Yeah I wasn't talking about Alexa ratings. But we all know they aren't accurate.
What I was going for was from a models perspective these are the sites that are worth working on. Clicks on a site doesn't mean we make reliable income. Alexa means nothing when I say popular. As a cam model I don't give a shit about clicks or viewers. I care about quality of those viewers as well as quality site policies.
It is a general consensus LJ is shady and pays TERRIBLE. Any cam gal worth her salt doesn't typically send other gals to LJ.
Top sites recommended by models (therefore the most popular where it matters) does infact include MFC and SM.
"Popular" and "Profitable" aren't necessarily the same. One could argue that there's usually a correlation, but it's not science. "Popular" and "profitable" are also contingent upon the model. A German model will probably perform much better on MyDirtyHobby than an American model would. Therefore, a site that is "profitable" and "popular" for you doesn't mean it is for everyone. You don't have to worry about that, but I'm shooting emails overseas every day. It's very relevant to me. I need to work off data and not intuition. I also work off a lot of feedback, and global feedback. It varies from place to place.
Another thing that's not taken into consideration is the whitelabels and embeds. If it was possible to take that into consideration, SM would be way higher up on the list. Hell, the traffic for their TV channel they got isn't accounted for either. Which, if the whitelabels weren't generating money (thus generating models money), webmasters wouldn't be using them. Someday Google is going to swing the ban-hammer on all those sites due to them all running off the same nameservers and having basically 100% duplicate content, but until then, it's a factor not taken into consideration.
I'm really interested to see if MFC implements an in-house affiliate program and if you can see a correlation in the traffic reports. One could argue that their recent drop might be due to them leaving Crakrevenue, but there's so many factors going into everything, that it's difficult to know for sure. If they did implement an in-house affiliate program and traffic starts spiking, it would add talking points to that argument.
Which I did make some money off the MFC affiliate program. Lot of people Googling "camming sites" which I rank very highly for. Because of this, I do get some insights into customer referrals and spending. Which, if I'm making money, that means that models are making money too. That's how revshare works. Going off those metrics, Chaturbate performs better. Hell, SkyPrivate performs better for that matter. SM never performed that great, but I ended up giving all that action to a Streamate model, as she could actually access the SM model referral program, which I can't. Customer traffic wasn't performing, so figured might as well. Actually should email her and see how it's performing.
Don't have much insight outside of that, as with most programs you have to choose between model or customer referral links, but I do have what little insight I could offer from that. Don't have that insight anymore, as MFC is no longer with Crak. really wish I still did.
Another area one could look at is domain authority, which is a MOZ metric and based off crawlers so it's not sample data like Alexa or SimilarWeb. They've reverse-engineered Google to 70% accuracy and continuely crawls like Googlebot in order to tweak algo signals to better match Google's SERPs. Since Google doesn't update PageRank data anymore, the entire SEO industry goes off of DA. Here's how the top-5 sites when it comes to DA:
- ImLive: 77
- LiveJasmin: 69
- Cams.com: 69
- Chaturbate: 68
- BongaCams: 67
The relevance? Higher DA means that content will perform better on their site. There's tons of other signals in the algo outside of just backlinks, and I've never actually crawled the different sites, but in theory, the category pages should perform better on the higher DA pages. This leads to more traffic, and assuming the traffic converts, more money.
Also, look at all the industry awards. MFC used to win all the time. I think they once took XBIZ
Best Camming Site 4 or 5 years in a row. MFC doesn't win anymore. Sure, it's the opinion of the industry, but there's camming models voting as well. Maybe all the other sites are just better at driving votes.
So I am basing my assumptions on more than just Alexa. But on the topic of SimilarWeb, you should check out the Google Analytics of all the sites your running and compare it to SimilarWeb data. It's actually surprisingly accurate. Not perfect, but the graphs are always trending in the right direction. All the seasonal traffic is fairly accurate as well.
