. Call yourself a viral marketer and, people will often take two steps back. I know I would do. It is a sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether region somewhere between horror movies and disaster films.

That said however, you have to admire the skills of the viral marketer. They have a way of winning by sheer weight of numbers alone. They piggy back on everyone else and use their resources to grow their own. In the right circumstances the viral marketer can grow exponentially. A virus doesn’t have to mate, it just replicates itself again and, again and, again increasing its power, doubling its effect with each replication.

I
I I
I I I I
I I I I I I
I I I I I I I I

In a few short generations, a viral marketing population can boom as seen in the diagram above.

Viral marketing defined.

What does a virus have to do with viral marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for mass growth in the messages exposure and influence.

Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to hundreds, even thousands in a relatively short period of time.

Before the advent of the internet viral marketing was often referred to as ‘word of mouth’. However, for better or for worse, the term viral marketing has infected.

One classic example of this marketing technique is Hotmail.com one of the first free web based email services. Their strategy was simple.

Give away free email addresses and services.
Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out.
Watch people email their friends, colleagues and family.
Watch these same friends colleagues and family join up to their service.
See the message propelled to an ever increasing audience, all for free.

In closing viral marketing is like watching the tiny ripples of a single pebble dropped pond, one small splash can create ever increasing circles which in turn could create ever increasing revenues.

Article Written By Lee

Domain Name Registration Services What To Look For

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: Domain Names | Response: 0

Once upon a time, if you wanted to register a domain name, you could only do it by visiting Network Solutions at http://www.networksolutions.com/ and paying them whatever they asked for, about $35.00 per year.

Then ICANN, http://www.icann.org/, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) that is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities, decided to change the rules.

The initial testing phase of the new competitive Shared Registry System for the .com, .net, and .org domains quietly began to take place in April of 1999.

It started with five participants who were the first to implement the new system for competition in the market for .com, .net, and .org domain name registration services.

Previously, registration services in the .com, .net, and .org domains were provided by Network Solutions, Inc. under an exclusive contract with the United States government.

In the two years since this program began, things have really changed.

Just this last week, ICANN reported that two of their registrars, Tucows and New York-based Register.com, had recorded more new registrations for Top Level Domains (dot-com, dot-net and dot-org) than VeriSign’s Network Solutions.

This marks the first time ever that VeriSign’s Network Solutions was out-sold by any of the registrars and signals that their past dominance of domain name registration is certainly fading.

Why?

Because besides others being allowed to make domain name registrations, these new registrars are also cutting prices.

The Rules have most certainly changed.

The Shared Registration System (“SRS”), ICANN’s accredited registrars program, allows people to submit application to become a registrar along with a non-refundable $1000 filing fee.

After someone is accepted into the program then they must pay a yearly fee of $5000 to maintain their status as an accredited registrar.

This situation has created a very competitive environment which can only be beneficial to all of us as the price to register a domain name has fallen like a rock from a very tall building.

However, if you plan to register a new domain name using a virtual unknown registrar, make certain they do indeed have the legal accreditation from ICANN by visiting the ICANN web site and viewing their posted list of ALL accredited vendors:
http://www.icann.org/registrars/accredited-list.html

It will only take you a few moments to make sure you are dealing with a reputable vendor of domain names. Those few moments will make the entire process legal and worry-free.

Article written by Lee

Thumbnail Preview TGPs And The Gay Market Place

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the latest crazes to hit the gay adult market from a webmasters point of view is that of the thumbnail preview TGP and, more surprisingly than this is the fact that this new breed of gay adult TGP seems to attract more traffic than the standard format TGP ever did so, what is a thumbnail preview TGP and just how do you go about making one of your own? This is what we will investigate in this article.

Thumbnail Preview TGP Basics.

