How much free porn will entice the maximum number of people to subscribe to an adult website? It depends on which webmaster you ask.
Marketing motives, tempered by legal concerns, tend to get more attention as determining factors in how much and what kind of material to give away. One of the most visible lawsuits related to previews and trailers is the case Vivid Entertainment Group brought against AEBN, the parent company of PornoTube, late in 2007. Vivid's attorney, Paul Cambria, has called the lawsuit the adult version of Viacom's copyright-infringement lawsuit against YouTube. In addition to its copyright complaint, the Vivid suit alleges that PornoTube is violating laws on age verification and compensation for content given away.
Yet the Vivid suit may not set that grand of a legal precedent, since PornoTube has already settled out of court in another copyright-infringement case with plaintiff Io Group, the corporate parent of Titan Media. Titan's in-house counsel, Gill Sperlein, said the settlement terms included confidentiality, so he couldn't elaborate on any details.
However, Titan expects a decision any day now from the Federal District Court of the Northern District of California on a copyright-infringement case against Veoh.com. "The issue of whether the tube-type sites are liable for copyright infringement has been fully briefed and argued on summary judgment," Sperlein said.
Sperlein noted these cases don't change the legal advice he has been giving his employer regarding trailers. "The advice that I would give - and that we follow - is that content producers should carefully control where they put their content and the type of permission that they grant when they do distribute it," he said.
The industry won't necessarily feel an impact from these cases any time soon, given the pace of the courts' schedules, attorney Clyde DeWitt said. "It seems to me that what most of the content companies are already doing is prudent," he said. "They're not stupid. They don't want to give away a substitute for what they are selling. It's not all that different from when you go to the movies and see the coming attractions. Watching a trailer is not a substitute for a full-length feature film."
However, DeWitt pointed out that some of the clips running on PornoTube are 17 minutes long, which could substitute for a full-length film. The longest clips on tube sites tend to rack up the most views, he said. "They have clips that have been up there only three days and that have been viewed 1,000 times," he said, "and that's far more than the number of DVDs or subscriptions sold by a lot of adult content providers."
DeWitt said the lawsuit against PornoTube may involve an injunction barring the showing of Vivid trailers, but it won't stop previews from other content providers unless those companies jump on the bandwagon as possible class-action plaintiffs. But not all adult companies have budgets big enough to afford prolonged litigation, he said, and sites like PornoTube still offer a forum for free advertising.
These lawsuits fit into the broader evolutionary battle between new distribution platforms and holders of intellectual copyrights, attorney Reed Lee said. "Every time a new expressive medium comes along, there are people with intellectual property rights from the old regime that get panicked about it," he said. "At every stage, intellectual property law has had the courts to decide whether the new innovative medium works, and it does it through litigation."
Lee said content creators are still figuring out how to "put a meter on the Internet" to keep the proliferation of freebie content from driving up the cost of producing new material.
That said, the Titan and Vivid lawsuits may not impact legal advice for free content put into website tours, Lee noted. "I'm not altogether sure that those controversies have a lot to do with what a site will put on its free tour area," he said. "It is clear to almost everyone that some expression may be perfectly protected for adults but not minors, and the size of that category is unclear. And that's what dictates the concerns over free tours sites."
Age warnings have a way of attracting attention from minors who are determined to seek out prurient content, Lee qualified, but parents can one-up this by filtering out websites that have 18-and-over meta tags on their splash pages.
John Sander, director of marketing for Kink.com, said "every movie, mainstream or porn, has to put out a certain amount of free promotional content in order to sell the product." He said Kink.com previews continue to embrace ever-higher production values. "I am actually moving forward with higher-quality and more explicit promotional content," he said. "With the emergence of PornoTube and other similar sites, we simply have no choice in this matter."
Sander said he has gotten rid of promos that included censorship graphics over genitalia.
Kink.com also has been supplementing its previews with shorter-length clips touting weekly site updates. Now, each of the company's 15 sites has a single master preview that runs three minutes, and each of the weekly new-content postings has its own miniature preview.
All told, Kink.com has been reducing the amount of content given away in trailers and previews from as high as about 3.5 percent to around 1 percent .
