Hey again!
  This article will be devoted to sharing our experience in regards to CPA offers, ways of promotion and why we changed our direction of work. Some time ago when we did not have any sites we tried to test CPA offers. We were mostly interested in working with adult niche, so we picked adult dating and cams offers.    
  When you start working with CPA offers it is natural that you want to research and find the best offers and a traffic source to go with it. Several approaches were tried, some of them were fine, some of them lead to us making the wrong conclusions, some were just surprising.

  Our first try was AdPlexity for adult niche. We were looking for the offers that have the most traffic and that have been performing for a relatively long period of time. The ones that seemed stable enough. We tested several offers using various traffic sources. No luck for us, though we tried several traffic sources and worked on optimizations. What have we been doing wrong? After series of tests, we realized that spytools simply do not show the real picture of the industry. But we found the use for AdPlexity anyway. It was our source of landers for a long time and we are grateful for it. Of course, we had to learn how to make some edits on such landers, remove third-party scripts, etc. Even so we saved lots of time on making own creatives.
  Our second try was the most time-consuming and fun. And this was when we started to realize that there is something wrong with our approach. The idea was to dive into manual spying. Learn how to use SimilarWeb, set up some VPNs and go ahead.
  At first we stepped on the wrong way because we checked top sites in adult niche. By top we mean less than 100 rank according to SimilarWeb. We checked what kind of traffic goes into the site and what sites or pages the traffic was sent to. You will be able to see whether there are just sites, tech domains of affiliate networks, or tech domains of guys with banner codes or smth else. Most of the times the offers were promoted by banners or native. The majority of the offers came from Bongacams, Stripchat, etc.
  Here is where we made the mistake.
  After we saw that almost all the big tubes promote these cams, we decide to send traffic to them too. Grabbed the offers, set them up at ExoClick and went ahead. Needless to say, that it was far from success. We did not even managed to earn the amount that we have spent. Surprisingly bad.

  But why? Were we wrong? We saw with our own eyes that those were the offers that were promoted with the help those traffic sources. If the cool guys have been doing it for so long, why can't we too? 

  The next idea was to check out the sites that had lower rankings. Lower than 200 for sure. We managed to find some other offers, like Casual Dating, Cunt Empire, Sex Emulator, etc. The result were slightly better but still disappointing. The thing is it is really difficult to understand who is buying traffic in fact - like media buying team from some big cams, media buyers from affiliate networks who are trying sme offers, CPA monetization made by adult tube owners themselves or real affiliates. Most of the last aren't able to buy on really big volumes, big enough to be featured on SimilarWeb.

  So hours were spent on SimilarWeb, STM, AffLift and Defo forums. Tons of research. We spoke with our affiliate managers, traffic managers, sometimes were lucky to chat on forums. We thank all people who shared their experience and advice with us. Unfortunately for us, it did not work out that good so we had to look for something else. Here we are today, creating and growing our adult sites. As an adult tube, we managed to promote the same offers but in a different way. Take some banner codes and monetize our traffic on CPM model. Sometimes CPA but let's talk about it next time.
  Did we waste time on trying to figure out how to monetize based on CPA? Probably yes, but this is what lead us to our current state.

  We hope that our experience will help you in some way. This was not really a guide or some practical words. But rather our take on the situation and sharing our thoughts. It is true that here are some successful affiliates. If it works for you, we are glad about it. As for us, we had to change our focus and start something new.

P.S. When started to shift our focus our affiliate manager recommended us to test installs. Reluctant at first, we decided why not to try. Some hot browser extension. Funny, but we managed to earn something and had positive ROI.

But in the end, it doesn't even maaaaaatter.