A thumbnail preview TGP is just as the name suggests, a standard TGP with one main difference, the TGP itself doesn’t list gallery descriptions rather a small preview image of the content placed on each of the galleries submitted. This thumbnail preview is usually size between 100×100 pixels and 60×60 pixels in dimension however, the thumbnail preview size can be determined by the webmaster owning the TGP.

How Do I Start My Own Thumbnail Preview TGP?

In order to start your own thumbnail preview TGP you will need a couple of things, first and foremost, a domain name to run it on, the current trend in the gay marketplace is to name your TGP something short, memorable and, well, brand able so, the domain name you choose for your TGP should take all of these aspects into consideration. The next thing you will need in order to run your own gay thumbnail preview TGP will be the script which you use to manage the TGP itself, for this purpose I would highly recommend Autogallery MySQL from http://www.jmbsoft.com it is affordable and, easy to maintain which is a must if you are wanting to run a sizable TGP. One other thing that you may also like to consider investing in for your thumbnail preview TGP is a design, in fact, most of the ‘good’ thumbnail preview TGPs whether they are focused in the straight or gay market, have a clean, almost pay site quality design aspect to them. Of course, you do not need to keep up with the joneses however, if it works for other people, then why not see if it will work for you also?

Thumbnail TGP Structure.

So you now have a domain and have purchased the script and / or design that you want to use on your thumbnail preview TGP what next? Well first things are first, you should take a look at some of the other sites that currently exist and see how they do things, find out what things you feel they are doing wrong and, capitalize on that.

You should also make some decisions now as to the look and feel you want your thumbnail preview TGP to have, how many galleries are you going to list on the front page each day? Will you be utilizing the archives feature of your TGP script? What limitations do you want to put on submissions from other webmasters? These are all aspects of running a TGP that you need to think of prior to opening your site up for general submissions.

In general however, you will find that most thumbnail preview TGP sites will have roughly 100 thumbnail images on their front page of the site with any additional galleries being listed in their archives section again, you should decide on how you want to maintain your own site.

Getting Traffic To Your Thumbnail Preview TGP.

Now you have hopefully set your thumbnail preview TGP live you need to do one final step in making the TGP itself a huge success, get the traffic flowing, one of the best ways to do this, as with any other type of site is to ask your friends and associates to trade traffic with your site however, should this not be an option then you should use more conventional methods such as submitting galleries to other TGP sites ensuring that you use a recip to your TGP on each gallery as well as utilizing other forms of traffic such as cheap brokered traffic, top lists, web rings and, even counters, within a month or so you will soon start to see a steady flow of new webmaster gallery submissions and, with each new submission comes more traffic and ultimately, more income from your site.

Article written by Lee

TGP Posting – Automating Submissions Responsibly

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

TGP Posting – Automating Submissions Responsibly.

Many an experienced webmaster has endured first hand the labor intensive process of manually building a submitting large quantities of image galleries to TGP’s in an effort to drive traffic, whether it be to their own site or a sponsors, in a bid to generate money. One quickly learns that creating a gallery template is the way to go, whereby one can more quickly and easily swap out the reciprocal links for the TGP’s, which means building customized galleries is more efficient, before going off to submit them to all the relevant TGP’s…

But this is only the beginning of the story. Manually visiting and posting to all of the TGP’s (there are literally thousands of them) takes a lot of time. Moreover, one must stop and read the rules for each TGP to ensure one is staying within the specified guidelines…

There is an easier way! Enter the Thumbnail Gallery Submission Wizard (TGSW). It takes much of the labor intensive work out of producing galleries for, and submitting them to, TGP’s. Available in both desktop (PC) and server (Perl based) versions, TGSW has gained rapid and widespread acceptance as the de-facto TGP gallery automation tool. Some of it’s features include:

Fully Customizable Gallery Templates.

You can create templates on a niche by niche basis, inserting appropriate sponsor codes and images. For the thumbnails and images they link to, you simply insert some intuitive ‘placeholder tags’, which are interpreted by TGSW at run-time and replaced with the appropriate images. You can be flexible as to how many thumbs/images you would like displayed per gallery to meet your own personal preferences.

