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.
Admittedly, it’s perhaps not quite as simple as that. Quite a few of those 1,000 visitors will simply move on to another (non-age gated site) rather than go through age verification. That would likely improve my conversion ratio, as you would think that these people would have been less likely to get their credit cards out anyway. It would also reduce the number of visitors to verify. It might, however, cost me some percentage of sales.
So I was pretty much resigned to making all of my sites non-nude, along with pretty toned down language, in the hope that this would negate the need for age verification alltogether. I still intend to do this for certain sites, and this blog – in which I will discuss various facets of the life of an adult webmaster, along with detailed advice on the best adult webhosting services – will take the same path.
But, as it happens, there is already a free and remarkably easy to implement age verification service – ageverification.org. Not only does it require only the adding of a single line of javascript code to your site, but it only age gates visitors from states and countries that have age verification laws in place. It’s not perfect – there are no settings you can change, and it doesn’t completely blur out the images on your site, so it’s not guarenteed to make a hardcore site compliant. But it’s definitely a start, and if they can do this for free, I’m sure there will be quite a few other alternatives appearing soon too.
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