Some of Kink.com's affiliates have been posting previews on free content distribution sites like PornoTube, but Kink.com itself doesn't actively contribute. "We haven't yet prevented affiliates from doing that," Sander said. "We haven't yet made a decision or deployed a strategy one way or another on that. I think PornoTube is affecting everyone's businesses negatively."
So far, the lengths of clips on free sites haven't changed as a result of the latest PornoTube lawsuit. Legal experts expect Vivid Entertainment to file a preliminary injunction that would pull its own copyrighted content off the tube site. Any other company wanting the same treatment would have to make its own legal filing, as part of a class-action lawsuit or otherwise.
In the meantime, CECash Director Ardy said he doesn't expect any of his affiliate websites to change their behavior based on the outcomes of the lawsuits against the tube sites. "PornoTube is a new medium, something that's just coming out," he said, "and there's more and more of them coming out, and the way they use that content [is] not like a free tour."
Ardy said he sees a variety of strategies embraced by sites participating in his company's affiliate program. "Because of the rampant availability of free sites, we think ... it's better to give away more content to entice subscribers," he said. "But I'm not saying keep giving away more. You want to entice them but not satisfy them."
Ardy said he tells his affiliate webmasters to give away no more than two minutes of video footage in a teaser. "We evaluate how they use our content," he said, "and as long as they're not misusing it, we give them as much as they need to show in their promos."
Some CECash affiliate sites give a few video clips of relatively longer lengths, Ardy said, while others may post 100 or so snippets of shorter durations. He said the balance of hardcore versus softcore among freebies also differs among affiliates.
"I don't think there's a magic number out there for ‘entice, don't satisfy' because there's not a benchmark," said Jack Avalanche, chief executive officer of CherryPimps.com.
As for individual sites' changes in their own freebie content, "I think a lot of this has to do with supply and demand," said Jay Kopita, vice president of YNOT. "If you try something and it doesn't seem to be working, you consider changing your model, whether it's changing your content or your free tours.
"Obviously, webmasters need to give away some content to tease members into the sign-up areas. Then there's the level of content, whether it's softcore or hardcore. I'm fine with a company giving away softcore, but hardcore's another story."
Softcore content tends to prevail in the online promotions of Adam & Eve Pictures, which puts more hardcore trailers into shrink-wrapped DVDs. The company assumes that people buying the packaged flicks already are adult customers, whereas Web surfers might not be.
Adam & Eve also sends out trailer compilations on DVDs mailed to distributors on a quarterly basis.
Peter Reynolds, Adam & Eve's vice president of sales and marketing, said free content is one of many promotional factors contributing to the company's 28 percent annual increase in sales. "We attribute the growth to increased marketing and high-profile promotional events," he said. "We did a big event at the Palms Casino Resort in July. We took it over to promote our film Eden that came out in September. The sales have gone through the roof."
The trailers for Eden played in all hotel rooms at the Palms, and packaged versions of the trailers became handouts at the weekend event. A shortened trailer also played on a large outdoor screen. "By the time the movie released, everyone knew the release date, the name of the movie, and there was a high curiosity level at that point," Reynolds said. "You have to be very creative in getting your product out there, especially because of the competition."
Adam & Eve's promotions staff regularly reviews trailer content and alters it accordingly. The company has an internal review board that prescreens everything before including any flicks in the catalog, including promotions of movies bought from third parties.
Penthouse also slices and dices its freebies for different markets, to such an extent that "I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20-25 percent of our content given away," said Tony Previte, president of entertainment. "I cut 40-50 different trailers for a feature production, all aimed at a plethora of different users."
One group of users consists of Penthouse magazine readers. Every print issue has a DVD insert with an entire scene from a feature production. Previte calls that giveaway an upsell that recoups some its costs from the price of the publication.
The various trailers have different ratings, depending on the intended viewer and market. "I'll do an all-rated, a soft X, a hard X, a XX and then even some XXX trailers that are specifically purposed for foreign use," Previte said. "And then previews you give to a webmaster are very different from what you give to a broadcaster for a teaser or a mobile provider."
