How to make money from porn in other words
Saucy. Make money from an adult affiliate site *snigger*.
So, I’m hoping we can all be as ‘adult’ about this topic as the subject matter requires you to be in order to view it.
Now, I’m not talking about an actual adult content producing site, as in you create and distribute your own pornography! Make your own porn videos and nude clips and pics.
What I’m talking about here, is earning money from affiliate commissions from the sites that do, and associated niche commissions from adult ‘toys’ and other such related paraphernalia, and also selling specialist adult advertising on your site.
As for making money, I’ve just created and launched a site like this, so I haven’t… but I’m intrigued, so we’ll see.
Thus, like a lot of what I do, I’ll return to this with an update in due course. For the moment, I’ll confine myself to the set-up process and what’s involved.
It’s big business, the adult scene, I don’t think that should come as any surprise to anyone.
And a significant chunk of the internet, and the searches on it, deals with just that subject matter. In fact, a lot of the technology of the Web was driven by delivering adult content to those wishing to purchase it.
This is nothing new, as it was pornographic lithographs that drove the spread of the printing press across Europe, not the distribution of the King James Bible.
So it’s been on the go for a while. And it might seem an over-saturated market, but it’s probably the one market that never will be. As one guy making money from this niche wrote on his blog, no one who goes looking for this stuff is ever going to say, “Oh no, not another adult site!”
Being involved in the production of this stuff is a whole other ball game, but what I’m talking about here, is being the affiliate middleman.
It’s not exactly a conversation for polite company granted, but it’s nothing to be ashamed of either, and as human as any other trait and desire.
Web stats say just about everyone’s indulged, taken a peak, at some time or another.
Both men and women.
Naturally, what I’m going to be talking about is the entirely legal and above board stuff.
And it should be remembered that pornography is entirely legal. The regular, easily accessible stuff I’m referring to anyway.
Anything outwith that is just going to get your site shutdown and you a visit from the authorities – and quite right.
But the depiction of regular, consensual sex between adults is entirely legal (in most countries).
That’s what I’m talking about here – anything you can find freely available on the large tube sites catering to this market.
To give you an idea of how big that market is, Pornhub, a popular tube site, reported three billion in revenue from the umbrella company that site its part of.
That’s a very sexy figure, no matter how you look at it.
The first thing you’re going to need is adult friendly hosting.
Many sites state that adult content will be unceremoniously deleted from their servers, so you want to go somewhere where you can be assured that your site (and hard work) isn’t suddenly going to get zapped and disappear.
I found a lot of companies purporting to be adult friendly, but in truth I’d never heard of them, and couldn’t find too much by way of reviews either.
So I went with a big name that is adult friendly, and I know will still be around for longer than next week: HostGator.
TMD Hosting or Digital Ocean would’ve been my preference but they don’t do adult hosting.
Actually… I suspect that they do; just under a subsidiary. As previously discussed, the whole adult biz is worth billions, so I can’t see these corporations passing up a slice of that pie. They may prefer to distance their main business from the industry, but you can bet the same room of servers hosting that church prayer meeting and discussion forum, also hosts Nuns Gone Wild too.
I reckon that while these web hosting corporations may want to present a veneer of ‘respectability,’ it’s entirely done as a front so as not to lose business from any group that might object. It’s leaving too much money on the table not to create an off-shoot and have it aimed at the adult site market.
So, I found myself with HostGator.
I’m not really a fan because I don’t find HostGator cheaper (in fact its more expensive than TMD Hosting) and things that are achieved so easily on other hosts, can be a major headache to get working on HostGator: like SSL.
While it’s the flick of a switch on other sites, on Hostgator you’ve got a more convoluted process, and nothing seems to get all updated and work right on the first attempt.
Why HostGator offer additional up sells like SSL, and then don’t automatically implement them, I don’t know. You’re left to do that yourself, and have the ensuing arguments with their frequently lacklustre support. I can see many a newbie not realising that all that they’ve paid for, isn’t implemented, assuming because they checked the box and were charged for it, that it was.
But I had little choice, and HostGator is the recommended host on many an adult site discussion blog, so if you want to do such a site, for all I said about them, I’d advise HostGator too.
Once you’ve got your hosting, you need to get your site setup on it.
I went with a WordPress solution and chose a suitable theme from the offerings describing themselves as adult-tube site ready.
This is because the easiest way to get into the adult niche is via your own tube site.
Tube sites host links to movie clips held on the bigger sites. These sites will pay for traffic to them, so just hosting their content, if viewed and clicked on in sufficient numbers, will generate income in itself.
