Like many an adult webmasters, the issue of age verification has been a weight on my mind for some time. Every week it seems some new country or US state is passing mandatory age verification laws. As a small-time independent publisher who earns money primarily through affiliate commissions, I feared that implementing age verification would inevitably be expensive and simply make my sites unprofitable.
This seems to be born out when the first “solutions” came online and would cost more than 10 cents for each visitor. Now I run SEO driven blogs rather than high-bandwidth tube sites, so my sites aren’t the most expensive to run and the conversion ratios are higher than most. For some of my sites it’s under 1:200 (sale per clicks) for certain sponsors. Yet 5c to verify each visitor would make any of my sites impossible to run. Let’s do the maths – say my high-converting site has 1,000 visitors a day. Maybe 400 of them will click on one of my affiliate links. Suppose the conversion ratio is a pretty solid 1:100 and I get a $25 PPS for each. That would mean I make 2 sales a day = $50 daily. Yet 5c for each of those 1,000 visitors would be costing me $50, leaving me with nothing, even before taking into account webhosting and other expenses.
I was pretty much resigned to making all of my sites non-nude, along with pretty toned down language