Columbia House Plans Porn Club
 

COLUMBIA HOUSE PLANS PORN CLUB


By JOHN MOTAVALLI


January 9, 2005 -- BUSINESS EXCLUSIVE

Penny for your (dirty) thoughts?

Columbia House, famous for its "12 CDs for a penny" record clubs, will launch its own adult video club with Playboy Entertainment at the end of this month. The service, called Hush, will sell pornography through direct mail and a Web site.

While 50-year-old Columbia House is eager to cash in on the $12 billion porn business, officials are pretty hush hush about Hush.

"This will be a separate subsidiary," said Jim Litwak, senior vice president of marketing at Columbia House. "It will be completely separate from Columbia House, and will not be marketed to current members. We are not using Columbia House at all, and are not talking to existing members; this is a separate business and deal."

Columbia House, the nation's largest direct distributor of DVDs and home video, will handle distribution, while Playboy, which has an adult direct-mail list "in the millions," according to Litwak, will handle marketing.

Litwak added that his company estimates that total adult video sell-through and rentals total $5 billion a year.

He said Hush can grab a significant amount of the marketplace because of Playboy's wide reach and Columbia's direct distribution methods. The club would work similarly to the company's record groups ? subscribers would select from a monthly catalog of titles.

Executives from Columbia House were roaming the aisles of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last week, meeting with producers and stressing that Hush will distribute adult content from other publishers besides Playboy.

Hush also insisted that it is starting with no members and is not piggybacking on existing Columbia House subscribers. In the words of one company executive, it will be a "slow build."

Last June, Columbia House struck a quiet deal with Playboy to add about 150 of its more "tasteful" product line to the Columbia House DVD Club, and it has also been test marketing adult titles through its Canadian subsidiary. Litwak said very few club members have complained.

But considering the outcry over Janet Jackson and Nicolette Sheridan, Columbia House needs to tread carefully, said entertainment analyst Dennis McAlpine of McAlpine Associates.

"Columbia House might bring in some negatives because of the association," he said. "It's more risky for Columbia House than for Playboy."

It may be risky not to get into the flesh business, however.

Traditional discount-book and record clubs like Columbia House and Time Warner's Book of the Month Club, which once enjoyed huge market shares, have been hard hit by the introduction of discount Internet distributors, such as Amazon.com, and eBay. Adult entertainment, meanwhile, has grown exponentially.

Among the recipients of Hush marketing dollars, Litwak said, will be Howard Stern, with Hush spon soring contests on Stern's syndi cated radio show. Hush will also be promoted through direct mail and through ads in adult magazines, Litwak added.

Columbia House was launched in 1955. It has over 8.5 million offline and online club members in the United States and Canada who pick from some 5,000 DVDs and 9,000 music titles through its various entertainment clubs.

In 2002, the company was purchased by merchant banker Blackstone Capital Partners, with former operating partners Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music still owning minority stake

where do i join there affiliat program?

Yeah right. This is gonna be big.

Yeah, wheres the sign up page?

damn that is cool.

It'll be ok it it doesn't take an act of congress to cancal your subscription like the regular columbia house bullshit..

i am already in their dvd program cant wait for this

Theres no money in porn, sisnt someone tell them this ?

I was the first to do this ..

http://partners.dvdsforabuck.com

Long to read:)

Wow this is a big company and this could mean a lot of extra money in our pockets

That's awesome. They will have a shitload of cc refunds, though. Can you imagine the amount of Teen Boys that will get into this? lmao. Sounds great though.

The more that mainstream culture popularizes adult entertainment, the better for all of us.

:thumbsup

-Dino

why is that?

Just look at the difference in perspective towards 'porn' from the seventies to now. In the seventies, the popular view was that porn was mostly conducted in dark alleys and involved unimaginable exploitation (and maybe rightly so).

Now, you cannot watch TV for a whole night without having some playful comment made about cruising for porn on the web, cybersex, signing up to membership sites. The major players in the adult industry are now featured in economic trade journals as legitimate business players.

Mainstream TV also has tons of programming now involving sexuality which cover the whole gamut.

When popular view supports the freedom to explore this and to be entertained by it without the traditional stigma of being considered 'perverted' (in a dangerous way) the social climate is much more germaine to facilitating adult entertainment (versus the orchestration of its demise).

-Dino

you do realize the more mainstream it becomes, the less valuable it is?
we make money partially because we're taboo

this is why many sites and video companies have puished the envelope even further...the same things a guy used to whack off to in secret in the bedroom are now available on late night cable....

personally, I'd love to see all adult video stores closed down so we'll make more money on the Internet...and of course video store owners want the Internet more regulated and some would love it to go away entirely so people have to go to their stores for a porn fix...

Wow, good new for porn companys :thumbsup

I think that's total BS.

