Maybe Tube Sites Aren’t As Big As You Think

Almost everyone who owns content looks at illegal tubes as a major threat. The global traffic scale of tube sites and saturation of content is clearly on the minds of Producers. So before I start, the word “Tube” in this article is fully targeted towards “Illegal Tube Sites”. Since they control the largest volume of surfers and they are the threat. The Tube Sites referenced in this article are examples only, I’m not implying that any of these contain Illegal Content, even though we know more than a few do.

Taking a look at 5 popular Adult Tube Sites, (youporn, redtube, pornotube, megarotic, pornhub) We get the picture that Tube Sites are very hot, popular, growing, and contribute to overall content saturation and probably a loss of income.

If this makes ya sick: In the screen shot below I have removed the two smaller Tube Sites and added in TheHun and FreeOnes (Side note: Damn good job Freeones). This picture really helps put things into perspective. Even two of the largest Adult Sites stacked on top of each other can’t compete with a single Tube site.

Now we all think Adult Tubes are monster sources of traffic. So to put the Internet into scale, I have included YouTube and Adult Friend Finder into the mix. I don’t know if this is sad or amazing, but either way it’s neat to look at.

How do surfers find Adult Tube sites?
When we take a look at a Tube Site, in an instant know why they are so large, almost without question. But what if you do question it?

We could ask things like, who told the surfers about the Tube sites? Who links to them? I haven’t see any Gallery Posts or Adult Sites trading traffic with Tubes. So what’s the deal?

How Most Tubes Get Traffic:
Open this link to Yahoo: If it doesn’t work, then within Yahoo’s Search Box enter this search string: linkdomain:pornhub.com -site:pornhub.com -link:http://www.pornhub.com -link:http://pornhub.com (then click to lucky page 13)

Jump to pages 13, 5, 20, whatever you like. Study the search results. If you notice, most aren’t in English. The English sites are often splogs, forums with other piracy on them, and lots of other trash listings.

Looking through a Websites back links can tell an interesting story about the Website. The story with Pirate Tubes says that most of the traffic is, well.. worthless. At least to most Sponsors within our Industry. That doesn’t mean the traffic can’t be filtered out to convert better. But it does mean, overall, Tube sites are infested with straight up shit traffic from shit countries that can’t or hardly buy porn.

What All That Shit Traffic Means:
It means we are using Alexa to gauge popularity of a Website when we should probably look at tools like Site Analytics from Compete. Taking a look at FreeOnes, TheHun, YouPorn, Megarotic, and RedTube, we start to get a different picture.

Did you notice something? Make sure you look at the blue line, yeah that’s FreeOnes kickin everyones teeth in. And yep, that’s Megarotic, the king of piracy at the bottom of the list, below TheHun.

I’m not saying Tubes don’t command some serious overall traffic, because they do. But it may not be as much as our Industry thinks it is.

Why, you say?
Well, that’s actually the simple part. Alexa is used by a great deal of International Markets and the overall tracking on Alexa, Sucks! The International use of Alexa is much higher used than within power buying Countries, like the US/CA/UK/AU traffic markets. It appears the Asian Markets, Russians and several Eastern European countries love Alexa. So much so, they can skew the Alexa Rankings of sites to extreme levels.

Tubes also have a great deal of page views and raw visitor use, another factor that can help skew the Alexa Rankings.

Webmasters can also skew Alexa Rankings. Yep, Webmasters love Alexa too. Enough that if you watch GFY and other popular Forums when they talk about a Tube Site, that Tubes rankings will spike while the heat is on.

An Example of skewed Alexa Rankings:
Social Site Twitter is a great example to look at since they gave us some statistics in a recent post. On Alexa, Twitter is larger than TheHun and smaller than FreeOnes.

However on Compete, both Adult Sites are larger than Twitter. TheHun is almost twice the size as Twitter with Compete but twice as small on Alexa. That’s some rather large changes.

Read the Twitter Post, Twitter Web Traffic from Around the World - You can View the Traffic Graph here.

The traffic graph shows that 40% of the traffic is U.S. based. Then within the 60% International traffic base, UK is at 11%, Canada 7%, and Australia would be less than 4%. Looking at it like this, Twitter could have some serious buying power and probably does.

The difference between Alexa’s Rankings and Competes rankings is the Asian Traffic. The post stated, “we also have good old-fashioned web traffic. 60% of our web traffic comes from outside the United States.” Inside that 60% International traffic base, we have two Asian countries. Japan and Taiwan, which combined together, take up 25.8% of Twitters traffic based.

When looking at my own non-tube adult sites, I see that Asian countries hardly make a mark in my country stats, same with my Alexa Rankings, same with my Yahoo back links. So, if a 25% Asian traffic base can skew Twitters rankings this much, just think about how much Tube Sites are being skewed when almost all the back links are from Asia, Russia and Eastern Euro based Websites.

Let’s Move Forward:
It’s no secret in the Adult Industry that Illegal Tubes are a hot as hell topic. Several clearly profit on copyrighted content, along with some Sponsors. So any company willing to sue a Tube over this, I fully support. Some companies may even profit greatly from doing so.

For the groups that believe Tubes are the cause of lost traffic and sales, well… I’m sorry to tell you, that simply isn’t the true.

For me, the numbers tell me to not open a Tube site. And that I probably should stop marketing on them too, including Sponsor Tubes. The ‘net is filled with hundreds of other free and easy traffic sources to tap into. The Illegal Tubes popularity is from finding those unique sources of traffic, as the back links show, and in doing so they have killer rankings to show for it.

I’m not suggesting you go out and spam a bunch of trash Forums, even though it’s a great way to burn some bandwidth. I am suggesting that you open your mind, maybe look outside the Adult Industry Traffic Bubble for alternative traffic sources. The rewards can be greater than any affiliate, gallery, paid spot, or exit trade can provide.

~TheDoc

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