The Round Bar at the Virgin Hotel became ground zero for something more valuable than any panel discussion or booth demonstration, the kind of unfiltered, whiskey-lubricated conversations where the real history of this industry gets told.
Night Zero is when the veterans emerge from whatever holes they've been hiding in since last year's convention, drawn together by some gravitational force that only exists when enough people who've survived three decades of technological upheaval gather in one place.
I'm Dugmor, and I've been in this circus since the mid-1990s, which means I remember when "streaming" meant something entirely different and fortunes were built on plastic discs that cost forty cents to manufacture.
The AVN show starts as the SHOT Show firearms convention ends, creating this bizarre collision of industries, gun enthusiasts and adult entertainment professionals sharing elevator space and casino oxygen. Two tribes that understand American capitalism in its purest, most unregulated form, each carrying their own special relationship with controversy and credit card processors who'd rather pretend neither existed.
Ghosts of Affiliate Programs Past
The conversations flowed like bourbon, smooth at first, then burning with uncomfortable truths. I spent hours with industry veterans who remembered when MPA3 and Silvercash ruled the affiliate landscape, when Evil Angel was revolutionizing gonzo production, and when a solid DVD distribution deal meant you could buy a house in the Valley. We're the last generation who can remember dialing into bulletin board systems to trade image files and thinking we were witnessing the future.
One colleague and I reconstructed the archaeology of our business like two paleontologists piecing together fragments of a extinct species. The DVD era, with its glorious profit margins and physical inventory. The early affiliate programs that paid actual money before everyone realized they could just steal traffic and rebrand it. The golden age before tube sites detonated the economic model and forced everyone to rebuild from smoking rubble.
Now? It's OnlyFans, AI-generated content, social media automation, and blackhat marketing. The tools change but the hustle remains constant, find attention, monetize it, repeat until the platform bans you or the algorithm kills your reach.