Not much, around $2.50 per thousand, but it all depends how much traffic your site gets and then passes on.
To put it in perspective, many popular tube sites are landing 1,000,000+ visitors a month.
So, those clicks will add up nicely, converting into money for you.
There’s a few adult tube WordPress themes to be had, designed with affiliate marketing in mind i.e. they come with built in advertising areas already defined, and layouts geared to the tube site.
There’s also plugins designed to make it easy to import links from the bigger tube sites.
These are a must if you want to cut down on import time, and it is money well spent to invest in a specific adult theme and plugin. This isn’t too expensive, maybe around $99, and you get deals and reductions.
The set I went with is called WP-Script. I did find a “free” theme and plugin but I didn’t like its layout. I thought it a bit dated, plus you had to subscribe to several affiliate sites of the designer’s choosing to get a license key to get it to work, and I didn’t like that, being required to promote what they dictated.
Plus, I also wanted a solution that looked like it was going to stick round, get updated and have tech support, rather than something that might be abandoned or subject to vanish at any moment.
The reason you want to pay the extra to get a plugin to cut down on import time, is that instead of text posts to draw traffic, it’s video posts that are going to be the source of your Google beacon.
Embedded posts that is.
So a plugin that does the job of importing titles, tags and the embed script – the actual video formatted to play on your site – will make your life a lot easier.
You have to update the title though, as you don’t want Google to penalise you for duplicate content. And add a little something of your own in the description, which will basically be another long tail keyword to help your site get found.
The import plugins can do mass imports, but it’s not advised to just copy Pornhub, Xhamster etc, in a bulk import, because you have to change the titles as I said, and you’ll have to categorise it all too.
But worse, you’re just creating something that could be got anywhere else, and done better. You’re better off to select a specific sub niche of the adult movie biz, and only host content associated with that.
It can be a grind to go through this process, finding suitable material on those sites that offer a reward for traffic (because few do) and then editing it, making sure all titles and descriptions and tags are SEO honed. And then doing it again, and again, and again… It may sound fun or titillating, but it isn’t.
But it’s not for the pennies you can earn from driving traffic to the bigger tube sites you do this (that’s just a bonus and maximising your site’s return), but the affiliate commissions from the advertisements you place on your site.
I’ve read that affiliate commissions from content producers isn’t that lucrative. Mainly because tube sites such as the one you’re about to create, host so much ripped-off, free material that the days of subscribing to view this stuff are largely over, or at the very least much reduced.
There are some companies that aggressively search for pirated content of theirs on the Web, and then request it removed, but it’s something of a Sisyphean task once it gets out there.
What’s more lucrative is affiliate commissions from adult chat sites and webcams, as that’s live and perishable – and also fresh and unique on each visit.
Also giving space over to selling adult advertising such as the sort of ads run by JuicyAds amongst others. You just create an account, get the links and banners (plus your code) and place it where you think best to be noticed – and clicked on – on your website.
Because when people click, you get paid. It’s like Google Adsense – except actually worth implementing.
JuicyAds isn’t for every site, it’s an adult advertising space, so tends to just appear on over 18 sites i.e. gambling and sex related etc, and you’ve no control over what’s advertised, so it isn’t going to be suitable for your blog on cat and dog breeds!
Additional ways to monetise include adult toys and Clickbank products that you can review and/or link to.
Not all sex toy sites want to be associated with an adult site believe it or not, so you have to do some looking around, and remember your potential readership is global, so a distributor with a global network is best – not everyone is going to want to wait 2wks and pay through the nose to get an item sent from the US to Europe or vice versa.
Clickbank hosts all manner of programs, so it’s not hard to find something applicable in the adult niche; I’ll leave it to your imagination, or check it out for yourself.
There’s numerous places and methods of placing your banners and links on your site, and you can put a fair few in amongst your own content (links) without it looking overstuffed or unusual.
Way more than you can on a regular affiliate blog I’d say.
There’s certain notices and disclaimers you have to include on your site to cover yourself, the most important being a DMCA, but other than that it’s pretty much the same as any other site.
The DMCA is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It’s something all tube sites should include to avoid their host shutting them down. Basically, it covers you from certain forms of copyright infringement, and you agree to take down any material that’s brought to your attention that meets that stipulation.
Now, all of that is pretty much a high – and I mean really high – overview of getting an adult tube site set up.
There’s way more I could go into but right now, it’d just be theory or repeating other people’s advice, so I’d prefer to return to this subject when I’ve got a bit more experience under my belt, and can give my own take on it, rather than someone else’s.
As unusual as that is for these sorts of blogs that I’m writing.
So… to be continued.
