I was going to post something about
Imitation Marketing or
Porn for Women, but I think this might be of more interest for a few of you, so here you go. Proper thanx to Dr. Agnes Z. who provided the psychological insight
Displaying content in members areas in better ways
For most membership sites there's a common misconception: "the more, the better". Although this holds true when speaking about number of scenes and/or models, it's not correct when you talk about length and amount of content for any given scene.
Thus, you can see many sites using
"10000 Gb of video, 2000000 images, yadda yadda yadda", when it says about anything to consumers (aka your target). Instead, the correct way to express it would be something like
"2000 scenes featuring 3000 models". That says a lot more than the previous claim.
So, after that, most sites build their members areas based on that misconception, and you see scenes with 10-12 5 minute clips and 300 pictures. WRONG.
For anything and everything in commerce, there are logical procedures, tested ways and studies that will help in developing and innovation of new ways. Plainly put, there's no innovation that comes out of the air, but it has some kind of background, whether it comes from logic, psychology, previous experiences (even in different fields), etc. The "megacontent" scenario is one that comes from an error and from there it evolved making it even bigger.
Think about this: adult entertainment isn't really a mistery, it has psychological roots that dig into lifestyles, conceptions, moral values, subjectiveness and such. Hence why it is really easy for many people with no real formal background in the field to make money off it: because it's inside each and every one of us. If it wasn't that way, everybody would be opening more "society friendly" business and succeed, which of course doesn't happen. The purpose of this reasoning is to go into what people wants to see in a porn scene, which relates basically to a single word: fantasy.
Most human people use fantasy as a psychological tool to keep themselves into the boundaries of what's accepted into their respective social groups. Anything out of that would be considered a deviation (a strongly cultural dependent concept that can vary from a culture to another) or a perversion. Both deviation and perversion have its own psychological paradigms and ways, so we'll stick to the somehow known as "common people".
"Common people" fantasizes about things that can't be done and they would like to. Without going any deeper, a porn scene is the sublimation of a fantasy, the closer this fantasy is to the viewer, the more he/she'll stick to that. So, men like to see an idea of man that in their minds has the strengths (or weaknesses!) they'd like to have. Since it's impossible to cater to each and every person in the worlds, we'll use common stereotypes that are usually accepted as the standard for what a "real man" should be: strong, muscled, with big genitalia and the ability to please more women than the average person. The counterpart for this "perfect" man figure should be one or more women who simply want to "get served" by this ideal stallion and will cater to all his wishes. Basically, sexual slaves.
(Side note: this applies only for heterosexual men on western cultures and slight fetish fantasies)
So once the content is served, the viewer will be into the fantasy, and, accordingly, he'll share it with a sexual partner or most commonly, he'll masturbate. The average video should include the logical step for erotic pleasure: warm-up, masturbation, ejaculation. In average, the whole proccess shouldn't take more than 5-6 minutes, so 10-11 minutes is always a safe bet. Once the video is running, the fantasy is going on. If they need to forward to go to the climax scene (let alone loading another clip), the fantasy will be broken, since there are strange elements that shouldn't be there, in this case the need to fast forward/load video and the confirmation that there is no fantasy: just something they'll have to pay. Even the less educated prostitute knew this for thousands of years, but somehow most adult sites are going the exact opposite way, trying to say, scream and yell to their members: "this ain't no fantasy for you, this is business for me".
The exact same thing happens with photo shoots. Besides the lack of creativity of most photoshoots (pretty understandable when you have to do 20 photoshoots a week, and of course this applies to video as well), it's a total lack of respect to your member to display 300 photos, of which 250 are the same with a slightly different position. Even worse, there are many sites that include photos that aren't rotated properly. This just says the membership site didn't care at all. Try this: 40/60 photos that continues the story in a logical way, hand picked. Give something from yourself. Let you members know YOU hand picked those for them, make it personal. If you feel unsure, just add the option of the 300 crap photos so they can compare. And you'll be able to compare results as well. You'll be surprised, believe me.
(Another side note: Photo content is so strong yet very few people realize that)
Of course, there's a lot more to the story, but for some of you, here's some food for thought. And even if the tip of the iceberg, it might be a lot more than what you already have
Discuss (if you want)