Canadian/Dutch webmasters i'd like your opinion please !!!

[Raziel]

I just wanted to know if you have traffic from these countries (Canada,Netherlands ) and also in your opinion what it's suposed to do well in these countries regarding websites , content and niches
i need an honest answer and please no spam ....i'm working for a sponsor program so don't bother

[Dzinerbear]

Raziel,

Good to hear from you. I'm a Canadian webmaster. I'd be happy to try and answer any questions you might have.

Generally speaking, I really don't think the the Canadian market is too different from the American market. In fact, although we have a completely different identity, outlook on life, and mindset, in many other ways, Canada is just an extension of the United States. With the exception of a few programs and artists, most of our television, movies, and music is American. Canada and Canadians do constantly fight to avoid be swallowed up by the big American machines like Walmart, General Motors, Disney, Universal Studios, and CNN.

In other ways we are very different from Americans. We are constantly teased for being so polite, our cities tend to be cleaner, our citizens are not so fond of guns (although violent crime is taking a huge jump in places like Toronto), we love our health care programs, and we tend to be just as familiar about other places in the world as our own. (In fact the average Canadian knows more American history and geography than the average Amercian knows about Canada.)

So, it stands to reason that generally speaking our tastes in porn don't differ too much from what you find in the U.S.

What does set us apart more than anything is the value of our dollar. Many websites charge $39.95 U.S. for their premium membership and when you consider that for a Canadian that translates into $52.00, that's way too much money for anyone to spend on a monthly membership.

So, if you're wanting to target the Canadian market and get them to purchase a membership, keep the exchange rate in mind. Even a $24.95 US membership is going to cost a Canadian $32.50.

Actually, this suggestion goes out to all webmasters and site owners. If you could somehow employ geo tracking or something and present Canadians and citizens of other countries with a price that takes into consideration their currrency and exchange rates, you might find your sales increasing. Ask yourself how much do you think your sales would drop if you were asking Americans to spend $52 a month on your membership? How many more would you sell if you dropped that price to $24?

If there's anything else, please let me know.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

[emmanuelle]

While I won't get into theories; having operated paysites since 1999, I can safely say that our Canadian memberships are miniscule. The Canadian memberships that we do get tend to be regional fans of amateur (personality based sites). Alternatively, for our other sites, the members are often Quebecois, where attitudes towards sex are much more liberal. It makes me consider mirroring my sites into French to try & capitalize a bit more on the market.

I do find that we have a pretty good % of sales to the Netherlands, and other 'Nordic' countries, including Norway, Finland & Switzerland. These sales tend to be for our balloon site.

Interestingly enough, we've learned that certain fetishes seem to be regional. A huge % of frisky-business members are from Australia, while 70% of our Messychixxx members are UK!

We're currently in the midst of preparing our content for mobile delivery, which is huge in Europe at this time. We'll be launching this in November, and should have all the bugs nicely ironed out when the craze eventually hits North America :-)

[MacDaddy]

Dzinerbear, really well put. Have you considered writing an I am Canadian commercial? On that note:

CANADA ROCKS!!! :goof:

emmanuelle, I often heard of the quebecers being more liberal with sex. But after just moving to Toronto from Montreal 2 months ago, i have to disagree. They are plenty liberal here!! In the gay community, probably more liberal

[emmanuelle]

Originally posted by MacDaddy

CANADA ROCKS!!! :goof:

emmanuelle, I often heard of the quebecers being more liberal with sex. But after just moving to Toronto from Montreal 2 months ago, i have to disagree. They are plenty liberal here!! In the gay community, probably more liberal

hehe- I moved from Toronto to Montreal a year ago. While I can't speak for the gay community, I do think that the straignt/bi crowd is more open minded here :kitten:

[Evil Chris]

Originally posted by emmanuelle
hehe- I moved from Toronto to Montreal a year ago. While I can't speak for the gay community, I do think that the straignt/bi crowd is more open minded here :kitten:

Really Emma? How so?

[Raziel]

great answer Dzinerbear and what you told me about the US$/canadian$ cost was really interesting and we'll try to keep that in mind
............thanks all for your answers :elf:

[gaystoryman]

Great post Dzinerbear

I think a lot of the 'miniscule' sales from Canada has a great deal to do with that exchange rate... and perhaps that is also a limiting factor for many of the other countries too... in some US dollars are tightly regulated as well... which could hamper a person's ability to join or buy...

just my thought.

Ian

[desslock]

Originally posted by Raziel
I just wanted to know if you have traffic from these countries (Canada,Netherlands ) and also in your opinion what it's suposed to do well in these countries regarding websites , content and niches
i need an honest answer and please no spam ....i'm working for a sponsor program so don't bother

Hi Raziel

To answer your marketing question - I would just market to the Canadians like you already maket to USA consumers.

I would sell stuff to the Dutch that have a European flair. For example - if you have travel packages on American Airlines to sell, sell them to North Americans. If you have travel packages on KLM, then advertise that to the Dutch.

So to translate, for Canada you would sell twinks that are like the California/Falcon guys or maybe Cobra or CitiBoyz. For the Netherlands, you would probably sell British twink Eurocreme stuff, Bel Ami boys or the emaciated Sweedes from SEVP.

