This month has been a unique one as after disabling the troublesome third-party PayPal solution and putting "Buy us a video" on hold we got to test how viable is monetizing a site 100% through crypto.

So far, the proceeds are roughly 15% of what they were last month, or 30% if we're talking crypto payments exclusively. This highlights two prominent trends:

A) People are super-hesitant to get into crypto

A lot of you either never had a need to pay with crypto, or heard some controversial things about it, or find the process too complicated or tedious. This translates to quite a few choosing to move on rather than dabbling into crypto for the sake of this site.

B) The pool of potential members is limited

At Vids.Rip, we deal with fetishes, which is something not everyone's into. And desperation happens to be one of the especially niche. For example, this site has about 10% the audience of PissRIP. Therefore, this is something we experience the most. Desperation community is not that large, and once we're well-known there's only so many people we can still attract.

While many expect us to go back to PayPal, or adopt some sort of "gray" billing that would be easy and comfortable to use, it is a terrible idea for the 3 following reasons:

1) gray processors are very unreliable, for example only this month over a dozen of members of PissRIP reported they did not get Premium following their PayPal payments, as those did not get recognized and logged by the system. You can't really base your operation around a payment method that is arbitrarily available to some of your customers and unavailable to the others.

2) they tend to charge unreasonable fees, like 40% and even more. Even though they suggest to simply add their atrocious fees to the base prices, charging y'all so much kind of defeats the whole purpose of the site. While it could be justified if the service provided was great and the memberbase was large - the reality is neither. It sucks being charged through the roof for a service that's more often unavailable than otherwise, and it equally sucks losing about half of the profits when each and every customer is valuable to you. And it's not just about profits - the worse your bottom line, the less you can invest into the site to procure more content etc.

3) crypto is the inevitable future for the porn industry. Pornhub has been charging in crypto for a while now. Water-Detox has recently posted at their site that they will be looking into accepting payments in bitcoin. We're in 2022 and the reality is even if you're a 100% legitimate and incorporated studio with contracts with the models - you can no longer get billed conventionally, just because you happen to make adult content. Let that sink in.

So the only possible strategy I can see here is to suck up the loss and play the long game. In the future, it is likely that very few sites will be able to offer conventional payment methods for porn-related transactions. As a result, at some point everyone will have to get into crypto, like it or not. And to be honest, there is already a positive trend in this direction. What convinced me to part ways with PayPal is that last month crypto payments amounted to 50% of all payments. To compare that with PissRIP, last month about 25% of payments were made in crypto, while it was just 4% back in January. The dynamic is huge, and so the best thing we can do is help ease the transition for you. This month we made a step-by-step guide on how to get into crypto, and even though it hasn't been long, we already clearly see the benefits as a lot of people have been using that.

So, what does this change for the site? Pretty much nothing. While the content is rare and this site is more reliant on purchasing than others (and less profits kind of get in the way of the ability to purchase, right) - to purchase a clip it has to, at the very least, exist. And with many content creators in decline - this whole situation kind of balances itself.