Q&A: Affil4You on Monetizing Mobile Traffic

This interview originally ran in the 2013 Webmaster Access show guide. Affil4You takes all the guesswork out of marketing adult content to an international audience via the full variety of available mobile devices. Its expertise includes the understanding and experience of providing content and full billing services in dozens of countries while complying with all applicable laws and international processing requirements. Using the company’s simple sales solution platform, your global traffic can be turned into a significant revenue stream for your company without any up-front expense or the continual resources that would be needed for you to establish compliant cardless billing options on your own. Managing Director Joey Gabra was kind enough to answer our questions. What are the biggest challenges in terms of monetizing mobile traffic? How have you specifically addressed those challenges? There are actually quite a few challenges … but there are a few that stand out as well. In the mobile industry we are constantly faced with the rapidly changing regulations that each country and each mobile carrier impose upon us. There is a lot of work that goes behind making sure that we are fully compliant with all of these regulations, while still being able to provide a valuable service that makes money for all our affiliates. We also face the challenges of our competitors and making sure we claim our stake in every territory that we launch our services in. The best ways to specifically address these challenges is with a good combination of experience, creativity, and haste. We have strong relationships in the industry and it gives us an upper hand in the overall game. We also have crack team of over 30 techies who live for this kind of stuff, so when we all put our heads together it’s pretty damn amazing what we can come up with to overcome so many of the challenges we come across.How are you going to prepare for 2014, when over 50 percent of website traffic is expected to come from mobile devices? We have spent our lives as a company preparing for this type of thing. Affil4You was built to take as much traffic as we can get our hands on and make big money for all our affiliates … so we hope to see the trends continue to increase globally! Are there any technical or business model innovations in the mobile space applicable to adult that truly excite you? Plenty of things about what is happening in our space excites me…but I suppose it’s less about the innovations and more about the enhancements for what is already out there. People are becoming especially creative with the apps they are creating, so that is fun to see. I am also excited to see where things may go with the new Google Glass project, and I am quite pleased to see my friends from MiKandi kicking things off in the adult mobile space for the Google Glass project. There also seems to be a growing trend in motion-sensor technology and voice-activated technology, which opens up a world of fun things we can do in the mobile space! Parent company Wister celebrated its 10-year anniversary this year. Can you name a few of the company’s proudest achievements over the years? I would say that some of our proudest achievements would be in the fact that we have grown as a team so rapidly in the past few years. We now have almost 50 people working with us with an office in Los Angeles and our headquarters based in Paris. We have also made our mark as one of the top mobile service providers in Europe, which is not an easy thing to do considering there is so much competition out there. We have prided ourselves on being something of a “sleeping giant” … while we took the approach to grow slowly and steadily, so we could build a firm foundation for our company to really flourish. We have also won a number of different awards over the years, which we are very proud of, and are aiming to win many more! What are you most optimistic about in terms of your own company and the industry in general? I am so optimistic that Affil4You is absolutely in the right place at the right time. We are a part of an industry that thrives on innovation and creativity … and Affil4You literally has the best of both worlds. We are seeing improvements in every aspect and we have been able to overcome the challenges that we get faced with as the industry becomes more beastly as it grows. I am also quite optimistic about what so many of the other great companies are doing out there to make the mobile space a more lucrative space for all of us. One of the best things about what we do is being able to work with some of these other companies and find ways that we can partner up and creatively complement what we do as business.