I think marketing to different countries is kind of fun. Although frankly I've personally never gotten much return from a "Canada focus." I love Maleflixx's affiliate program because their reporting tells me what country each referred sale is from. This little piece of tracking info is invaluable - (and a reason why I promote them significantly more then other PPV networks) - this little reporting statistic tells me a number of important things:

+ Unlike non-adult websites, adult websites pull in a greater proportion of non US customers. So build your sites accordingly.

+ If you wanna sell to foreigners, sell to EU countries. UK, IE, Deutschland, and Switzerland seem to open their wallets a lot. I've done some sales in Australia too - an interesting market.

When I was at Internext, a webmaster was asking me about marketing to Canada. My advice was to just accept that Canada will be a country that may produce outstanding entertainers (you know William Shatner and Celine Dion) - but as a consumer market, it's nothing you need to try and "break into."

For example - I used to make an extra set of links on selling books not only to Amazon.com but also to Amazon.ca --- I learned after a few months that was a waste of time. Not only did I almost never get a Amazon.ca sale, but then if you go ask them, they tell you that they never even visit Amazon.ca! -- they all just shop Amazon.com. Same with eBay.com and never selling stuff on eBay.ca!

Curious conclusion: The Canadians don't even go to their own sites.

(of course, I could digress into some serious lampooning here about Canadians....)

So for porn marketing: I would wager a whole looney that rather then trying to sell adult movies through Priape - and building all those extra links - I suspect that I'm capturing just as many or more Canadian customer sales through my USA-based affiliates Movie Mountain and TLAvideo, and not lifting a finger. [My MovieMountain tracking reports have verifyed sales to BC and Manitoba, so yeah]

One last jump back to your Netherlands question - my economic understanding of that country and others is that they are now officially a Common Market. So I conclude from that phrase, one marketing word - "bonanza!" Since they are a common market, we would pretty much market to the whole block of EU countries. They all have the same currency. (yeah, I know there are variations) It actually makes it easier now because rather then selling to the Netherlands and Denmark and Germany and Italy and Malta - you just have one "common market" to sell to. That probably makes it much easier to sell stuff to that way.

Imagine if once upon a time, all fifty US states had their own currencies and trade laws. You really would have to market specifically to California, or Oregon, Michigan or Texas. Now the EU is much more like the USA, so think of it like that.

Bonanza.

My best paying affiliate programs are in the Netherlands and Canada.

Good luck,
Steve

[desslock]

Originally posted by Dzinerbear
So, if you're wanting to target the Canadian market and get them to purchase a membership, keep the exchange rate in mind. Even a $24.95 US membership is going to cost a Canadian $32.50.

Dzinerbear

Nice post. This is interesting because you and I are seeing at a very concrete level what it means for a weak US dollar when you are trying to sell US goods. (in our case porn).

On your suggestion: the price problem cuts both ways. If a US website makes a profit selling at $24.95 USD, discounting it to Canadians or Europeans 20% or so would eliminate a lot of that profit.

This is an unfortunate fact of life right now when the US dollar is worth nuthin'. And the reason the dollar isn't worth anything is because the interest rates are tiny. Watch as Alan Greenspan and the Fed raise interest rates - that will make the dollar worth more, and you will see it start strengthing to the Canadian dollar and the Euro.

For us webmasters, that will mean that a $24.95 USD website would not cost $32.50 canadian dollars, but more like $30 or just more at parity. That would definately help us in the USA sell more to people in other countries because our stuff wouldn't be so expensive to them.

Steve

[Dzinerbear]

Hey there,

Desslock, your comment: "Curious conclusion: The Canadians don't even go to their own sites.(of course, I could digress into some serious lampooning here about Canadians....)" shows that most American webmasters probably don't "get" it when it comes to Canada.

Canadians don't go to their own websites, as you say, because almost every single website run by a Canadian bills in U.S. dollars because there are no cc processors in Canada who will process for porn. The Canadian banking industry decided they didn't want to deal with porn, so they don't. So virtually every single Canadian porn site processes through ccbill, iBill, Verotel, or someone else.

And again, why would a Canadian pay $52 a month to purchase a premium membership that normally bills at $39.95 US.

As for your "weak" American dollar, you've got it in reverse. Your "weak" American dollar should actually mean an increase in sales from Canada. When I started webmastering a year and a half ago, your dollar was very strong. Canadians were paying about $1.48 for $1.00 U.S. This was great when I took those U.S. ccbill and MANcheck cheques to the bank. A $450 commission cheque was worth almost $700 by the time I converted it into Canadian. Today, it's worth $584.00 ... big difference.

But from your point of view: a $24.95 US membership was worth $37.00 CDN, at today's exchange rate, it's costing Canadians about $32.00. Not a significant change perhaps, but probably enough to net you guys some more memberships.

And you say that by reducing your rates to sell to Canadians that you wouldn't be "making" any money. But if you picked up an extra 100 memberships a month from Canadians, you probably wouldn't be complaining. And you're still making money because a Canadian membership isn't going to chew through $24.95 worth of your bandwidth.

And BTW, Sean Cody advertises like crazy here in the gay newspapers. Sean Cody charges $24.95 US for a membership. If SC is paying the advertising prices to take out full-page ads in Canadian gay newspapers, SC is getting Canadians to sign up.

Cheers,
Dzinerbear

[desslock]

Ack -- yep I mean the reverse thingy. I should go to bed earlier.

An intreesting aside - guess what Canadian company pays affiliates anadian dollars?

Amazon.ca

Steve