It’s an odd day when the adult industry and religious groups agree on something. Both groups opposed the proposal to create a .xxx top level domain requirement for adult sites, which went down in defeat last week. It would be surprising if ICANN approved the plan, after rejecting it twice before. The proposal by ICM Registry would have dealt a major blow to the adult biz by requiring that adult sites end in .xxx instead of .com. (Never mind that effective filtering tools like Netnanny and CyberSitter already exist. We’ve seen how useful labeling music as explicit has been at preventing kids from buying it, right?)

The proposed change would have forced ICANN to become content regulators. It may have allowed local and state governments to get to say what is decent. Who’s to say what is or what isn’t? It’s all relative, no? And in an age where the public is obsessed with things like Janet Jackson’s boob flash and Brittney Spears’ crotch shot, would not half the blogs in the sphere have to be xxx’ed? Who would decide?

While many in the biz expressed fear of this threat in hotly-debated exchanges on adult webmaster message boards, I didn’t lose much sleep over it. People who admit to looking at porn represent 42% of internet users. That means that porn is pretty much mainstream. If that many of us admitted to visiting a red-light district in any town, there wouldn’t be physical red-light districts, either. We’d have porn stores on every corner.

I got those statistics from a 2007 Pornography Statistics report by Top Ten Reviews. The report also notes that: “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC” and daily porn searches account for 25% of total search engine requests. It’s an eye-opening report.

Now, back to my theme of affiliate success for adult webmasters. If you want to succeed, pay attention to the trends in this report, go out and find one of the many new niches forming as porn is becoming a mainstream commodity. Sites made by and for women, bisexuals, and trans-folk–basically porn for people other than straight men–are definitely hot opportunities for the new adult webmaster right now.

By far the most interesting statistic I found in the report relates to the average incomes of adult internet users. The reason is this…you target someone making under $15k with a completely different psychology than someone who makes more than $75k. Seeing the chart here, it becomes clear that you should get to know how to speak to these folks, and let go of the bargain hunters. Listen up all you membership-based site owners. Do you really think that those members who join for a week, grab your content and cancel are in the 35% you want to do business with?

The answer is NO. What you really want for sustainable success is to target a group of people who have lots of money to spend and who have expensive tastes. Not the bargain hunters and kids without credit cards whose parents have not succeeded at keeping them away from porn.

So when looking at options for your sponsor programs, think like a wealthy lesbian, or closet cross-dresser, or obscure fetish-loving rich man. These folks are not the ones who benefit from the terabytes of free explicit photos that are readily available online. People with money usually have less time on their hands. They want quality, folks. They want to find an adult webmaster who shares their passion for whatever it is that gets them off, and form a lasting relationship with you. They will buy from you over and over again if you have their trust, so earn it.

You are better off with fewer visitors and members who are mad about your unique site and hungry to buy stuff they like. Along those lines, you can skip the sponsors with volumes of free hosted galleries you can give away and high initial percentages, and instead partner with someone who has a large amount of product to sell them, and higher conversions. Gamelink has one of the largest adult stores on the net, and some of the highest conversions in the industry. So you can be sure to find a steady stream of product to sell the discerning, wealthy surfer. Our recommendation engine works like Amazon’s: it suggests additional products based on the ones they are looking at to increase your average sale. Not many programs have this feature and new adult webmasters don’t always see why this is so critical.

And here’s a tip that helps everyone…tease ‘em if you want to please ‘em. You’ve seen the power of a striptease…let ‘em peek, and stop putting all this free hardcore pix out there where anyone can see. Save them for your members, and make them pay. You may lose some sales but you may gain the right quality members who will be yours for life if you treat them right. And you help to reduce the obscene amount of content on the 420 million pages of porn that gets accessed by the wrong people. As it turns out, what is good for marketing adult sites is also good for those who have a legitimate need to protect their kids from porn.