The world contains approximately 6 billion people. Of those people, about 600 million of them have Internet access. Of those 600 million, about 60 percent or 360 million of them are adults.

In time the majority of the planet's populace will be connected to the net but that day is a good while off. At the moment our customer base is somewhere in the vicinity of half a billion adult surfers. Subtract from this the grown people who will never look for sexual entertainment on the web. A high guess at this amount would be twenty percent. That would narrow our pool of potential buyers down to 270 million. Knock off 20 million for good measure and there we have all the porn customers shopping on the information highway. One quarter of a billion likely shoppers.

Just think about that for a minute.

Even if you ran the only food store in the biggest city on the planet, you wouldn’t see 250 billion customers pass through your door. It took McDonald’s ten years and a whole chain of restaurants to sell their first million hamburgers. Only now do they boast sales in the billions after close to fifty years in business.

"Traffic means bandwidth and bandwidth costs money. If you can't cover your operating costs, then your site is failing."

No matter how big you get as an adult webmaster, you’re never going to serve the whole of your possible market. There may be 250 million adults with Internet connections but that doesn’t mean you could or would want to have them all as your clients. Your client base is probably going to be more like that big city food shop than McDonald’s.

Oh, but you say when it comes to unique visits your fabulous porn network produces pretty good statistics. You make the point that mass marketing is a numbers game. A million uniques in a year is low as far as you’re concerned. You’re sure your adult products convert into money because of your site’s massive traffic. As far as you’re concerned, you will never have enough hits to your web pages. Traffic is king to you and to quite a lot of your peers.

Then again, traffic means bandwidth and bandwidth costs money. If you can’t cover your operating costs, then your site is failing. If that staggering traffic doesn’t convert into profits or at least solvency, then what good will more traffic be to your future? You have to learn how to filter unproductive visitors away from your servers. Traffic is bought and sold among webmasters on a daily basis. Before you buy a server or spend a penny on someone else’s traffic you have to understand your market. You have to get to know who it is you’re selling to and learn how to forget the rest.

That’s right. There comes a point when you have to know who to let in and who to turn away. You’re not McDonald’s. The customers who walk through the doors of the golden arches do so in order to buy fast food. People looking for good sushi don’t waste their time at Big Mac’s house.

An adult porn site lacks the physical barriers brick-and-mortar stores do. Gobs of hits from search terms like ‘sex’ and ‘hardcore’ won’t do your tranny page any good. That traffic coming from a listing on a TGP is useless if all your uniques are the virtual equivalent of a bunch of window shoppers. It’s impossible to weed out all the freeloaders but discernment of your customers and traffic from appropriate sources will greatly reduce wasted bandwidth.

If you run a MILF site, you have to think like an MILF fan. You have to apply keywords to your Meta tags that are specific to your surfers. You have to incorporate sponsors who sell memberships to MILF or at least mature model sites. You have to textually apply phrases and terminology that buzz in the MILF lover’s brain. You have to use redirecting codes that send uninterested surfers and countries away from your page.

You have to take control of your traffic because you can’t afford to serve 250 million adults. You can only realistically serve those shoppers who want your particular product.

Do your own math. Out of 250 million possible customers, how many of them are truly shopping for what you’ve got to sell? How many unique visitors convert into sales or bookmarkers? How many did you piss off because their search term ‘anal fucking’ resulted in your softcore website? If your toon site is getting Asian traffic, how many sales are you losing because you haven’t translated your page into appropriate languages?

250 million adults are on the net looking for porn. Even if you wanted to, you can’t have them all. When you figure out who you want on your site and who you don’t then you’ll be playing a better number’s game.