Two new fisting sites, with affiliate programs, launched this month - HDK Fisting and Fisting Underground. With their debut, the landscape for this niche has almost doubled, so I thought it might be interesting to take a look at all the players. While there are other sites out there covering a variety of fetishes, only five place all or most of their focus on fisting. Here is a rundown of what each has to offer.
HDK Fisting was created in collaboration with zBUCKz, and is the latest in a series of sites being developed using content produced by Hot Desert Knights Studios. Backed by a NATS cascading billing system, affiliate payouts are at 50% to 60% on all sales and rebills, or 35 to 40 PPS. As with all sites under the zBUCKz umbrella, the HDK Fisting tour is completely leak free. Affiliates have at their disposal a wide range of promotional materials including banners, hosted galleries, embeded videos, downloadable flash flv files, and RSS feed. As of this writing, some of those materials won’t be available for another week or two. Members get access to the entire HDK Network of sites. HDK Fisting also offers a selection of flash video feeds including several that fall into the rough trade, raunchy, and nasty hardcore content categories. Videos can be downloaded and are NOT DRM protected.
Pistol Media’s Fisting Central is clearly the six hundred pound gorilla on the block, but with the introduction of HDK’s new site that might be changing. Fisting Central is one of eleven gay porn niche sites managed under the Gunz Blazing banner. Affiliate payouts are at 50% to 60% on all sales and rebills, or 35 to 40 PPS, and driven by a cascading billing system. Gunz Blazing provides webmasters with a top notch selection of promotional materials including banners, hosted galleries, embeded videos, and RSS feed. When it comes to traffic leaks, each site is different with Gunz Blazing. Fisting Central has a mailing list and video store link in the site tour. Memberships include access to most of the Gunz Blazing suit of venues, many with good crossover from the fisting niche. Videos can be downloaded, but are DRM protected.
Club Inferno Dungeon is Hot House Entertainment’s fisting site entry. It is one of two sites managed by their Hot House Cash affiliate program. Hot House Backroom also has fisting content, but it’s more dominant in The Dungeon which is pitched as an anal fetish site. Powered by QualityUnit Affiliate software, payouts are on a sliding scale, starting at 40% and capping at 50% for those that send 75+ sales a month. The webmaster area is poorly designed and difficult to navigate. Hosted galleries are in no obvious order and are not dated. Shortly after launching, all traffic leaks were pulled from The Backroom, but I see they decided to sneak one back in. All but one leak had been removed from The Dungeon, and that has not changed. Hot House has started using flash 10 and prompts surfers to install it when they hit the two sites. If the customer elects to install the upgrade, his browser will have to be reloaded, resulting in you loosing him. The site reloads, but without your referral information. I don’t know if a cookie gets written so webmasters still get credit for a sale, but its definite the webmaster looses his surfer if he had him opened in a separate window. I was using Firefox at the time, and can’t say how it plays out in IE. I could not determine if videos can be downloaded or if they are DRM protected.
Dark Alley Media’s newly launched Fisting Underground is powered by the eProcessingNetwork. Payouts are at 50% on new sales and 15% on all rebills, and webmasters are paid by check or PayPal. The sponsor claims to have banners and flash previews, but I could not find either. I’ve also been informed additional promotional materials are in the works. The site is so new they clearly haven’t gotten all the bugs worked out. For example, the contact page has not been completed. The Fisting Underground site tour has one traffic leak to their video store. Movies are streamed, cannot be downloaded, and are DRM protected.
Stud Fist is powered by CCBill, and payouts are reported to be 25% on all sales and rebills, but they actually have rebills set to pay only one time. From what I understand, there was a change made at CCBill awhile back that caused the rebill setting to get switched from unlimited to only one, so I’ll stop short of suggesting this is intentional on the sponsor’s part. Best I can determine they only offer a few banners for promotion of the site. The Stud Fist site tour has multiple traffic leaks. I was not able to determine if videos can be downloaded or if they are DRM protected. Frankly, this site looks like it isn’t serious about their affiliate program.
As you can see, low payouts and traffic leaks are popular with most of the players in this niche. It isn’t surprising, considering how well fisting converts. I think its moot anyway, as those with the worst traffic leaks and least attractive payouts also come up short on promotional materials, giving the big boys a clear edge in the market place.
