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Maybe my negativity come from the view I got of online porn.
It was of an industry with great potential, lots of ways to move porn forward and an industry that could adapt and innovate beyond what offline porn was able to do.
When I first met a lot of online people at a show their talk backed up what I had experienced meeting a few. The few I had met were making a lot of money. A guy in San Francisco was buying images and video to put on discs and selling them for free and a $4.99 delivery and package charge. Which was a $3 profit and selling them by the 1,000s. A guy in Pasadena who was buying all he could get, 20 image sets for $3 to $10 an image. And others who were buying and selling very well. Then brokering with Scarlett and John Copeland was making lots of money.
The talk I heard at Internext backed all this up. right to the moment it came to buying content.
The biggest sponsor of the day offered us a laughable wage to work for him full time. Ounique weren't able to pay $300 a set for the license to sell a set online. And over and over again the same story, big talk with small purses.
And later it carried on. big talking sponsors who couldn't afford a decent product. Their reason why was always the same, "You don't need to spend a lot of money on content." Or words to that effect. Truth is if you want to convert and retain well you absolutely have to have a good product.
If you want a site that converts twice as well as sites you're competing with you need to give surfers twice as much reasons to buy. If you want a site to retain twice as long, you need to give members twice as many reasons to stay.
Or you send twice as much traffic, to get the same number of joins and twice as many again to build the members base.
Is that cheaper than providing a better product. Is it cheaper to send 40,000 hits to poor site, than sending 10,000 to a great site?
Forward to 2005. It was then I first thought of live scenes. Going online with a live cam of a porn scene. Maybe where I am shooting and the girls get carried away, or just live sex scenes. Did a budget for it and it was clear few single sites could do it. It would need 4-10 sites, depending on their size, to make it work. Armed with the costs I visited a show and spoke to many. And came up with the same story, "I can buy an exclusive scenes I keep for ever for a lot less."
Today, boxed porn is dying, be it online or offline. Free, legal and non legal is killing it slowly.
Do we keep going down the same road or look at something free can't offer? Or adapt the MFC model to make it work inside paysites?
And if we don't adapt and innovate, why. Lack of finances or will or ability?
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