I normally don't like to write about the sites I use to generate income but I have blogged about this before. I co-own the NSFW website AhCabron.com. The basic idea is that users upload their photos so others can comment and vote on them. Most of the work that I need to do on this site is just help approve the uploads. We try our best to make sure that the uploaded photos are not obviously copyrighted, etc. and the users take it from there.
Adult sites that are free to use are usually more difficult to monetize. A good chunk of the users will be 14-18 year old boys who have no credit card and rarely click ads. The only form of monetization we currently use is text ads via BlackLabelAds (or AdBrite) and some affiliate banner ads.
In the past we were working hard doing direct deals with advertisers. That made much more money than just text ads do, but was a lot more work. We didn't feel the return was worth the effort, so we slowly phased that out and went back to text ads.
We also do ZERO advertising. All our traffic is, and always has been, referral traffic. Some how word got out about it and people starting flooding in and bringing a friend with them. So much so that we had to buy a second server to split the load.
With all this traffic success, I still haven't figured out how to turn that traffic into real money. We are averaging 250K page views per day, but our checks every month are very low compared to our traffic. I have a few ideas I want to try to up the websites income but I have been thinking...
How do I successfully monetize a "free to users" adult website? I am hoping someone out there in the blogosphere will have some experience in this area and send me a tip. Any takers?