What's Possible In Porn Today?
 

I was sitting here thinking about all the changes I've seen in this Industry since January , 2009 (that's when Mister Peabody World, the network, was born). Seems like such a short time ago, barely 2.5 years, and yet I've seen:

The ePassports debacle
Countless programs closing left-and-right
Visa changing its' regulations so no more over the limit purchases, etc
The end of Xsells (and those tiny pre-checked boxes of gold)
Charlie Sheen cavorting with porn stars - and giving porn stars a bad name
The rise of "free porn"
The decline of the "little guy" affiliate, formerly the backbone of most programs
Piracy on a level never before seen
Paysites being sold and consolodated into larger programs
Less and less content being shot
DVD sales dying
New technologies emerging and, while creating new, untapped revenue streams, has also left a lot of programs in the dust, unable to adapt to rising technological demand...

...and I'm sure I'm leaving out all kinds of "big" (and terrible) things that have happened in the last 2.5+ years.

So after the sale of YouPorn and Twistys to Manwin, AVN's purchase of GFY (and other acquisitions) it got me wondering:

What is still possible in today's porn climate? Is growing a company even possible any longer? And, if so, how big could one get today?

We're not talking Manwin-sized companies, either. They have the capital and footprint to squash anyone, if they wanted to. No, I'm talking about a small-to-mid-level company (under 2 million in gross rev, let's say) being able to grow to even the size of a Twistys, let alone a Hustler or Penthouse.

The future looks bleak for established companies but what about the "little guys" with dreams of becoming one of the "big guys"? Is it all a pipe dream or is that kind of growth and success still possible, even today?

Your thoughts kindly welcomed.

What's Possible In Porn Today?

answer: you can watch it for free at youporn and jerk off...
Enjoy !

Or someone could come over, and jerk you off while watching youporn.
Vary the lube and drug of choice. Endless possibilities.

The wife likes longer porn movies, maybe that's possible.

I like poo. Oh wait, wrong nic. FUCK!!!

Well, thanks for sharing that on your 541 post in 5 years. I feel quite special now.


I know what you like, dude - seen it on youporn enough to know. :D

Sic transit gloria mundi...

Still lots of opportunity out there, for the PATIENT webmaster. I think what we saw a little also, was a weeding out of the so called "webmasters" who were in it for the ultra-short term. All no traffic all talk. Most have now moved on, and having a recession helped that along nicely as well.

Until the USA gets out of the slump, sales will continue to be poor to mediocre, but then again, i'm here building traffic, sites and my network for when everything turns back around. I'm looking at 5 years down the road minimum.

Best of luck to you! But five years = ugh. Let's hope it doesn't take quite that long. :D

:1orglaugh

One thing that is possible because of very cheap cameras is much higher quality video production.

Even in recession sales of HDTV has continued. Product that looks good on these sets I believe will make money.

Computers/ TVs will merge so that more content will be watched on TV.

Old content will look increasingly dated and poor.

High quality needs certain skills, focus, lighting, sound and editing. So as quality goes up quantity will be cut back

HD will be minimum of 10,000 - 20,000 bits / sec (TV HD ) and slowly Blu Ray quality will take over 35,000 bits

It's definitely possible. There are a number of factors that come into play.

How in tune you are with the market's interests. Ie if you can put together a site that sells on tubes = big $$$

How in tune you are with the direction of the industry.

Maybe the biggest is how much you are willing to risk. Both in terms of money and how hard you are willing to push the envelope.

I'm pushing, I'm pushing....LOL Thanks Shap - but shouldn't you be counting your millions on some beach right now? Wait, maybe you are and are just multi-tasking. Impressive! :)

LOL

In my opinion the reason Brazzers grew to the size they are is largely because of their willingness to risk what they had made and re-invest HEAVILY into their company. They went from gallery makers, to tgp owners, to paysites to program owners. Growing bigger and bigger and bigger.

For 12 years we put the affiliates interests before the customers. We didn't even want customers in shows, as they might tell us something. But pouring booze down any affiliates neck, or even me who would never promote a site, was cool.

We had the upper hand until 2007/8. Then Tubes really took off and after 10/11 years of buying online porn we hadn't built anything that would compete.

Most porn online today is bland. The sites lack identity, character and personality. They just get a model in and add more to the pile of models they already have, that's the ones that are adding.

You all know my thoughts on content, so no more on this.

As the BW and hosting costs plummeted, did we give the members a better deal, a better product. Or did we just give out more free porn?

Are new ideas coming forward, are sites doing something different?

