We recently received a case study from an affiliate marketer detailing how he earned nearly $16 000 in the webcam and adult niche that many assume is too saturated to profit from. He decided to share his story with us in order to publish his insights to benefit other affiliates.
In this case study, he walks through his process of how he selected the offer, promoted it and ultimately optimized and scaled it to $15 996 in 90 days. If you also want to learn more about the world of affiliate marketing, we recommend you check out our Telegram channel.
Without further ado, we'll let the affiliate take it from here and share his story in his own words.
I decided to enter the world of webcam affiliate marketing, even though many believe it's too late to get into this space. But you know what? My example shows that the webcam industry still has enormous potential, and in the long run, it can be very profitable for affiliates.
I'm not a fan of constantly switching between different offers, so I’ve decided to settle on Stripchat. This webcam program is directly from Stripcash, a top-tier webcam affiliate network. They have a top-notch product and a solid reputation, which allows them to attract high-quality users who are willing to spend significant amounts of money.
Offer and Strategy
The video ad format is the optimal choice for grabbing users' attention and showcasing Stripchat effectively. Users see models in action, which visually captivates their attention. Moreover, in tier-1 countries with high purchasing power, the competition for video ads is relatively lower compared to other formats.
Additionally, Stripcash provides affiliates with access to a wide range of ready-made promotional materials in various languages, including banners, videos, and pre-landers. This means you won't have to spend much time creating your own materials – everything is ready to go!
Now let's dive into my advertising strategy, which led to incredible success. After careful analysis, I tested tier-1 GEOs (countries) along with what is called "Asian tigers": South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau. My Stripcash account manager highly recommended testing these GEOs, as they are currently at their peak in terms of profitability.
I work on a revenue share basis, meaning I receive 20% of user spending on Stripchat. Stripcash does not impose additional payout conditions or quotas. Even if you decide to pause traffic for a month or even a year, your percentage will still accrue to your account. In essence, it's like passive income.
In this scheme, it's necessary to set up a postback pixel for ad optimization and accurately calculate CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), and LTV (lifetime value) for users. I'll explain this in more detail below.
TrafficStars Campaign Settings
Create a campaign and select GEOs. TrafficStars has presets for countries, which is very convenient.
A few clicks, and all the necessary GEOs are added.
I create separate campaigns for desktop devices, tablets, and mobile devices.
Another useful feature is excluding proxy traffic.
Next, I create a campaign targeting RON (run of network), adding xHamster and PornHub to the blacklist. These are the most popular adult sites, and the bid prices there are significantly higher due to competition. Creating separate campaigns specifically for them makes traffic analysis more effective. By focusing on RON traffic and excluding these highly competitive sources, you'll get cleaner analytics and understand how to optimize campaigns for profitability.
The next setting is selecting only Direct Inventory to receive higher-quality traffic.
The next step is choosing a pricing model. Select Dynamic CPM and Recommended Bid.
Finally, add VAST and upload the ref.link from Stripcash.
I set a limit of 2 impressions per day per user, meaning each user will see my ad no more than twice a day.
💡 Ensure that the Postback URL is correctly configured to track conversions.
Optimizing the Campaign
The campaign setup doesn't end here. Now it's time to add an automated optimizer tool for additional campaign automation. At this stage, it's crucial to calculate eCPL (estimated cost per lead), eCPA (estimated cost per acquisition), and LTV (lifetime value) metrics.
Since I work on a 20% revenue share model, I first needed to estimate the approximate cost of acquiring a new user and their initial deposit. After a thorough analysis of the webcam affiliate market and studying typical payouts for initial sales, my goal effective cost per acquisition (eCPA) was $150. In other words, the lower the eCPA, the more profitable it is for me to acquire that user.
Assuming that every 1 in 10 registered users makes a purchase, my target eCPL would be around $15. However, these figures can vary substantially depending on traffic sources and user behavior. To account for all these variables, I set the cost per lead (CPL) range between $10 to $30 for optimization.
To configure the optimizer to hit these goals, I set up postback pixels to track user registrations and first sales separately, assigning a value of $150 to each event. This way, any revenue generated by users is attributed back to their initial purchases, essentially flagging every place where revenue occurred as a place where first purchases happened.
It's important to note here that in this context, "leads" refers to the sum of registrations and first-time buyers.
Leads = Registrations + Initial Purchases
Based on this, I configured three rules:
#1: One for blocking non-performing ad placements.
#2: The second one is for adjusting bids to stay within the target range.
#3: The last one for blocking sources with low CTR.