The mobile-enabled previews consist of about 10 seconds of the content that fits best on a 2-inch screen, whereas online trailers might last longer and look best on a 10- to 17-inch screen. Similarly, DVD previews aim for a wider range of screen sizes.
With so many different trailers out there, Penthouse content might appear more susceptible to abuse by the PornoTubes of the world, but Previte regards it as free advertising. "As a content provider, I respect other people's trademarks and expect people to do the same," he said. "But there are people out there who are letches and just violate the copyright. The guy looking for free stuff is either the guy who isn't going to pay you anyway or he's a casual user who isn't committed to buying anyway. We have brand loyalty."
Penthouse's formula for what to give away boils down to a combination of legal advice and marketing initiatives. Balancing the two is a matter of risk versus reward. "I know that if I go with harder trailers, I'll convert more customers," Previte said. "But then you have the increased risk of prosecution."
Previte also pointed out that preview content also factors in compliance with 2257, the law requiring documentation that all performers in videos are at least 18 years old. Potential 2257 noncompliance was one of the complaints Vivid raised in its suit against PornoTube.
Performance analysis has more of an impact on preview content than anything else, said Avalanche of CherryPimps.com. "I don't think we have a strict schedule for revising the content of our free previews," he said. "We do it on a performance analysis basis. We rotate trailers in and out. We bring in new content and then add new trailers for it, and then we'll bring in another one and see how that adjusts."
Avalanche said the hardcore nature of his site's content has largely deterred him from capitalizing on PornoTube and other sites of its ilk. "If I were to take a hardcore trailer and make it suitable for PornoTube" by censoring out the explicit details, he said, "I don't know whether it would further my sales or hurt me."
Avalanche expressed concern that distributing freebies raises the cost of creating content and said the industry could be damaged on a grand scale if the trend continues. "If the membership market starts drying up because of all the free content, pay for the performers could go down, and then the talent market would dry up," he said. "You won't have the influx of 18-year-olds flying out to L.A. if there's no money for them."
He contrasted the situation with that of the music industry, which relies on the distribution of free singles and videos to promote sales of albums and concert tickets. "Musicians will do it for free because they think of it as art, but adult talent won't operate that way," he said. If the paid opportunities aren't there, "you'll be left with all of these 40-year-old nymphomaniacs doing it because they love it."
Yet Avalanche recognizes that there's no stopping the continuing growth of free content distribution and that the industry needs to keep finding ways to work with the new technologies for giving out freebies. "Five years ago, everyone was complaining about free thumbnail picture galleries, but now everyone has thousands of them and are contributing to the TGPs," he said. "And now half these affiliate programs have launched their own tube sites."
Avalanche said the industry needs to find a way to work with the tube sites, rather than fight them, though that means creating more exclusive content that doesn't go out for free.
Avalanche predicted that more content providers will strive to keep more of their products exclusive without distributing freebies. He said this could eventually raise the barrier to entry for newbies, who will require ever larger amounts of capital to enter the online adult entertainment industry. "There has to be a return on the investment in these free promotions because if there isn't one, that's what will destroy a company," he said. "I think it reduces profit margins, but there's really no way to determine 100 percent how it's helping or how it's hurting."
A related impact of these trends is the migration toward pay-per-minute downloads without making any free trailers available, Avalanche said.
For now, Avalanche limits his trailers to one minute of excerpts from a 20-minute scene or video clip. Out of 60 videos, for example, he may create teasers for only a couple of them, rather than for the whole bunch.
Avalanche said his affiliates don't create any of their own trailers: They use the ones created by CherryPimps because of the heavy editing required. "I do what makes sense to me, and I don't feel like I'm giving too much away for free," he said. "We need to tease them [and] entice them but not satisfy them. We can't get to a point where we're 100 percent freedom of the content because there won't be any market left."
In some regards, the answer to the question about how much to give away doesn't change at all: It depends on each viewer's threshold. Avalanche put it bluntly: "There are guys out there who only need 15 seconds to come from beating off, while others take up to an hour."
-Jackie Cohen
This article initially appeared in the April 2008 edition of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe to AVN Online, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscriptions/ .