While customers move to Tubes in increasing numbers, rejecting HD, we still think shooting the same old crap but on a HD camera will bring them back, after 3 years of losing customers that's sad.

We need to rethink the product and work out how to pay for it.

You reap what you sow.

i cant afford 2 nics...

the only thing thats not possible is the impossible :winkwink:

That's certainly true about Brazzers. I wonder if they did just that - just re-invested most earnings back into the biz - or if they got financial backers who said (more or less) "Here's x number of millions, now go bang it." LOL Maybe nathan could tell us....:)

Now finding investors is something I've considered. While I'm willing to re-invest thousands of my own money back into my business (which I have done, and continue to do), I wonder if an influx of BIG cash would leap frog this puppy (leap frog this puppy?) to the next level.

But trying to grow 'organically' through more hard work, more sweat equity, is not doing it on its' own, ya know? So the point of this thread (I had a point here?) was: is it even worth trying to "go for it" in 2011-2012 or should a program owner just be happy with whatever he can get these days. LOL

I'm talking about the original owners of Brazzers the guys Fabian bought out. My understanding is this. The original owners re-invested almost 100% back into the company. They kept pumping money back in. And as a result they grew faster than anyone. It makes sense. You think about it year 1 they make $100k and put $100k back in. As long as they break even they are at $200k reality is they were smart guys and grew faster than that. So Year 2 let's say it's 500k then year 3 2mil then going into year 4 you have a company spending $2,000,000 a year on top of their operating costs. As long as you are smart with your investments you can kill it which is exactly what they did.

The key is this. If you have something that is doing well scale that fucker up (as "quiet" used to say) as far as you possibly can. If you've done that then you are probably doing as well as you can do right now. If you haven't then there is where there is huge immediate opportunity for you.

As an example I see right off the bat your ccbill join form (and hosted join form) could be tweaked and you have no cross sales. You add that and let's say right off the bat you are adding 10% pure profit in your pocket. You take that profit and invest in traffic and there is some immediate growth for you.

Thanks for the feedback Shap, you know it's always appreciated. :)

Cross-sells I'm considering (an old cohort of yours, Van, contacted me yesterday about this - and still hasn't gotten back to me yet, the slacker. LOL!). The Join forms I'd be absolutely willing to A-B test them further (and it depends on what site we're talking about here) but essentially, I've tried eight diff forms and this one converts the best for me (I'm talking my own join.html pages; the "CCBill" forms are actually custom forms and outperform any CCBill form I've ever encountered - and this comes from CCBill, who probably want my custom forms for everyone but I've refused to give them to anyone else haha!).

Buying traffic, after 10k spent in three months - yes, you read that right, 10 grand in 3 onths, from Exoclick and JuicyAds, and so far all I've seen is a big fat ZERO when it comes to any sales growth from advertising. I'm still willing to throw another ten grand at buying ads BUT I need some hands-on help othrwise I'd rather buy a car with that $, or some really expensive hookers. LOL! At least I'd be getting something fun for my money.....

Thanks Shap - but I'm feeling I could invest 100K into this thing and it still wouldn't grow that much. But we'll see, it IS summertime after all. :)

Nothing is impossible... But dont fall into the trap of spending all your money...

Money spent does not equal money made.

Money NOT spent equals money made :2 cents:

Van knows the join form and it ties in with the cross sales. Talk to him about it he'll get you hooked up. He killed it for us :winkwink:

Don't ever spend all your money at once. Small buys wait to see if you get a return if you don't move on. Email me anytime if you want some ideas. I personally wouldn't have gone with juicy or exo for your 10k.

Re-investing would of been a great way to go in 2005. In 2011 :1orglaugh

Heh - you got that right Paul! Now if I could invest in a fucking time machine....:)

short answer? yes, YOU can. Most people don't. :2 cents:

Much appreciated, those kind words of encouragement Harvey!

I have but one thing going for me (okay, three):

1. I never, ever, ever stop.
2. Harvey's support.
3. _________(fill in the blank)

:) :) :)

If you like gambling ...

There are still ways to grow and establish something. However its not as easy as in the old days. It's busting your balls, making long days and re-investing every cent you make, at least that's what I'm already doing for 2.5 yrs.

With VC or informal funding it would be easier and more quicker to boost business but that's not common for adult. I spoke/met the last 8 months various VCs but no one wants to be associated with adult especially when they have name.

Personally I think we need to look more into the mainstream market for innovations and adapt certain things.

Last week an old friend of mine who became a millionaire with his ISP company 15 yrs ago visited me in Czech Republic. He is still active together a group of investors as VC and only focused on Internet / tech startups but unfortunately they can't be associated with adult.

