jayeff

Traffic will always be king on the 'net and - at least so long as PPS is dominant - content cannot even be titled queen. The comment you placed in brackets bears that out.

As to trends in video, so far they have less to do with what the surfer wants and more to do with competition and the limits of current technology. What you call old-school video got away with those dreadful plots and (generally) abysmal production and post-production standards, because that was what there was. No-one can imagine they ever reflected what their customers actually wanted (well okay maybe a few did enjoyed the sheer awfulness of those storylines).

Producing for the 'net did not initially mean higher production standards (although those followed), but it did mean catering for slow download times: at first very short clips which have now been relegated to the role of sales tools. That dictated the use of at most a scenario, and although with broadband the clips have got longer, on the whole, storylines are still missing.

If we try to go beyond observing what has happened, we get into the realms of guesswork and misdirection. First because as webmasters, generally with good connections, we often forget how many customers who still surf at low speeds. It is hardly surprising these people would rather have 45-minute (or whatever) movies broken down into segments, so the number of those choosing segments (when they are available) gets inflated. Does that mean it is an absolute choice, or one which will change if/when still faster connections become the norm? I don't think we have any way to know in advance of that actually happening.

An even more prevalent misdirection is to attempt to deduce much about customer behavior from surfer behavior as a whole. We often talk as if every surfer is a potential customer and while that is true in a theoretical sense, most people will not pay for porn (except perhaps once or twice out of curiosity) even if none were available for free (not only the many minors surfing for porn to whom we cannot or at least should not sell anyway). These surfers logically include a higher proportion of low-bandwith connectors than the typical membership of a video paysite, so their behavior is going to be influenced by that and simply by what is available to them. Perhaps they flit from clip to clip because mixed with the premium content is so much dross? Again I don't think you can usefully guess at how they might behave in other circumstances.

My feeling is that you are over-analyzing and from the wrong perspective. The big plus of the 'net from a marketing point of view is that every possible customer profile is accessible. Thus you can sell low-margin/high-volume, the reverse and everything in between.

What I believe will change (is changing, albeit very slowly) is that in the past we have been able to basically chuck any old content out there, get ourselves some traffic by whatever means, and make money. Because demand exceeded supply for much of the past ten years, we haven't really needed to think about the customer much at all except as a source of income. But a combination of crapping on our own doorstep and increasing competition is pushing up the cost of sales and that is going to force us to start tying business models more closely to customer profiles.

That won't result in a single business model, because ultimately online porn is like any other business sector. There will be a handful of sponsors with enough capital to go the low cost route, a larger minority will offer high-priced, speciality content and most will be average in every respect, aimed at the customer ready to pay a little more to get a little more.

To be successful, no matter what route a sponsor goes, he will have make a lot more effort than now to identify and cater for his customers, dropping the one-size-fits-all approach which currently dominates. But there will be several sets of goalposts and they will be moving constantly for the next 10-20 years at least. I don't think it is possible or even relevant to try to make more specific projections because the industry and the 'net itself will be changing so quickly on so many levels.