How adult sites actually make money

There are only four ways an adult site makes money. Most sites use two or three of them. What follows is the working knowledge, not a pitch — we have no affiliate relationship with any network named here.

1. Display advertising (CPM / CPC)

You put ad slots on your pages and an ad network fills them. Payment is per thousand impressions (CPM) or per click (CPC).

The networks that matter: ExoClick, TrafficJunky (owned by Aylo, strongest on tube inventory), TrafficStars, JuicyAds, EroAdvertising, Adsterra, PlugRush, Clickadu. You will usually run two or three at once and let them compete for each slot.

Formats, roughly best-paying to least intrusive:

Realistic RPM (revenue per thousand pageviews), whole-site blended:

• Tier-1 traffic (US, UK, CA, AU, DE), tube or gallery: $1–4
• Tier-1 traffic, blog or directory: $0.50–2
• Tier-3 traffic (most of Asia, Africa, LATAM): $0.05–0.40

So a site doing 500,000 pageviews a month, mostly tier-1, on ads alone: somewhere between $500 and $1,500. The popunder is what closes the gap between the low and high end — and it is exactly what gets a site a D on our Safety Index. That trade-off is the central tension of the ad-supported model.

2. Affiliate and CPA

You send a visitor to someone else's site and get paid if they sign up, subscribe, or sometimes just register.

• CrakRevenue — the big aggregator. Runs cam, dating, and paysite offers with "smartlinks" that auto-route a click to the best-converting offer for that geo and device. Good default for a directory.
• AWEmpire / Awempire — LiveJasmin's in-house program. Cam revshare; pays a cut of what the user spends, for the lifetime of the account. This is the long-tail earner — small trickle per user, but it compounds.
• Chaturbate affiliate — pays per signup and a revshare on token purchases. High volume, decent conversion.
• Dating smartlinks (CrakRevenue, MyLead, Los Pollos) — convert on sheer volume; pennies per lead but leads are easy.
• Paysite programs — individual studios (Brazzers, Vixen, MetArt via their networks) pay PPS (pay per sale, often $30–150) or revshare. Lower volume, higher value.

PPS vs PPL vs revshare: pay-per-sale is a lump on conversion; pay-per-lead is small and fast; revshare pays forever but starts at zero. A new site usually wants PPL/PPS for cash flow and shifts weight to revshare as the audience becomes repeat visitors.

A directory sending 50,000 outbound clicks a month, well matched to offers, might see $300–2,000 depending heavily on geo mix and how good the matching is.

3. Your own membership

You host the content and charge for it. The upside is you own the customer; the downside is you now run a payments business.

• Billing: CCBill, Segpay, Vendo, Epoch, RocketGate. All are "high-risk" processors — expect 10–15% effective fees after reserves, a rolling holdback (they keep a slice for months against chargebacks), and account termination if your chargeback rate crosses ~1%.
• Site software: NATS/MPA3 (Too Much Media) is the industry standard for paysite management and affiliate tracking; some run WordPress + a membership plugin for smaller sites.
• The hard part is retention, not signup. Adult subscriptions churn fast — a 3–5 month average lifetime is normal. The math only works with steady new traffic and a reason to stay a second month.

This model needs real traffic before it makes sense. Below roughly 100k monthly visits, the processing overhead and chargeback risk usually outweigh the revenue.

4. Tips, unlocks, and creator splits

If creators publish on your platform, you take a cut (typically 20%) of subscriptions, tips, and paid messages. This is the OnlyFans model. It only works if you can attract creators who bring their own audience, which is the whole difficulty — see the 2026 opportunity guide.

The payment reality, in one paragraph

Card networks treat adult as high-risk. Every model that takes a card payment inherits higher fees, reserves, and the constant threat of losing the merchant account. This is why so many operators keep subscriptions on a specialist processor and push tips, token top-ups, and one-off unlocks to crypto (usually via a processor like CoinPayments or NOWPayments rather than raw wallets). Build the assumption that a payment method can disappear with 30 days' notice into the plan.

What we do

PORNAGG runs on model 2 — affiliate links, disclosed on the methodology and advertising pages, and never allowed to affect a grade. The longer-term plan is licensing the Safety Index data as a feed. We publish this because the information was hard to find when we were looking for it.