Afterward, I manually collected real statistics on eCPA and eCPL in a Google spreadsheet.
RON Traffic Results
After running campaigns for about 3 months, here are the results I obtained for the two RON traffic campaigns:
Tier 1 | Video RON Desktop
- Desktop
- Spent: $6 173
- Profit: $899
- ROI: 15%
- eCPA: $126
Tier 1 | Video RON Mobile and Tablets
- Tablets and mobile devices
- Spent: $37 294
- Profit: -$9 208
- ROI: -25%
- eCPA: $237
The desktop campaign shows strong results, although the volume is low. I kept this campaign running with some optimizations. Over time, it will generate higher profits due to the initial legwork.
Based on the data from the mobile and tablet campaign, I took a closer look and identified the specific ad placements and two countries driving the most revenue — Germany and France. As a result, I created two new campaigns with a whitelist targeting only those high-performing placements and countries.
Here are the results of the new optimized campaigns:
Germany | Video Whitelist Mobile
- Targeting: Germany + Mobile Devices + Whitelist
- Spent: $4 214
- Profit: $1 310
- ROI: 31%
- eCPA: $114
France | Video Whitelist Mobile
- Targeting: France + Mobile Devices + Whitelist
- Spent: $3 339
- Profit: $7 209
- ROI: 216%
- eCPA: $57
Launching Campaigns on xHamster
The results from the initial RON traffic campaigns were satisfactory. After making optimizations, I launched two additional video campaigns on xHamster specifically.
Germany | Video xH Mobile
- Targeting: Germany + Mobile Devices + Whitelist
- Spent: $15 302
- Profit: $4 548.91
- ROI: 30%
- eCPA: $425
France | Video xH Mobile
- Targeting: France + Mobile Devices + Whitelist
- Spent: $12 800
- Profit: $3 712
- ROI: 29%
- eCPA: $346
Even though xHamster tends to have higher competition, the site also provides a lot of high-quality, targeted traffic. As expected, both of the focused xHamster campaigns generated strong profits.
Asian Tigers
As my Stripcash account manager recommended earlier, I decided to test out some traffic in the "Asian tiger" countries with high income and purchasing power: South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Macau. Competition in these GEOs tends to be much lower, making them prime targets. The campaigns proved to be very lucrative in these regions!
Advertising Creatives
Heeding the advice of my TrafficStars manager, I launched a campaign with 300x100 mobile banner sizes and a whitelist targeting only these Asian GEOs. I chose banners instead of video because, in these regions, video pre-rolls would have been considerably more expensive at the time than standard banners.
For the actual ad creative, I simply used an iFrame widget generated directly within my Stripcash affiliate dashboard. This saved a ton of time and effort instead of having to create unique banner ads from scratch.
Campaign Settings
I launched the banners campaign targeting both RON and Direct Inventory traffic sources on mobile devices. Since the minimum bid prices were very similar between RON and Direct, I opted not to exclude xHamster and PornHub for this campaign, unlike my previous efforts. As before, I excluded proxy traffic to avoid bot clicks.
Results
The managers' advice turned out to be genuinely beneficial — the campaign achieved a respectable 96% ROI — it can be your ticket to success in affiliate marketing 😎
Asian Tigers | Mobile banners 300x100 Whitelist
- Spent: $3 269
- Profit: $3 154
- ROI: 96%
- eCPA: $74
Of all the Asian countries tested, Taiwan delivered the biggest returns. The other GEOs generated relatively modest revenues in comparison.
Overall Results
- Period: 01.01.23 - 30.06.23
- Spent: $82 391
- Net Profit: $15 996
- ROI: 19%
While a 19% ROI may seem modest at first glance, affiliate marketing is a long play, and I'm confident these campaigns will exceed over 100% ROI within 6 months as my users continue to generate revenue over their lifetimes.
Unlike many other affiliate programs, Stripcash provides a true lifetime revenue share guarantee. So even if I was to pause all my campaigns today, I'd continue collecting commission on my users' spending indefinitely. It's an excellent hands-off alternative to investing capital in stocks or other assets.
Moving forward, I plan to test various new low-competition GEOs such as Brazil and India. I also intend to launch campaigns focused on specific high-potential verticals and interests like trans cams, gay cams, or VR webcam streaming where there is ample room for growth.
So in summary, through an effective combination of product selection, GEO targeting, campaign optimization, and leveraging insider tips, I've been able to find great success and earn substantial profits from webcam affiliate marketing, proving there's still huge potential in 2023 and beyond.
