The German Market
My Point of View
By
Ike
Is there a different between the American and the German Market? Of course there is. Almost everything is different except one thing: the German Adult Market is one of the richest, so be prepared to get your slice of it.
Let us see which way you have to go to succeed in the German Market.
To understand the German Market you have to realize the difference in the social order. Prostitution is legal. Anal sex or Blowjobs are normal, Topless on beach is more then normal. There are lots of sex shops and video stores where you're able to rent every day a new hardcore video for small money. Free-TV in the evening is full of softcore porn - that must be the stuff you see in American hotels at the porn channel. The commercial breaks on Free-TV after 11pm are spammed by sexy clips about phone sex.
Ways to Pay
The next difference is in the way to pay. For me - this is the main point when you try to make your money on the German market. Nearly 80% of the money comes from dialers! It is unbelievable - they pay up to $1.8 per minute - YES - PER MINUTE! You offer a month for $19.95 per CC or they choose to download a program and pay per minute - it's crazy. There's only one reason to do this - a dialer is anonymous.
When you offer only Credit Card, you have to tell them that this is safe and with a cool billing address. Universal Internet Service and not Big Boobs get fucked ;-) Unfortunately, several greedy webmasters work with more than dirty tricks such as automatic installed dialers with a very smart code: For a connection of more then 90 seconds you have to pay $300 bucks!
Every newspaper and talk show is full of these stories, even the parliament talks about this problem. Therefore, they updated a free antivirus program and now every dialer is held as a virus. After an order of court they have deleted this, but the fact is: within the last three month there is a really dramatic decrease of sales. Also, many people have blocked the preselection dialer number at their phone company. The market is moving - we will see the direction later.
CC with a good sales text, dialer, and something calls "Lastschrifteinzug" would be perfect. This "Lastschrifteinzug" is a kind of debit note, which is very popular in Germany. They just gave their bank connection and an OK for a specific amount of money.
Language
This is leading directly to the next point: language. If you're interested in German customers you need a good translation. The German grammaticism is yet too difficult for a translation program. When you translate your tour don't forget the metatags!