Finally, we are going to see some real competition which brings (much needed) creative innovation.

The cookie cutter, "let's start a porn site instead of going to college" club IS going to lose unless it learns to COMPETE in an industry which has so many innovative possibilities.

It's going to take a lot more than finding new objects to insert into a limited number of orifices to maintain the attention and patronage of an adult audience.

This need to find the next creative level (or die financially) will be great for the industry as a whole and continue working on elevating entertainment involving adult sexuality into a solid LEGITIMATE place in our culture.

I am concerned about the syndication of the industry making it tougher for smaller indy shops to compete, but this is no different than any other major industry.

-Dino

Very interesting.....

ohh christ now i will start getting those damn flyers

...or not. :2 cents:

good idea I bet it does well for them

actually it's a bad news.
for many reasons.
One of them : they can't compete with amateur content providers/paysites and can push some regulations to make em illegal, just an example.

this is gonna be interesting!

Those who believe that competition from multi-million dollar mainstream companies will benefit them really deserve what's coming.

Interesting...very interesting...thats all i can see...

There goes the neighborhood... :upsidedow

This is going to be a huge money maker for webmasters. Looking forward to it!

the best thing to happen to the adult industry

mainsteam acceptence.

Little guys have already been competing with multi-million dollar adult companies for years - what's the diff?

-Dino

niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiicccccccceeee :-P

I guess this is one of the first major changes this industry will see in 2005. Whether it's good or not will be determined over time I suppose.

I don't see it Lens. They are only paying out $5 per confirmed signup now with their Columbia House program. Unless they have a radical change in their affilliate thinking I don't see why any traffic should go to them.

Not to mention they would probably do better without afilliates for the first year or two considering the level of advertising they are doing for this.

Unless you know something I don't (which is possible Mr. Playboy), I don't see this working in our favor.

Adult Webmasters are already competing with billion dollar companies:
Comcast/Cox/SBC... etc.

now we have other set-top box companies to contend with:
Akimbo, TIVO NextGen, XTV... etc.

IMHO, "HUSH" has a rough road in front of them but this is a move they must make in order to survive/compete.

I wonder what their domain name will be: ???

HUSH.com - owned by HUSHMAIL.com (great secure email service)
HushClub.com - owned by ULT SEARCH - Created on 2004-06-19
ClubHush.com - owned by me. :) - Created on 2002-02-09

:thumbsup

That would be some shit..

The more, the worse. The closer to mainstream porn gets, the less room there is for small, independent guys. Compare it to a small grocery store next to a supermarktet, and think of how many small grocery stores and delis have been utterly destroyed by supermarkets. Big, dominant players with huge market shares destroy small businesses.

Big companies are able to offer better prices and better products because of their bigger sales volume, and so the small guys get pushed out of the market if they can't offer something very unique (e.g. scat, beast, hard bdsm, specific girls, rape, watersports, etc.).

If you're not in a very specific niche and are not a content producer or a very big player, the move towards mainstream will hurt you. Just mark my words.


Oh, and one positive point: big companies with a presence in adult can and will lobby for better "protection of minors" online. So, free pornsites based in the US will become very risky to maintain.

That's the nature of business.

The 'pioneering window' on internet adult entertainment is closed.

We are already working within a class structure amongst ourselves. Just look at the comments that the bigger indys say about the smaller ones when it comes to processing lately.

There was a time when we all were scrambling at a more equal level and there was a peer exchange which kept us informed (and out of too much trouble).

Now the smaller guys who have grown up a bit share little empathy for the guys who still need 3rd party processing to grow their business. This industry is already divided from within - mainstream is just going to galvanize the classes and the ones at the bottom (whatever that means) may drop out all together.

BTW: I'm a little guy - but I'm inventive and have been surviving for over 25 years as a small player in industries with multinational institutions.

If this is your first time around this block, I can appreciate how scary and hopeless the prospect of big players moving in might seem.

But this is similar to what happened to the software industry when you know who pretty much saturated the PC market - there were a lot of little programmers (like me) who were saying just what is being said right now about the adult industry.

If you're attached to things staying the way the are, you will have problems.

-Dino

www.HUSHDVD.com is the new adult division of Columbia House (the 10CDs for a Buck people). There are already coming under fire from Religious groups trying to boycott Columbia House and all their corps/subsidiaries.

another gfyer said they've been hearing ads on Howard Stern.

anyone worried or excited by this now?

This is to be expected.

Just because a mainstream company decides to 'bless' our industry by sticking its neck out into it, does not mean it will suddenly happen.

Just as it has taken television media years to ease the notion of acceptable 'normal' interest in entertainment related to sexuality into our mainstream culture, it's going to take a while (and possibly quite a few tries) to bust through enough of the road blocks put up by 'moral extremists'.

This is just the beginning...

-Dino

It will be interesting to see how this one play out