The Internet is still growing and is finally becoming a true global network of individuals communicating, conducting business, shopping and thankfully transacting large amounts of money. For you, the Adult Webmaster, this means that you must service various cultures, desires, and most importantly offer targeted options.
Adult properties will never be an easily welcomed source of revenue for major credit card companies. That being the case, third party processors such as Paycom, CCBill and Ibill are forced to scrub a little harder and drop a fair bit of traffic on the floor, while they also take steps to block certain countries so that they can be what is termed ‘compliant’ by Visa and MasterCard. Meanwhile, you are probably giving all of the traffic that comes through your site a credit card option and if denied, your end-user is left to figure out another way in, or simply bail out resulting in dropped revenue.
What Does This Mean to You?
Currently, foreign patterns and growth demonstrate that the online community will grow exponentially in the foreign market, however that does not mean that credit card use will grow incrementally at the same rate. When dealing with various countries, cultures and languages, a one-size fit’s all payment plan becomes antiquated and truly unrealistic. Most purchasers in foreign countries do not use credit cards the way we do in the United States. Alternative transaction models are required to insure that you can provide for an incremental global service method (see: take money however and wherever it comes from the right way for the right person).
Traditionally, you could give your traffic an option to go to a dialer, be it Profit Plantation, goodthinxx.com, No Credit Card or any semblance of the three, and up until now, if you did this, you would be locked into one or maybe two dialer companies. The problem with any dialer company is that they may perform better for some countries and not as well for others. The result is a loss of conversions due to non-optimized sequences. (See: losing money).
Realizing that every hit counts, and identifying that there was a need for a "best of breed" offering that also had scenario design and identification capability we set out to find a solution. My partners and I met with a fair amount of Webmasters who said that they "currently have a geo-targeting solution". What we realized was that the solution was no more than a database of IP addresses that more than likely had not been updated in some time as they got it from a friend months ago, used their own on top of it or licensed one from a company that has no real "thumb print" on the Internet. As we all know, any time you ping a database and drop a bunch of scripts/API’s on pages and mix in a lengthy integration process, you will run into performance issues. Either way, this type of system is old school and does not allow for any scalability without additional infrastructure expenses.
So we created, Playa Director and chose the world’s largest and most efficient map, the Akamai Network, to act as the gas. If you are not familiar with Akamai as a company, type in CNN, Yahoo, Microsoft, McAffee, Symantec, Apple, Etrade, Victoria’s Secret or pretty much any other top level name and note that Akamai got that page to your screen without any hassle, quickly and very efficiently. Like the Matrix, Akamai sees more than 100 Billion unique hits a day - plus or minus.
Playa Director was designed to cut the jokes and just allow you to maximize and create an opportunity to profit from every hit that comes to your site before it comes to your site, while saving you time, money and resources no matter how big you are or how big you get. That’s right, I said, "Before it comes to your site".
How does it work? In simple terms, you decide where you want to redirect your traffic to go to from a particular place and it goes to that place without having to look anything up, check any scripts, or even come to your boxes.
Playa Director, backed by Akamai Technologies’ global edge delivered map of over 60,000 servers in over 60 countries, enables us and now you the ability to identify and control each person that desires to hit your domain(s). It geographically identifies the user before they hit and automatically routes and redirects that person to wherever you have decided to send it to. If you change your mind, you simply enter the new redirect for that country and poof, that’s where they go. Once again, without any script changes because there are no scripts.
This entire process means that a once ‘useless hit’ that just sucked bandwidth (money) from you and banged on your boxes is now a real opportunity and allows for new opportunity to join your world. The result is the ability to truly route traffic, in real time, from anywhere on the globe, from the EDGE OF THE NET. This is not just for optimized transactions. This is a real cost cutting tool. With the built in edge routing capability you can avoid bandwidth spikes, blocked networks, routing issues, switch issues, load balance, or overloading. Simply put you can serve one user one type of bandwidth and another maybe your less expensive bandwidth, send one to one box and one to another, or just send people to other people. I am a geek, so to me, these tools are way cool. Perhaps equally as important is that you won’t have to ask yourself the question "what do I do with this source of traffic that my credit card company doesn’t take but seems to show up and cost me money and resources."
For your Adult Business, Playa Director will allow you to make a profit from countries that are falling through the cracks due to the wrong language, high credit card scrubbing days, Internet congestion or just going to a non-targeted transaction or exit sequence. The likes of China, Europe, Australia and Asia are no longer a concern as you have been able to turn them into a revenue stream. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, right? ...profit from countries that are falling through the cracks due to the wrong language, high credit card scrubbing days, Internet congestion or just going to a non-targeted transaction or exit sequence.
Why Consider This?
Think of it this way; if you are running several niche specific sites, you have more than likely created various front ends to target that traffic or maybe you have various content package choices on a single page to better filter and convert traffic. Playa Director will allow you to conduct a similar situation for traffic presentation and billing. Japanese traffic goes to a high performing Japanese redirect or your Japanese tour ends in a transaction sequence at a JCB compliant processor and/or a dialer. If they leave, you exit them to a high converting Japanese website. This of course is first determined at the edge of the Net without your boxes ever touching that hit. (See: save money and make money). Push your Chinese traffic to Profit Plantation; charge your French traffic with a dialer from goodthinxx.com, offer your UK traffic the ability to do SMS billing with Vector and a traditional dialer from No Credit Card all in their home language… see where I am going with this?
With Playa Director, you can use as many dialer companies and processors as you wish. This true solution allows you to leverage the best features, functionality, rates and language pages for your sites. So if one dialer or program is paying out a higher rate for a particular country, only send them that country’s traffic. If they stop performing on that traffic, with a click of a key, you can switch where that traffic goes, and converts. Playa Director requires payment companies to work for you. The possibilities really become lucrative when you realize that you can do traffic deals for specific types of traffic without ever having to touch it, or pay for it. It’s a pure revenue stream with almost zero resource cost.
It takes less than 30 minutes to implement, it is less expensive than other "geo-targeting" systems that are out there, and more efficient because you can change the edge redirects as often as you want; to wherever you want to, whenever you want to. The bottom line is that you can embrace and capitalize from growth without sacrificing. Once again, that is just plain cool!
Playa Solutions LLC is a company that fuses seasoned management with a business model that has been created to minimize risk and maximize revenue potential for various types of online properties. In addition to providing direct and professional services, the company’s end-to-end solutions increase Web traffic, protect content, and generate additional revenue streams. Acting as a conduit between properties and concepts, technology and the adult and mainstream verticals, Playa serves as an infomediary that is firmly rooted in the belief that creating and serving the end user is paramount to success and begins by augmenting existing technologies and marketing efforts. For more information, contact Jason Tucker Tucker@playasolutions.com T: (310) 779-4010
