Cobra Media Group implodes their websites... again
By Aaron LawrenceWednesday July 15, 2009 at 7:48 pm PDT
Long before there was a GayGeek there was Cobra Photo (aka Cobra Media Group). They are a European-based company that specializes in twink photo sets and videos from around the world.
Cobra Photo is not to be confused with Cobra Video, an unrelated company whose owner was murdered two years ago. The management of Cobra Photo is alive and well, and is now engaging in one of their phoenix-like restructurings.
A little history. Cobra Photo has been around for at least eight years and probably ten or more. It started as a successful twink porn business in Europe that eventually expanded to models from all over the world. From the United States to Colombia to Sri Lanka to Russia, if there was porn to be made Cobra probably had a cameraman shooting it. The end result was a collection of what I recall was 20 or so twink websites on a variety of themes.
An Original Game Boy
Around 2003 Cobra reorganized their websites. They merged many of them and rebranded the survivors as 11 "Original Boys" sites. Their new websites included Original Action Boys, Original Latin Boys, Original Euro Boys, and eight others. Eventually a new one was released as well, Original Princess Boys, which involved gender-bending twinks jacking off and having sex in a most feminine manner. Twinks in heels, if you will. Truly a unique website.
Unfortunately, the powers that be designed one of the world's worst signup systems ever seen on a porn website. Users could not sign up as they do for most membership sites. Rather, they were redirected to a "cover" website (OriginalBoys.com) that attempted to sell them "packages" of memberships for multiple sites. ("For $20 a month extra you can pick three sites from this list. Or for $25 you get those three sites plus another one from this other list..."). It was confusing and users hated it.
Even worse, users were only able to see thumbnails of the models pictures that were 60 pixels high unless they provided an e-mail address to the website. By contrast, the thumbnail pictures normally used on GayGeek are 150 pixels high (or wide). So users couldn't even see what the boys on the site looked like until they signed up, which they often weren't inclined to do because they couldn't see what the boys looked like. A classic catch-22.
A shot from Original Action Boys
At the same time, Cobra redid their affiliate program. Affiliates are sites that provide free advertising in exchange for a percentage of any sales resulting from those ads. Affiliates were unable to link to a specific website. They were required to link to the horrible "cover site" instead. So besides having to deal with the convoluted signup system, users also had to click though several pages before they could even see the website they clicked on the ad to see!
Affiliates generally experience a signup ratio ranging from 1:75 for a good site to 1:200 for a less successful one and 1:400 for one that is performing very poorly. The worse a site does, the faster a webmaster replaces the ads with those for a different website. After all, why promote a 1:400 website when a 1:80 site may earn you five times the money?
Because of all the hurdles and poor design issues the conversion rate for the Original Boys websites often along the lines 1:2000. The end result being that affiliates abandoned Cobra Media Group in droves and their sales plummeted even more.
I have no access to Cobra's financial data, but my guess is that the end result was an 80-85% decrease in sales over what they would have experienced with a more usable system. They had made a series of truly poor business decisions, with the only silver lining being that their content was usually high quality.
Stano from Original Slavic Boys
Inevitably Cobra Media Group needed to revamp their business model. Within two years of the release of the Original Boys sites Cobra halted updates on most of them, lowered their membership price, and announced they would henceforth be archive websites. They removed the terrible cover website so users could sign up normally. They also once again allowed affiliates to link directly to a website instead of the cover site, although that had little impact since non-updating sites convert poorly. Affiliates had little interest in working with Cobra's Original Boys sites.
Along with revamping the Original Boys sites Cobra launched a new series of sites. Adams Boys, Solid Gold Boys, Young Devils, and many others. The most famous of the new sites was Teen Boy Cum Party, a Latin twink bareback video site that promised two cumshots per model per scene. As you can imagine that last one drew quite a bit of attention from twink lovers. All of these websites placed a much heavier on video than the Original Boys sites, which had been mostly photos at first and mixed photo and video toward the end.
Two of the models from Teen Boy Cum Party
Now at GayGeek, we receive dozens of promotional e-mails each week from the websites that we list. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that we failed to notice Cobra Media Group stopped sending out e-mails last December. I finally noticed two weeks ago messages had appeared on all of their websites announcing that they were closing at the end of July. Curious why they were imploding their business I dropped them an e-mail.
It turns Cobra is restructuring their websites yet again and wanted to save staff time and resources necessary to do weekly updates on websites that are minimally profitable. As they explained to me earlier today, they have given up on the membership model of website design and have decided to switch to a pay-per-view model where users pay specifically for only for the content they want to enjoy. Unlike some "movie sites" where users pay by the minute for streaming video, Cobra envisions their new system will be on a download-to-own basis.
Will their new system work? Hard to say. The pay-to-own model is becoming more popular on Internet which bodes well for them. On the flipside, Cobra's websites are often hampered by poor business decisions salvaged only by the high quality of their content. A lesser company would not have survived.
The staff at Cobra informs me that their new website will premier later this year. It was scheduled for December but they are rushing to get it on the market because of what they perceive as an accelerated pace in the decline of the membership revenue model of adult websites.
Whenever it premiers, we'll be sure to list and review it immediately. Cobra is too interesting of a player not to do so, to say nothing for the hot boys they film. In the meantime, users have one last opportunity to check out their websites before they close. These sites are...
