We recently had the pleasure of speaking with Ross Allan from Traffic Force.
Allan gave us some insight on mainstream traffic and shared how some adult traffic companies work in the “real world” with mainstream entities.
YNOT: Could you give us a brief background about what you do now, and what you’ve done job-wise in the past.
Ross Allan: Like many others in this industry, I dropped out of school in 2002 at 19 years of age to start working on MGPs and gallery submission. Over the years, I transitioned more toward buying traffic as an affiliate and leveraging high PPS with low conversion CPAs. Gallery submissions were a good way to generate free traffic, but competition was crazy, so I started to buy spots, listings and banner ads to get my products listed higher than the rest.
I knew I made good templates and pushed great products, but I hated not knowing if I’d be listed number 5 or 55, so buying guaranteed listings gave me the confidence to scale my operations, and in turn, that led to higher payouts, which meant more money in my pocket and less for my competitors.
In 2007, I started working with PIMPROLL (the parent company of Traffic Force) as a media buyer on 200+ paysites, taking charge of generating more sales for the company in-house and helping to expand by optimizing paysites and generating new revenue. In 2009, we started working on an ad platform, which in 2010 became Traffic Force. Ever since then, I have been the head of the Traffic Force platform, ensuring it is one of the best ad platforms in our space and constantly evolving it to advance the success of ad buyers in the adult industry.
How common is it for adult companies to sell traffic to non-adult companies? Do you see that getting increasingly more or less common in the next five years?
There is a lull in that space right now, but between 2010 and 2013, it was very common to sell adult traffic to casino companies and bingo companies. It tapered off toward the end of 2013. There are still mainstream buyers for adult traffic; often with products like VPN services, browser extensions, and some app companies are still profiting. But it takes a brave company to buy adult traffic for their mainstream products, because it is still taboo in their verticals.
That does seem to be changing again in 2018. As you probably saw, the supreme court ruling on online gambling in the United States just this month opens up a huge opportunity for more mainstream companies to buy adult traffic again in states that allow online gambling.
In general, more mobile mainstream products are buying adult traffic for themselves, as they see the value in the consumers and are not afraid to get into our industry if it improves profits for them. I see this trend continuing with ethical adult sites, which are not as negatively thought of as they used to be. Sites like Pornhub are doing big things to change public opinion and that will continue to help the adult ad industry.
What are some of the challenges adult traffic sellers have when approaching mainstream buyers? What are their concerns, and what can be done to mitigate them?
Mainstream buyers are afraid the funnel will not work for them, or that adult consumers are not interested in purchasing non-adult products. It’s not true of course—anything can be sold to anyone if your funnel and product are good enough. It doesn’t matter what sector the traffic is from.
Put something interesting and creative in front of someone and you will get their attention. Some of the things we do to mitigate the concerns of mainstream product owners is give them a free sample of the traffic, offer them a bonus on top of their first deposit, or we even push small volumes on a CPA/CPI basis to prove it’ll work and that they should be buying more. Sometimes all it takes is a small offer of good faith for them to get interested and it sure goes a long way.
What are examples of some non-adult products that do well with adult traffic?
We know that casino and gambling does well on adult traffic, we’ve had a lot of successful gambling partners over the years and we continue to seek them out to work together. We attend some conferences for the gambling industry in the EU every year and try to network with as many operators as possible. Unfortunately, I can’t go into too much more detail on other products due to privacy requirements, but more and more products are coming online and it’ll continue to be something we fight to bring on board as we change peoples’ perceptions of our industry.
For adult companies with destination sites, how can they monetize them with mainstream offers? How would someone even get started doing that?
Each product is unique, so there is no one-size-fits-all to that question, but some general tips would be to try multiple things. Offer a few products to users, AB test, track all the data possible to build a picture of what is working. Sites with premium areas can be even more specific and track user behavior or interests and target them directly with certain products that may be to their liking.
You can run surveys, which give you great intel, and target to a product that fits in line with the answers the users give you. Crypto offers are making a strong entry into the ad buying industry. I think it meshes well with adult and would be something that adult site owners could leverage to generate more income from their user base. You just have to find the right offers and be sure you are partnering with a strong network.
Are mainstream shows like Affiliate Summit welcoming of adult companies, or do adult companies need to keep a low profile to attend and participate?
Affiliate Summit is very welcoming to adult companies, but they do ask us to be respectful so we can’t have adult materials or branding or clothing. They are a very forward thinking group of people. They realized years ago that their attendees were gravitating toward adult offers and they went out of their way to accept us into their world by helping us build relationships with key people who could work well with us.
As always, it was a big learning curve. Initially, they were only accepting certain companies and rejecting others, but now anyone who abides by the rules is welcome to attend and exhibit. I urge anyone from our industry to attend an Affiliate Summit event because it will be eye-opening to them and valuable for their business.
It can be a bit overwhelming with how big the conference is. There are more than 5,000 people attending, and it can feel like double that at times when you navigate your way around, but as long as you go with a plan and execute it, you’ll do just fine.
Interview was edited slightly for clarity.
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YNOT’s special reports on advertising and online ad networks will continue through the end of the month. Read more about this month’s theme here.
