The complaints are legion, and they grow louder every day:
- "The affiliate model isn't as effective as it used to be."
- "There's too much free content on the Web."
- "Still images don't sell anymore."
- "The monthly membership model is passé."
- "Video on demand isn't cost-effective for producers."
After a 10-year romp in high cotton, the digital adult-entertainment industry is facing some serious challenges. Buyers are demanding changes from sellers, and sellers aren't quite sure how to discover or deliver whatever it is buyers want.
At least one relatively small but increasingly significant adult-entertainment sector continues to thrive, though, not least because it doesn't find any of the common complaints about the adult Web to be insurmountable. Sites like Neil Orkin's Clips4Sale.com almost laugh in the face of the adversity that makes more traditional adult-entertainment purveyors cringe.
Launched in 2003 with "a few thousand amateur video clips," Clips4Sale formed the vanguard of a new content-delivery model custom-designed for the Web 2.0 revolution - before the revolution arrived. Using Clips4Sale's servers, bandwidth and architecture, small or amateur content producers could upload their videos to the Web, slap a price on them and make them available to the porn-buying public. They didn't need to be tech wizards. They didn't need their own financial processing systems. They didn't even need to have websites of their own. All they needed was a video camera, a willing performer, the software to make the finished product Web-ready and an Internet connection that would allow them to upload it. Clips4Sale handled the details and paid the seat-of-the-pants producers 60 percent of every sale.
At the time, Clips4Sale was a revolutionary concept. Consumers were accustomed to streaming entire videos by then, but the idea of buying two-minute "good-parts versions" for as little as $2.99 apiece was somewhat disruptive. Traditionalists said the business model wouldn't work because in order to be profitable, many, many clips would have to be sold.
They were. Late in 2007, Orkin predicted more than 1 million clips ranging in length from two minutes to 30 minutes would be available at Clips4Sale by January 2008. As many as 99 percent of them would be produced by "guys with a camera in their living room" and a flair for uncommon fetishes, many of whom will earn between $20,000 and $35,000 monthly. According to Orkin, a privileged few will earn upward of $40,000, and a few slackers will earn as little as $100.
It's all done without an affiliate program - "I don't know if I ever will have one," Orkin said - and most of the independent producers don't give a hoot about piracy. Although a digital-rights-management system is in place for clips uploaded to the site, Orkin said most producers prefer not to use it. Instead, they mark their clips with a URL and a "studio" logo and hope to God they escape into the wild and trigger a viral-marketing epidemic.
Consumers embrace the site, Orkin said, because they can get exactly the kind of content they want when they want it, it's easy and inexpensive to acquire, and they own it forever. Because Clips4Sale functions under the law much like an Internet-service provider, Orkin doesn't have to maintain 2257 documentation - which, he said, leaves him time to plot new methods of world domination. He just added a live-cam section to the site so independent producers can offer feeds from their "studios," and he's working on a tool that will allow producers to edit their content in real time on the site instead of offline. He recently added a white-label program that allows small producers to build membership sites offering warehouses of two-minute clips on a 50 percent revshare basis.
Only one thing darkens the horizon for Clips4Sale and sites like it, Orkin said, and that's something over which he has no control. The greatest danger, as he sees it, is a sudden explosion in the download-to-own business. It's not that he fears competition, but far too often, newbies enter the field without a plan for the future, he said. Instead of building a better mousetrap, their sole innovation is to offer the same products at prices that drastically undercut established operations, and that eventually leads to a vicious circle that weakens the entire market segment. Orkin said he's seeing that sort of behavior occasionally now, but most new websites quickly realize they can't sustain themselves as easily as they thought, so they disappear - often leaving content producers unpaid.
Still, it's a model worth examining.