Original Action Boys
Original Asian Boys
Original Aussie Boys
Original Boys Collection
Original Euro Boys
Original Exotic Boys
Original Game Boys
Original Latin Boys
Original Princess Boys
Original Red Hot Boys
Original Slavic Boys
Original Splashy Boys
Bareback Friends
Teen Boy Cum Party (Particularly popular)
Young Devils
Adams Boys
Solid Gold Boys
Tino Boys
Twink Sex Instructors
Cobra Photo is not to be confused with Cobra Video, an unrelated company whose owner was murdered two years ago. The management of Cobra Photo is alive and well, and is now engaging in one of their phoenix-like restructurings.
A little history. Cobra Photo has been around for at least eight years and probably ten or more. It started as a successful twink porn business in Europe that eventually expanded to models from all over the world. From the United States to Colombia to Sri Lanka to Russia, if there was porn to be made Cobra probably had a cameraman shooting it. The end result was a collection of what I recall was 20 or so twink websites on a variety of themes.
Around 2003 Cobra reorganized their websites. They merged many of them and rebranded the survivors as 11 "Original Boys" sites. Their new websites included Original Action Boys, Original Latin Boys, Original Euro Boys, and eight others. Eventually a new one was released as well, Original Princess Boys, which involved gender-bending twinks jacking off and having sex in a most feminine manner. Twinks in heels, if you will. Truly a unique website.
Unfortunately, the powers that be designed one of the world's worst signup systems ever seen on a porn website. Users could not sign up as they do for most membership sites. Rather, they were redirected to a "cover" website (OriginalBoys.com) that attempted to sell them "packages" of memberships for multiple sites. ("For $20 a month extra you can pick three sites from this list. Or for $25 you get those three sites plus another one from this other list..."). It was confusing and users hated it.
Even worse, users were only able to see thumbnails of the models pictures that were 60 pixels high unless they provided an e-mail address to the website. By contrast, the thumbnail pictures normally used on GayGeek are 150 pixels high (or wide). So users couldn't even see what the boys on the site looked like until they signed up, which they often weren't inclined to do because they couldn't see what the boys looked like. A classic catch-22.
At the same time, Cobra redid their affiliate program. Affiliates are sites that provide free advertising in exchange for a percentage of any sales resulting from those ads. Affiliates were unable to link to a specific website. They were required to link to the horrible "cover site" instead. So besides having to deal with the convoluted signup system, users also had to click though several pages before they could even see the website they clicked on the ad to see!
Affiliates generally experience a signup ratio ranging from 1:75 for a good site to 1:200 for a less successful one and 1:400 for one that is performing very poorly. The worse a site does, the faster a webmaster replaces the ads with those for a different website. After all, why promote a 1:400 website when a 1:80 site may earn you five times the money?
Because of all the hurdles and poor design issues the conversion rate for the Original Boys websites often along the lines 1:2000. The end result being that affiliates abandoned Cobra Media Group in droves and their sales plummeted even more.
I have no access to Cobra's financial data, but my guess is that the end result was an 80-85% decrease in sales over what they would have experienced with a more usable system. They had made a series of truly poor business decisions, with the only silver lining being that their content was usually high quality.
Inevitably Cobra Media Group needed to revamp their business model. Within two years of the release of the Original Boys sites Cobra halted updates on most of them, lowered their membership price, and announced they would henceforth be archive websites. They removed the terrible cover website so users could sign up normally. They also once again allowed affiliates to link directly to a website instead of the cover site, although that had little impact since non-updating sites convert poorly. Affiliates had little interest in working with Cobra's Original Boys sites.
Along with revamping the Original Boys sites Cobra launched a new series of sites. Adams Boys, Solid Gold Boys, Young Devils, and many others. The most famous of the new sites was Teen Boy Cum Party, a Latin twink bareback video site that promised two cumshots per model per scene. As you can imagine that last one drew quite a bit of attention from twink lovers. All of these websites placed a much heavier on video than the Original Boys sites, which had been mostly photos at first and mixed photo and video toward the end.
Now at GayGeek, we receive dozens of promotional e-mails each week from the websites that we list. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that we failed to notice Cobra Media Group stopped sending out e-mails last December. I finally noticed two weeks ago messages had appeared on all of their websites announcing that they were closing at the end of July. Curious why they were imploding their business I dropped them an e-mail.
It turns Cobra is restructuring their websites yet again and wanted to save staff time and resources necessary to do weekly updates on websites that are minimally profitable. As they explained to me earlier today, they have given up on the membership model of website design and have decided to switch to a pay-per-view model where users pay specifically for only for the content they want to enjoy. Unlike some "movie sites" where users pay by the minute for streaming video, Cobra envisions their new system will be on a download-to-own basis.
Will their new system work? Hard to say. The pay-to-own model is becoming more popular on Internet which bodes well for them. On the flipside, Cobra's websites are often hampered by poor business decisions salvaged only by the high quality of their content. A lesser company would not have survived.
The staff at Cobra informs me that their new website will premier later this year. It was scheduled for December but they are rushing to get it on the market because of what they perceive as an accelerated pace in the decline of the membership revenue model of adult websites.
Whenever it premiers, we'll be sure to list and review it immediately. Cobra is too interesting of a player not to do so, to say nothing for the hot boys they film. In the meantime, users have one last opportunity to check out their websites before they close. These sites are...
Original Action Boys
Original Asian Boys
Original Aussie Boys
Original Boys Collection
Original Euro Boys
Original Exotic Boys
Original Game Boys
Original Latin Boys
Original Princess Boys
Original Red Hot Boys
Original Slavic Boys
Original Splashy Boys
Bareback Friends
Teen Boy Cum Party (Particularly popular)
Young Devils
Adams Boys
Solid Gold Boys
Tino Boys
Twink Sex Instructors
Posted in Porn news
