As Some Things Change Others Never Do
Posted On: 2009-12-28
Well it's been a few years but finally mobile content seems to be starting to make money if the number of sponsors who are offering mobile content is anything to go by.
I can still remember at least five years ago buying our first mobile domains when Voltar tried to get a few people interested in mobile porn. Sadly I think we were a bit ahead of our time back then because we never made a dollar out of that and as far as I know we've let all our mobile domains go but now ... well now it is looking interesting.
Sponsors are even offering their affiliates scripts that will automatically redirect surfers who try to browse your non-mobile sites on their smart phones so if you're not into offering mobile porn on sites that are specifically designed for surfers on smart phones then you're almost certainly missing out.
Hell with some sponsors you don't even have to design your own mobile site ... they'll design them for you and even fit the graphics to give the mobile sites the same look and feel as your big-traffic non-mobile sites.
If you want to be really adventurous you can even develop your own mobile paysites for there's even a billing company that can handle signups direct from the surfer's mobile phone and it's integrated with NATS and CCBill
It seems that Mobile certainly took a while to get off the ground but it's here now and it's only going to get a whole lot bigger.
Of course if you want to build a mobile site of your own then you're going to have to do things a little differently than what you do when you're building a normal free site or gallery. File size is very very important for mobile and the smallest file sizes you can achieve are what you should be aiming for.
The length of the domain name is also very important. Try typing anything longer than six or seven characters and it starts to become a real chore that surfers will get tired of very quickly and even think about a two-letter .tv is better than a three-letter.com.
Don't forget that surfers want to get to their porn fast and not spend time trying to type long domain names into a mobile phone character by character.
Not every sponsor pays
It's sad fact of life in this industry that not every sponsor pays their affiliates and sometimes you have to wonder how they manage to remain in business despite the fact that they don't pay. You would think that after a while their bad reputation would catch up with them but right now I'm looking at a thread on a well-known Webmaster board that is outing sponsors who don't pay and some of those names have been around for quite some time.
If you're new to this industry don't rush in to sign up with a new sponsor without doing some due diligence. It may be more fun to go surfing through a new sponsor's content and creatives to see how you can use the stuff they have but there's no point promoting a sponsor who isn't going to pay you so take a few minutes to run a few searches through Google just to see what kind of reputation they really have.
Affiliates ... at least at the beginning of their career ... are often living almost hand-to-mouth and all it's going to take to destroy their business is just one sponsor who doesn't pay so make sure you don't get caught.
It's also interesting to see a few names in that list of non-paying sponsors that were more than trusted a few years ago. I guess that when times get tough you really begin to discover which sponsors are genuine and look after their affiliates and which ones are prepared to screw the people who do the hard promotional work for them.
So there's a lesson there even for affiliates who have been around for some time. Keep an eye on your sponsors and as soon as they begin to miss payments start looking to see if others are experiencing the same problem.
And if you're an affiliate who thinks that maybe it might be easier to get people to pay over in mainstream ... well things are just as tough over there. There are plenty of mainstream merchants who will take all the traffic and signups that you can send them and then find some loophole to crawl through so they don't have to pay you.
Surviving can be tough in this business but I still haven't found a business that's better than this one.