Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

As I write this it's April 1 over there in the United States and of course that means that it's April Fools Day. Perhaps I'm just getting older but I have to say that so far all the silliness that I've seen around the online marketing industry today just leaves me a bit bored. We're supposed to be creative but I don't see anything all that creative in the April Fools jokes I've seen today.

One April Fools Day 'report' that came out today suggested that Americans were beginning to turn away from their mobile phones and aren't even bothering to turn them on anymore. I really do hope that no one was fooled by that one because the situation is completely the opposite. Cell phone use is going up at an incredible rate and a recent Pew Internet and American Life survey has found that American adults now say that their cell phones are more important to them than the Internet or television.

When Pew did the survey last year they found that 51% of those surveyed said that it would be hard to give up their cell phones while only 45% of those surveyed thought that it would be hard to give up the Internet.

Now you might wonder what those figures have to do with adult marketers but the truth is that those figures are very important for us. They become even more important when you consider some figures that I mentioned a couple of months back that showed that the biggest number of searches done from cell phones was for porn related terms.

When you consider those two results it seems that the people we want to market to are beginning to migrate from the PC to the cell phone and some experts are beginning to suggest that the days of the PC are numbered. Before too long people could be accessing the Internet from their mobile phones more frequently than from their computers so what are we doing about it.

Are we just sitting back here and expecting our market to come to us or are we going out there to where our market is and taking our message to where they are?

Is it possible that the affiliate business model that is so popular here in adult online will be completely changed if our market does drift away from PC access? Is it possible that online porn as we know it will even be able to adapt to a world where people are accessing the Net via their cell phone?

Those aren't just academic questions that we should be thinking about in our spare time. Those are serious questions that really could affect our future and we need to be investigating them right now so that we can be prepared for the changes when they do occur.

Of course it would be much easier to fool ourselves into believing that things will always stay the same and not worry about what the future might hold. If we do that then we don't have to worry about what we might have to do to adapt to the marketplace of the future and we won't have to worry about learning new skills ... but we will have to worry about learning how to survive on a reduced level of income.

And reduction in our income levels will happen if we let the marketplace move on without us and that is no joke ... April Fools or otherwise.

Does the thought of a changing world scare you? Well it shouldn't ... it should actually get you excited and interested in improvising, adapting and overcoming the challenges that we'll face because there will continue to be a demand for what we sell no matter where the technology goes. All we have to do is find the best way to deliver what people want and in a format that is easy for them to access and enjoy via that new technology.

That's something that applies to everyone in this industry whether they be content providers, graphic artists or coders. Perhaps we won't see a complete migration from the familiar personal computer but I'm sure that consumers will want to see more and more on the cell phones rather than on their computer monitors and we all have to be ready for that.

We've already seen huge changes in the way we deliver our marketing message in the few short years that the Internet has been widely available so we shouldn't expect things to stand still now. Instead we need to be keeping up with the changes so that we're not left behind and don't see our income fade away.