Automated Reciprocal Link Insertion.

You can also insert placeholder tags for the automatic insertion of reciprocal links. At run-time, TGSW will insert a specified number of reciprocal links in the positions you have inserted those tags in your templates.

Customizable Filenames.

You can specify filename options so that when TGSW generates galleries, the filenames it uses are unique to your galleries.

FTP and ‘Free Host’ Support.

Do you host your galleries on a free host? Or simply on another of your servers? TGSW can be configured to FTP the completed galleries (along with images and thumbs if necessary) to a server of your choice. There is also a lot of support for ‘free hosts’ that don’t have FTP, but instead used a browser-based upload manager.

Automatic Gallery Submission.

TGSW will then automatically submit all of the galleries it generates to all of the appropriate TGP’s. It even sends an email to the TGP’s that require submissions via that method! TGSW can even be configured to place all of your submissions via a proxy server, so you can mask the IP address from where you submit.

Extensive Reporting.

There is an optional reporting feature that you can turn on or off. When turned on, TGSW logs all of the submission information at the point of submission, which you can review at your leisure at a later time.

Regular Updates.

TGP’s come and go, so TGSW offers an auto-update feature, whereby it will download the latest copy of the database from our site. We usually update at least once per week, sometimes more often, to keep your database current.

Of course, due to the personalized nature of your galleries, there will be some significant configuration work to do before one can hope to achieve any real results with TGSW. One of the key points is that we do not ship the product with any TGP’s enabled – this way, you are responsible for your own usage of TGSW, and are forced to at least visit the TGP’s in question – we do this in an attempt to remain responsible.

If you have neither the time nor the inclination to configure the TGSW TGP database yourself, then I highly recommend http://www.tgswupdates.com. They have spent extensive time configuring the current TGSW database for 55 niche categories, and offer fully-configured updates very soon after we release a new auto-update – not only will you be up-to-date, but you will also have all of the available TGP’s enabled, along with all of the reciprocal link images ready to start posting!

Article written by Robert Purdy.

Sex Toy Affiliate Programs

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Sponsors | Response: 0

For the past year I’ve been playing with sex toys AND I’ve been selling them too!

Over the last couple of articles I have tried to enlighten you on secondary and third level sponsors, to supplement your site income. Another successful addition is sex toys – which are a hit in the gay market. Personally, I sell toys and videos in the secondary spots simply because the payouts are typically lower than most sponsors are – but my motto is money is money!

The basic reaction by most straight webmasters has been, I didn’t realize gay men liked sex toys, too. Well we do.

While there are a number of great toy sponsors out there, not many cater directly to gay men. That’s why I worked a deal on Gay Adult Shopping (http://store.gayadultshopping.com/partners/). I have joined others, but typically, they sell to a straight clientele. When I say market to straight, I’m referring to the packaging of their inventory. This is not a judgment call but a plain fact; I’d rather buy something that has an image of guy on it rather than a woman.

Now mind you, BOTH markets favor many of the products sold. I know if a straight female friend and I went into an adult store, we would look at the same dildo; and, perhaps even buy the same item regardless of the package. But when you’re surfing the net from home, it’s no holds barred. The surfer is no longer locked into the inventory of a shop on the street. He’s going to look for what HE wants. It is all perception. And, knowing that is half the battle.

Ok on to selling! I have taken three approaches in my experimenting – free sites, TGPs and memberships sites. Within a paysite, I typically didn’t SELL the store as much as I told the surfer it is there if he wants it. The real work in selling came with the free sites and galleries.

