Rebuilding Your Userbase After a 60% Traffic Loss (80% Sales Loss) Disaster

That graph is unusual considering the title. I expected to see a graph of the traffic loss or the sales loss, but actually that graph just shows the cams available (in a diffcultto parse format).<p>What your story seems to show is this: you're a porn site that does not know it's a porn site. People are paying because they want the dirty stuff, same as they pay for the other real porn cam sites. Perhaps yours is more palatable to them because there are no weird pop ups and other in-your-face stuff. But it's the same stuff they look for on other sites that they look for on yours.<p>If it's about the money, should you not be aggressively exploring more in this area? Are you offering too little? Too much?<p>Now that you are turning the titanic, what do you want out of it? You want more money? You want more geek credibility? You want to sell it off someday?

One major lesson to take from this: Make sure you <i>fully</i> understand the impact of changes you're considering for your site.<p>It's easy to check one metric (in this case, percent of cams) and declare that that metric proves that your change won't be a problem. But you should make sure to check every metric you can get (percent of sales and percent of traffic, in this case).<p>There's no reason you couldn't have tracked traffic to each cam and discovered that 60% of your traffic was to adult cams, right? And you may not want to track what cams each user views for privacy reasons, but you probably could have taken some anonymous data to see that adult cams make up a significant percentage of paid users' views, right?

While I don't know if I agree with the decision, this is an excellent cautionary tale for what happens if you try to guess what your current customer behavior is instead of measuring it. I doubt there is anybody here who runs a public service who has not been bitten by that before.<p>This particular issue has caused trouble for a few other startups, too. IMVU, if I remember correctly, also had a huge fracture with a vocal section of their user base when they decided to ban pedophilia.

You're getting some criticism here, but deserve kudos for being willing to let product decisions come from someone you recognize as better suited to make them for the customer base you've reached.

Browsing through the webcam list (child safe mode off), every other one appears to be a bloke wanking.<p>So what's the site's business model?

&#62; "It turns out that that 5% of the cams coincides with 60% of the traffic and close to 80% of the sales!"<p>The traffic that each camera gets should be pretty easy to track. The site also has a top 100 cam list so it apparently does track hits to cameras. Seems to me that they should have known that 5% of their cams coincided with 60% of their traffic before hand (and whether those were adult only cameras or not).

Why don't you sell it off and do something that you &#38; people/users like.

The real question is if this extra traffic is valuable, then how to monetize the blokes wanking.<p>I would suggest a tie-up with an adult website and limit daily viewing time. The blokes wank off for free, crowdsourced, those who have a cam get to watch others for free, but those without have to pay a small fee after so many minutes (say 45 minutes a day free)

So, you did not do calculations of the probable effect of your decision _before_ taking that decision?

I was going to collect a lot more data and provide more details about the future direction but this got posted before I got around to that so I'll leave it as it stands.<p>The title here is not mine, but a replacement that I can't subscribe to 100% yet.

You don't explain in detail why you decided to go back on your decision...<p>It seems like the decision to go back to 'non-clean' was purely short term profit driven.<p>Seems like given more time and effort, keeping it clean may well have paid off in the longer run.

tl;dr: undo what you did that persipitated the "disaster"