|
Market Psycology
Who is John Smith? Psychology of a Pornography Customer
It's literally a million dollar question. There are tens of millions of porn users who don't have to pay for content in today's online market and indeed they don't. They can find perfectly good free movies to meet there needs. This, however, does not help the pornography entrepreneurs who need customers to get their credit cards out and spend money.
So that's the question how does our entrepreneur make this happen? Well one of the answers involves attracting millions of users to his free content, enticing some of them to click links to premium content services such as webcams, dating services and premium movie sites and then convince them to hand over their credit card details.
This undoubtably works on some sites better than others ( I'll address this issue later) but what is happening as natural market forces apply themselves?
The amount of free content is growing rapidly.
The number of content providers is growing as its now easy for anyone with a camcorder, computer and Internet connection to enter the market. ( the barriers to entry are extremely low)
The numbers of paying customers as a percentage of pornography consumers is shrinking. However the number of pornography consumers is in fact rising.
This creates an interesting situation for the entrepreneur, he has a product for which there is undoubtably a huge demand but so does all of the competition. Capturing and retaining market share is a massive challenge for him.
Why should consumers pay when they can get what they want for free?
Rather obviously there is no one clear answer but there are some theories to explore.
Firstly the market is going to continue changing. Free content is not going to go away but the amount of quality content offered for free is not going to grow with it. After all who is going to produce quality content for no return? Are the free content providers ( tube sites) going to produce there own? Unlikely considering there business models are constructed on such tight margins.
Are premium site owners going to provide them with content in order to link customers to their sites? Possibly. This may in the short term be the only way they can keep the ever diminishing flow of traffic to their sites. The irony of this is that they are, by doing this, contributing to their own demise.
The good news is that the demand for pornography is not shrinking in fact as less liberal highly populated areas of the planet become more affluent and have increased access to the Internet demand is going to increase. The current Global recession will end and regular customers will return with more money in their pocket.
So in summary it's mixed news, demand is growing, supply is growing, supply of free content is growing as a marketing tool and access to the Internet by potential customers is growing.
I believe that the smart players in the industry are well placed to profit in these conditions.
There are still millions of men out there looking for movies of attractive people having sex in order to jack off. Well that's true but he's mostly doing that for free.
The job of the entrepreneur, especially the small and medium sized organisation, is to convert the precious visitors to their sites into paying customers. The key to this is the provision of niche content.......
Using online pornography can become an obsession even for people without psychological disorders, simply because it is so easily available and taps into such a powerful appetite.
Eventually users will become attracted to pay sites for a number of reasons.
The user will eventually become desensitised and habituated to the same type of images. He or she gets bored and seeks the mix of nudity, sex, aggression, submission, and violence that causes the brain to release the endorphins that the user craves.
This is where niche content providers step in. Once desensitised to the regular content the user will become a connoisseur and start seeking content that pushes his buttons.
He starts actively seeking that toe tickling site that really arouses him.
Attracting this guy is another large subject which I'll write about soon I just wanted to take an overview of the market here.
|