I’m a text man. I love writing copy and seeing how it works. However with the toys, I used a graphic and embellished it with text. For my free sites, I found direct eye contact shots (Images where the model is “looking out”, presumable at the surfer) were more effective than a pic of a guy playing with toys. Along with the pic, I used text like “My boyfriend and I can not get enough of them…” and “I get off watching him play…” or “The one with the most toys… Gets Off!” Other places on my free sites, I just dropped in the text link. Either worked well. I added both sets of ad links to my basic main pages. The results were good – even though I kept them to a minimum not to out sell my sponsor sites.

My TGP experiment was WORK! After my first try I found out that text alone doesn’t work well. This is definitely an approach that requires imagery. On my first pass, I offered pics and a paragraph that that sold all the things I could think of… dongs, dildos, videos and ejaculating butt plugs -You name I tried to sell it. Out of 2000 hits on that one page, I had 60 clicks into the toy store. Even though I had a sale, it wasn’t going to break the bank. But it SOLD, so I decided to try more. This time I hunted through my content for pics with toys in them and eye contact. I added banners and toned down the text somewhat. Instead of listing an inventory, I stayed in line with the text I mentioned above. I gave an overall feel of what the store had (toys, videos, lube, etc.) Then I ended it with a little tease of what delightful experiences were in store when their package arrived.

This time, it worked! On that first day, out of the 2000 hits it received, 500 clicks went into the store. I have never had that kind of click ratio off of a TGP. I was amazed. Most of the sales were for smaller priced items ($10-$20), but I had two orders that totaled over $200 dollars each. Was this a fluke? I wasn’t sure, so I tried it again. With the next few submissions the click rates were smaller, and I don’t know why. It could be that I used the same ads or something too similar to the first. BUT the click to sales ratio was about the same as my first attempt. Needless to say this has now become part of my weekly regiment.

So what did this prove? Sex toys DO sell well in the gay market even under the hard to convert traffic scenarios. I guess we like our toys just as much as anyone else =)

Selling adult products, whether on a free site, a TGP or a pay site, will bring in a few extra dollars that many webmasters didn’t even know was out there.

Article written by Gary-Alan

European Surfers – Porn High On The List!

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General | Response: 0

Adult web sites were visited by 3.8 million home Internet users in the UK in June 2001, according to Internet monitoring company Net Value. This accounts for more than a quarter of the entire UK home Internet population.

UK visitors to adult websites spent more than 45 minutes on these sites each in June. Adult sites make up 41.2 per cent of all the sites visited in the UK with a significant audience. Students (23.2 per cent), manual workers (15 per cent), and professionals (12.8 per cent) are the largest groups of UK visitors to adult sites.

However Germany has the largest audience for online porn in Europe with more than 5.3 million Germans visiting an adult site in June. They also spent more time on these type of sites than any other nationality – each German visitor spent almost an hour on adult sites in June. Net Value data also showed that more than half (52.3 per cent) the websites visited in June by a significant number of German users were of an adult orientated nature.

Spain has the greatest proportion of visitors to pornographic sites – 40 per cent of Spanish home Internet users visiting a pornography site in June 2001.

“Pornography has become a lucrative online business, with many companies now recognizing it as a valuable additional revenue stream,” Net Value’s Alki Manias said. “And this would seem to be a stable business area – the popularity of online pornography continues unchecked.”

Adult sites are also popular amongst the earliest adopters of the Internet. People who first got online at home before 1997 account for 18.5 per cent of visitors to adult sites, though they only make up 14.1 per cent of the whole UK online population.

In the UK, Lastminute.com has just introduced an auction for adult toys and aids, whilst in Germany, Freenet.de and T-Online are also moving into the adult business.

The following charts detail various demographics relating to European surfers usage of adult sites:

Number of adult websites visited, June 2001

* Sites with a significant reach

UK visitors to adult websites by occupation, June 2001

As you can now see, we, as adult webmasters, have a considerable chunk of the online adult industry sitting in our laps and, we should concentrate on tapping into this market as more and more American companies are realizing the importance of these figures we will inevitably reach a stage where the European market will be passed across to our US counterparts.