As the end of 2011 approaches, FetishHits continues to celebrate a milestone: the company’s 10th anniversary.
Many adult businesses have come and gone since 2001, which was the year in which FetishHits.com was first launched. But the popular adult affiliate program/ adult Internet company has not only endured for 10 years; it has also grown and expanded considerably along the way.
The mobile/wireless adult market has grown by leaps and bound since the early 2000s, especially in Europe — and FetishHits has not been shy about increasing its presence and visibility in that market.
Back in 2001, FetishHits started out with only three adult websites; now, FetishHits boasts no less than 116 adult content sites, as well as a live adult webcam site (ItsLive.com) and 100 mobile sites. FetishHits’ CEO Toni attributes the company’s success and longevity to its willingness to change, evolve and grow with the times.
“We try to implement, as fast as possible, new technologies and solutions on our sites and in the promotional tools offered to our affiliates,” Toni stressed.
‘We always listened very closely to the demands of our affiliates, and that resulted in one of the biggest promo tools sections on the Internet with almost 50,000 free hosted galleries, free hosted sites and blogs, hosted FLVs, embedded Flash movie players, peel ads, instant messenger ads, RSS feeds, thumbnail plug-ins and many more tools for our affiliates to use.”
Along the way, FetishHits’ portfolio of adult content websites has diversified a great deal. A wide variety of erotic niches and sub-niches can be found in the Fetish-Hits portfolio of sites, ranging from Asian erotica (AsianSexQueens.com, AsianSex-Thrills.com) and Latin erotica (Latin-SexLovers.com, LatinasHeat.com, LatinaSexStudio.com) to MILF and cougar sites (MILFsUltra.com, MILFsWildHoliday.com, MILFsBang.com). And Fetish-Hits has made its presence felt in the gay market with everything from bear sites (RawGayBears.com, GayBearsPorno.com, GayBearsHardcore.com) and twink sites (SinfulGayTeens.com, TeenGayHardcore.com, TeenGayClub.com) to African-American gay sites (RawBlack-Gays.com, BlackGaysHardcore.com).
“The goal was to cover as many straight and gay niches as possible from ‘regular’ niches like lesbians, Latinas or group sex to smaller niches like black BBW’s, pregnant or interracial gay sex,” Toni explained. “Whatever an affiliate could possibly be looking for, we wanted to have a site for it — and as soon as our redesigns of current sites are fully completed, we will add even more niches to our list.”
FetishHits’ portfolio of adult content sites also includes some kinky sites, including the spanking-oriented SinfulSpanking.com and the foot fetish sites FootFetishPorno.com and BareFootFuckers.com. But despite having the word “fetish” in its name, FetishHits has never been specifically BDSM-oriented the way that Wasteland.com and Kink.com (two of the top players in online BDSM erotica) have been specifically BDSM-oriented. The vast majority of FetishHits’ sites, in fact, have focused on non-kinky erotica.
Toni stresses: “We don’t want to be considered a niche-only program, but more as a ‘regular’ program which is covering all niches available — especially since we have many types of sites. The name choice maybe wasn’t the best choice, but it (would have been) hard changing it…. Anyone who takes a closer look notices, very fast, that we are working with much more than BDSM sites (and are not offering BDSM sites) exclusively.”
The mobile/wireless adult market has grown by leaps and bound since the early 2000s, especially in Europe — and Fetish-Hits has not been shy about increasing its presence and visibility in that market. FetishHits launched an abundance of new mobile sites in 2010, and the company has made its portfolio of mobile sites as diverse and far-reaching as its portfolio of non-mobile adult sites. Gay, lesbian, BBW (big beautiful women), Asian, Latino, interracial and MILF/cougar erotica are among the many types of material that can be found in FetishHits’ portfolio of mobile/wireless adult sites.
‘We have already released 100 mobile sites and are working more new mobile sites with tours optimized for mobile devices and members’ areas that contain mobile-optimized content,” Toni noted. “Most of our regular sites have already been or are in the process of being adjusted to work perfectly on iPads. For example, all trailers and movie players have been transferred to HTML5 instead of Flash, and we are doing the same with our members’ areas to assure that iPad users are able to stream the movies on their devices.”
Toni added that Fetish-Hits is also “releasing various promotion tools for mobile devices like mobile redirect codes,” which, he said, allow affiliates to “redirect their mobile traffic to our mobile sites and better monetize their mobile traffic.”
It’s no secret that the last three years have been a challenging time for the adult entertainment industry (and mainstream entertainment as well). With both North America and Europe coping with a global economic crisis, the late 2000s and early 2010s have not been a time for either adult content sites or adult affiliate programs to become complacent and rest on their laurels. But Fetish-Hits has remained strong; the FetishHits brand has continued to be an adult industry success story, and Toni is optimistic and excited about the company’s future.
“The adult industry needs to adjust to the current situation and focus more on the customer experience and what the customer is willing to pay for and, most important, what he can’t get for free,” Toni emphasizes. “Like many other industries that had to adjust over the last 10-15 years, many companies in our industry also struggle with the changes—and the trend is adapt or die.
‘We are constantly working on redesigning our sites, our members’ areas, adding more content, more and new promotional tools for our affiliates and optimizing our marketing and traffic generation. Where many affiliate programs have closed down during the last 12 months or aren’t paying their affiliates, we have grown our revenue by over 20 percent. We are working on many new projects and are planning to improve significantly during the next years.”