However he was very impressed of what we developed over the last 2.5 yrs and showed me some new technology which he recently bought (incl. 7.000 patents).

The tech he showed me was really innovating. In fact it's an small iphone/android app which listens to low frequency audio signals.

So imagine you have that app installed on your mobile and watch a Brazzers clip on Youporn.

The low frequency signals are broadcasted to your mobile phone and triggers an event, for example to open a join or promo page of Brazzers with a discount.

He demonstrated this solution for the motion/music industry which they going to launch soon in various cases and must say from what i saw it was pretty amazing and innovating where the mobile phone is just an extra instrument to make consumers aware.

Again I think that with all the new technologies and always changing landscape there are multiple ways to put something successful on the market but you need to have luck and always believe in what you are doing.

I'm serious. And here's why:


I'd add you seem to love what you do, you seem to take risks, you seem to provide other people with what you would like to get. Although I'd never advocate for "intuitive marketing", I gotta admit there are few situations where it works because the person in charge is the perfect data sample for that segment. In your case, it seems you're exactly that.

Well Mr. Peabody one thing about today's climate as you know is the rising demands on technology trends. As I've said before, a business today that is capable of identifying how these trends affect their revenues will soon become the market leaders.

1. Higher Quality content is being demanded by the end users and larger content is moving online, thus end users have a broadcast quality expectation and revenue dollars are aligned to their experience.

2. There is explosive growth in web enabled mobile devices and in mobile content consumption especially where land line connections are limited. Reports show more smart phones will ship worldwide in 2011 than laptops and PCs combined with that market exploding to an 80% adoption rate by 2015.

3. Gartner states most companies are leveraging about 10% of the computing resources available them via their own infrastructure (owned and managed infrastructure is not optimized). Therefore there is huge movement to “cloud” infrastructure so you pay for what you use and nothing more. Further lowering cap X costs and costs surrounding the management of infrastructure.

In all things have never been better when it comes to the management of content and web assets as well as the ability to meet the user's experience however, most are still sitting on tons of old content in membership sites that are fading.

To paraphrase Will Rogers, find where you users are going and get their first.

Excellent post, thank you! I've considered VC but you're right: anyone with any name won't touch adult, so you're left with bacisally VC newbs with lotsa money and even more expectations. The headaches would be enormous.....

Excellent points on technology, which is why I coupled your comment with this:


Insights from The Master himself! Hey man!

(Anyone with sufficient resources should contact this man immediately to implement his tech solutions.)

For me, biting off what i can most easily chew (I hope), I've decided, more or less, to focus on mobile solutions and marketing for my sites. This is based squarely on the fine points you mention. For Europeans especially, VOD and mobile sales are hge, and a relatively untapped market....

The Cloud does await me, tho....

Heh - let's fucking hope so, Harvey. From your lips to some God's ears (I don't care which one, at this point...).

:)

Once, twice,...three times a Peabody!
Oh man I'm bored...

You got me racking my brain here :) Yes it is still possible but prob not by yourself if you want to become a super player.

3 points every guy on his own must follow for success.

In order of importance as well as operational heirarchy:

If you can concieve it, you can achieve it.

The results are in your hard work.

Work smarter not harder.

I will leave it to your mind to expand on these as words would require a long post. :)

I get the feeling that you are finding that one guy can only do so much and are finding all the manutia involved in things like building blogs, more feeder sites, your own paysite mgmt ect is heavily time and labor dependent and the investment is iffy at best.

Ya know Serge posted in my other thread and the last thing he said which kind of surprised me was.. the way to retirement is getting as many people to work for you as poss. The more the quicker, the less the not so quick.

Both the two above paragraphs go along with my point 3: Work smarter not harder. But ya dont get to 3 until 1 and 2 are done thoroughly and well.

So in a nutshell if you are working harder not smarter you are prob pissing time and money away and maybe need to do more testing (point 2).

BTW, I gave up on my latest Hottest Babe thread. I finally realized this is not the board for those kinds of threads.

If there was real interest ok but prob too off topic. I could post like nuts and make it happen but why? :) I mostly just wanted to do it and we had our threads MP. :)

The nature of this board makes even what I wrote above too long winded. :) But I am going to hit submit anyhow :)

Ill still post my vids tho :)

It is all redone over and over. The other day I seen a thread on the best candy bar. I could post a link to my candy bar poll where I covered that but it was too depressing. :)



good summertime stuff

Thanks for the words VJo - always appreciated, for many reasons.

