There are different ways of looking at this.

I had been adding new members every month since 2002. But the income never really increased beyond a certain level. Assuming the system was working as we thought it was, that suggests that there was little or no retention and nearly all of my longstanding members soon stopped buying or only did very occasionally. Most sales came from "fresh" members?

That means AEBN got hardly any income from those longstanding members either and mainly made money from the new members I added?

Income seemed to peak around mid 2007 and then began a steeper decline in 2011. In June 2014 (the worst month for 12 years) I earned one hundredth of what had I earned about seven years previously!

Badboysfilms, you say that others may make money from "a long term affiliate that no longer does anything." But my experience above suggests perhaps they won't.

And here's the thing... Sponsors tend to assume that we'll go on promoting them whatever, leave up pages etc. But that isn't necessarily the case.

Being in the UK I now have problems cashing Dollar cheques for less than $200 and the government is being increasing awkward about porn, particularly with an election due in May.

Recently, because the AEBN and other sponsor income had dipped so low, I decided I would switch off most of my main site to the UK completely. It wasn't worth the risk of being targeted by the government quango that has been going after UK adult sites.

I've done it simply by putting XSSI on the pages and it works with the HTTP_CF_IPCOUNTRY header that's added by Cloudflare.

So far I haven't turned off the pages that have the most sponsor links to my AEBN custom theatres, so they are still being found from search engines by UK web surfers. But I might decide that it isn't worth bothering to continue with AEBN at all if other webmasters are getting the benefit of the new members I add.

Years ago Badpuppy did something like this. They had a great little community of webcammers when that was the craze. They provided the hosting when that was a difficult thing and some webcammers made a lot of affiliate income on the sale of Badpuppy memberships. I had a hosted site too, though the sales never amounted to much for me. I did it for fun more than anything.

They were very nice people at Badpuppy. But one day they made changes and stopped sending the internal traffic that they had (for instance from pages listing the webcams). Some of the most popular webcammers lost most of their income and gave up. In my own case it prompted me to move my site onto my own adult hosting and that was one of the best things I ever did. I started promoting AEBN and others which wasn't allowed on the Badpuppy hosting and soon the site was making way more money than it ever had.

So the motto is: changes can cut both ways. I assume AEBN knows more about the market than I do. But could it find that those sites that tend to sell the memberships drop them and so there are fewer members around for the sites that Badboysfilms mentions to benefit from and they may not be so good at getting new joins.