3 years ago a life changing event for both the company and myself took place.  After 4 months of development, building up a pornstar database, working with a lot of affiliate programs, we launched 4Tube.com.  Today, I can happily say, that this paved the road for the future of the company, and has opened doors to many great new opportunities.  Since then we have tripled our staff, re-located to our new office in July 2010, launched other successful projects like PornTube.com, and some exciting things in the works for 2012.  As part of this 3 year celebration I will document the history of 4Tube, and discuss some of the challenges we faced during this period. 

August 2008, when in the brainstorm stage for 4Tube, we put all our industry knowledge from the pornstar market we had gained from running gals4free.net, and all the tech know-how we had gathered from running www.fux.com(an amateur tube community at the time) into this project.  Until then, we had only operated sites in the 200.000-300.000 visits a day range.  With 4Tube we knew things could really rocket-launch, as that’s what we saw happening in the market with other similar sites that launched.  Our 2-man dev-team at the time spent their initial time making sure we had a good foundation and infrastructure, before really starting to code.  They kept hearing me say this site would get “over a million visitors a day within no time”, so made sure the systems could cope with this.  I had no idea how we were going to get to this magic number, but had my eyes set on it and wouldn’t let go until that was achieved!

Tubes were nothing new to our industry at the time, some competitors had already established themselves pretty well, but no one took on the pornstar niche market and made it theirs.  That’s what we set ourselves out to do.  Become the best destination to easily find tube clips of the pornstar you like in a categorized manner.

Launch time!

Since we were on a limited ad budget to get things off the ground, we initially just fed traffic to 4Tube.com from some of our other properties, mainly Gals4free as it had the most similar traffic-profile.  We then went on to tweak many little things for the next 4-6 weeks based on both user feedback and industry feedback we got from peers.  We were keeping a very close eye on metrics like “time on site” and “average pageviews per user”, the primary ways to measure if people enjoy their experience.  We weren’t giving too much focus yet on the monetization per 1000 visitors metric.  The tweaks we implemented pushed us from 7.05 pageviews/user to 9.50 pageviews/user by the first week of December!

Once we felt fully confident we built and tweaked a good product, we started buying traffic for the site.  Initially I started hitting up a lot of our TGP/MGP contacts, people we did business with through Gals4free, to try and work out a deal.  I received a lot of push-back at the start.  Most TGP/MGP owners were all very much against the idea of selling traffic to a “tube site” (at the time, this was a very nasty term as it was shaking the adult industry’s business model upside down,  mainly because of the copyright infringement a lot of the other sites were involved with).  Even after showing them that 4Tube was not that kind of tube site, but that instead we worked with all the affiliate programs, most webmasters were still reluctant to work with us as they were afraid it would make them lose a lot of bookmarkers, and after a few months it would really damage their site’s traffic levels.  Being the persistent person I am and not giving up easily, I eventually got the first deals in place, and it became easier and easier to sign on more people when able to reference other sites had started selling us traffic.

The first few months were filled by many long days by most people in the company.  Our content department was working hard with the affiliate programs to get as much fresh video content on the site possible, our developers were scaling up our infrastructure to support the ever increasing traffic levels, and I was out setting up more and more traffic buys putting in many late nights as most people I had to speak with were in other time-zones.  By March 2009, even though daily visitors cracked the 500.000/day mark, higher levels than we had ever dealt with on our other projects, we still hadn’t figured out how to monetize the traffic enough to become profitable.  This was for two reasons, 1) our monthly hosting invoice and 2) the money we were paying to buy traffic to grow the site. 

Keep in mind we are talking early 2009, when hosting wasn’t as cheap as it is today, plus our contract was still growing and the good pricing only really kicked in once you pushed more than 1Gbit.  This was a technical barrier we were about to crack for the first time, and have never looked back since.  The geek in me will always translate this in how many hard-drives this fills with porn every month, especially when talking with a non-technical person.  At the time we were streaming all our videos of our own media servers using Wowza.  The term CDN or cloud-hosting were far from common in adult back in those days.

By June 2009, we were slowly approaching the initial target of having 1.000.000 visitors a day on 4Tube, yet we were still operating at a loss, something a small company like ours couldn’t sustain for a large period of time.  I really started to micro-manage each ad-zone on the site, and managed to tweak our revenues by about 10-15%, but still not sufficient to stop losing money.  When we launched 4Tube I really put a lot of focus with our designer on creating a good user experience, one which didn’t overload you too much with advertising.  Around this time I started receiving increasingly aggressive proposals to run popunders and IM ads, something I turned down for quite some time as I found these type of ads too intrusive.  After getting an offer I couldn’t refuse to run a test with both ad-types for a week, it quickly became apparent this was the key to continue fueling growth.  During the 1 week test our main metrics like time on site and average pageviews per user didn’t really get affected that much.  It became apparent that the main reason for this was that the surfer got accustomed to seeing those ads on most other tube sites out there.

At long last we were profitable, but still a while away from breaking-even.  Even though we were had higher monthly revenues, I was directly re-investing this into more traffic to continue growing the site.  Things really started to speed up at this stage.  By July 30th we had cracked 1.500.000 daily visitors a day, which catapulted us into the Alexa Top 500!  So within 9 months we had grown from 0 to being in the top 500 most visited websites on the internet…. Time to celebrate!

Party Time!

On August 22nd (by pure coincidence also my bday) we threw a party for our team, friends, and about 500 people who happily joined the opportunity to celebrate a porn site’s success with some of the things we had planned.  We organized a few live shows, had British pornstar Rebecca Jessop there to spice things up, and the rest is history.  The pictures and “after” video can still be seen here. (Note:  some interesting pics from our staff can be found if you dig through them!).

After summer we went into another heavy tweaking period.  From late August to October we sorta stayed in the 1.5M/day range as far as daily traffic went, but we made some important gains in our average pageviews per user, which showed in our bottom line.  The last few days of October I started activating a few more traffic deals to go for the next big jump.  We tried hard to reach 2M/day by November 3rd 2009, but had to settle for 1.967.787.  Still, not a bad result after 12 months!

One thing in particular we did notice around this time was that despite our efforts in the SEO department (we leveraged our other properties and set up a lot of link trades to 4Tube), our search engine traffic was only making up for a small % of the total traffic.  It was around this time that I started working with Rodney Cullen, who would later join Dreamstar Cash in July 2010.  He will soon be writing a detailed blog post about the SEO penalties we had incurred and the lessons learned by some silly mistakes we made in regards to our affiliate tracking code.

In 2010, Dreamstar Cash went through a significant transition as we were putting down the structure for PornTube.  We moved to our new office, grew our team by 200%, all things which put significant stress on the organization.  4Tube remained stable, despite receiving a lower focus.  After our penalty got resolved, SEO traffic starting picking up, allowing for an ever increasing quality of our overall traffic mix.

We put a lot of our lessons learnt into PornTube when we initially launched that project in December 2010, but by now we have new lessons learnt on PornTube which we will soon be translating across to 4Tube again.  3 years on, and 4Tube is still a very important of the company, and looking back really puts a smile on my face for the growth it’s allowed for the company, and the personal growth I’ve taken away from this.

I hope this was an interesting read for those who made it all the way through!  One of my first attempts at a blog post, but something myself and other members of the DSC will be doing more of on our company blog, so make sure you subscribe to the RSS!  If anyone has any questions they would like to hit me up about, feel free to shoot an email to info@dreamstarcash.com.