(BTW: it's not that "this board is not the place" so much as this board reflects most of today's soceity: whatever drops to page 2 gets no play. LOL People have a short memory, or no memory at all, which is why some people just do the same shit, over and over, because no one notices. Or not enough people to make them STOP repeating themselves, if you catch my drifteroo.)

One of the issues for me is internal: I could bang it, invest a lot, hire a lot of people, try and be "big" - but in the end I don't think "big" would stay "big for very long. In other words, it's like an iced coffee; cool for awhile until the ice melts (and the ice is constantly melting).

I love iced coffee.

So why bother to blow it up if it's a short-term bubble? Perhaps a stable, long-term goal is more realistic; if I'm still standing five years from now....

But generally I like the principle (and no we're not talking Victoria. Well, we're always talking Victoria heh, but not specifically this time). If you hire more people they should be productive and you should double, triple, etc your productivity and thereby your earnings.

But the only positive I've found so far in hiring people is more free time. This is great during the summer but if sales do not increase by the autumn I'll be wondering: do i want more free time or do i want more MONEY? LOL

Anyway, great post as always. Thank you!! :)

Harvey is Awesome! Hooray for the little guys!!! I am doing the same. Growing my network, biding my time...

ha ha, thanx for the nice words, but really, MP, you, Mutt, MikeS and a few more are the kind of people I imagine as Duracell rabbits, always trying new things and working hard and putting lots of love on what they do. It's very hard to fail with such abilities, so just keep on! :thumbsup

Yeah, if you want a topic "you" like to stay on page one you pretty much have to "work it". We'll see. :) I was kind of surprised Emma Peel got a vote besides me.

But most of them I covered in other threads like Linda Carter and Heather Locklear so I didnt sense much interest. Anyhoo... back to your topic.. :)

One thing I have noticed is nothing lasts forever and most of the status quo is not doing real well anymore. Expenses is part of the equation. Dont be too bullish now days is my advice.

I have been watching some eps of Ax Men S3. Man those bosses are tough. Guy missed work and boss Gabe from The Rygaard team went to the guys house and got him up, chewed him out and then started throwing his outdoor furniture on the porch around. lol Then he goes out in the street and says, "you want to settle it let's go" Well the Greenhorn (as they call em) knew better and just quit right there.

Bosses from hell! lol Keeps me motivated. :)

Maybe you need to be tougher to your employees. No profit, no employee. :)

But yeah things are transient in this biz so dont get too far out on the ledge. Steadily increasing profits is fine to me. I am not bullish on this biz or investing in it unless I am pretty sure something will work. I lost a ton on junk that didnt work so I know you can lose money real easy over time if you are too gung ho.

Ice coffee is pretty good. :)

I'm just being cranky. Of course the guy never seen my thread on candy bars. :) I should have posted my link. :)

We "computer people" get cranky sometimes. LOL

Understatement of the century! :)

I get cranky under two conditions:

1. No coffee in the morning
2. No sales in the morning

LOL

BTW: I'm editing 150 handjob videos while I'm reading/posting. LOL So please don't think I'm 'slacking off" here. Harvey would never forgive us Energizer Bunnies for slacking off. Multi-tasking is another thing.....

There are actually only a few people here on GFY (who post) who truly understand being a program owner. Affiliates are another thing entirely, although obviously connected. While I've done a little affiliate work, I don't know what all you guys go through on a daily basis, like watching programs close or do "questionable" things, all while relying on said sponsers to feed your family. LOL Not everyone can (or should) take on the risks of creating content, being legally responsible, etc. but being an affiliate is equally risky.

Anyway, ramble, ramble. I appreciate all views and viewpoints is/was my pernt. :)

I guess I'm also saying I feel for affiliates, because you have to sift through a lot of shit programs until you find some nuggets of gold, while we program owners can (theoretically) produce new content, find new sites to host, etc.

Either way it's a tough game, and (back to the point of this thread here) I think it's almost impossible to "grow" the way successful sites did even five years ago, let alone ten years ago. I've actually spoken to many highly successful people in this Industry and in mainstream, and all parties say they would have a MUCH tougher time achieving their success if they started now, or even when I did almost 3 years ago.

So there ya go: some perspective. LOL Carry on keepin' on is about all I (and many others) can do. Or go sell pizzas maybe. Nah, this is more fun and less fattening.

If I dont get any sales I get crazy not cranky. I start posting babe threads and stuff. :)

Good post by Shap above. Quiet's method (aka The Quiet Method :) ) in theory seems the way to go if you have a steady (and fairly dependable long term) profit margin, in whatever you do.

Push it to the limit.

good tune



otoh



The ying and yang of porn .. watch out for the YANG! It exists and will suck up your money. :)

It aint all YING baby :)