The problem as I see it is like this.

A lot of webmasters continued to do what they always did. As they saw diminishing results, they dropped off and pursued other interests. Like anything, free sites, TGPs, site reviews, blogs, and AVS sites, you have to continue trying new things.

Let's just take, for instance, content. In the beginng AVS wm's were scooping up content from newsgroups and making AVS galleries. That worked in the beginning, but that content became over-used. Content brokers started popping up and those wm's who bought content saw their AVS galleries move to a new level. Those who did not buy content started seeing diminishing results. A lot of those wm's would said, "AVS is no good anymore, AVS is dead." When really it was their content or approach that was dead.

As the online porn market started to grow and PPS exploded, who wanted to sell an AVS membership and make $11.50 when you could make $30 for selling a paysite membership? A lot of webmasters dropped off. Even if your one-year membership rebilled for one month on the premium product, you were still ahead selling one PPS membership.

So, as more webmasters drop off and move onto to other things, obviously an AVS's traffic is going to start to diminish as well.

Adult Check turfed most of their webmasters a few years ago, so that would explain their traffic decline. UGAS, I think just became saturated. Everyone had a membership. Plus I think UGAS started diluting their own brands by developing competing AVS models like Cyberage and CyberSexNetworks. The introduction of a new product probably pushed up sales initially, but then surfers probably started figuring out they were getting the same thing with any of them. It'd be like Randy Blue taking all of their content and opening a new site called "Horny Bob," it may do well initially, but eventually everyone would figure out it was Randy Blue with a new outfit.

I still can't sell many UGAS memberships, but their traffic is productive for upsells. I do the best with Mancheck. They're not as well-known and saturated. Also, Mancheck's been doing a lot of improvements to their sites and working on a fresh new look. The others look the same as they always have.

I think the basic problem with AVS is that they've been around for a long time. So a lot of surfers have at one point had a membership to all of them. As webmasters didn't improve their products and the AVS's did nothing to improve theirs, the surfers became disillusioned and moved on to paysites. And much of that traffic is hesitant to buy another membership -- they don't believe the hype and "thousands of galleries" just means "lots of crap."

AVS always relied on webmasters to provide most of the content and as webmasters moved on, that content started to stagnate. Some AVS's are doing better at improving their own content, others are doing nothing.

I find Rainbow Passport an incredibly hard sell. Maybe it's the site's design, I'm not sure. I would have thought an under-exposed site like RP would do well, but maybe surfers just look at it and think, "Oh it's one of those Mancheck / UGAS things and I've already had one of those memberships."

As I said, UGAS is very productive for me for upsells. I've never tried Global Male Pass, mainly because they had such a long period of time where they weren't approving sites very fast. (But Max says they're productive now.) I tried a brief stint with Mansites, but found the "free" AVS model too difficult to push. Imen never really developed their product, a fine example of a straight company throwing up a gay product and doing nothing with it. Mancheck still performs best for me in new sales and rebills, but I also find Mancheck's traffic isn't terribly hot for upsells in the member's area to secondary sponsors.

I'm not just saying this because I used to work for Mancheck, but they really have made a lot of changes to their site, so I think it's probably the best bet for selling new memberships. There's some new improvement to the site almost every week and that'll keep the surfers interested and coming back.

My 50 cents

Michael