"The good lines are still putting out the same amount of content that they put out previously," Castle Megastore Corp. President and Chief Executive Officer Mark Franks said a bit crankily, pooh-poohing the suggestion DVDs were disappearing from adult-content producers' repertoires faster than kegs at a frat party. "Some producers are just putting out way too much product that never will sell."
The secret to sales success on any platform is "[making] a product people want," Franks continued. "The reason some of these people are suffering is because they're putting out crap." Although he admitted DVD sales are declining overall, he said fetish content and high-end, feature-based movies from producers like Wicked, Vivid and Digital Playground continue to sell as well as ever. "People are real informed now, and they definitely know when [new] stuff is coming out that they want," he said. As in the past, those customers arrive in stores on the same day the DVDs do.
Even on the Web, Franks said, producers have to make a conscious decision "to sell on quality or on price. [Digital Playground's high-end mega-hit] Pirates is still selling hundreds [of DVDs] a month," even after more than two years on shelves. Evil Angel's 2003 epic The Fashionistas, Zero Tolerance's 2005 release Girlvana and other similar titles also continue to sell well, Franks said, adding that "high-budget productions are always in demand [on DVD]." Even Girlvana's availability in video-on-demand format on the Web hasn't hurt the title's DVD sales, as far as Franks can tell.
AEBN Marketing Manager Suzanne Knudsen observed the current atmosphere within the adult industry is not unlike the friction within the music industry - from which she migrated - several years ago. She blames it on a sort of "small-town" atmosphere. "The adult industry is a very personal industry," she said. "People are literally naked [while doing business], so it tends to be like a family." Consequently, the "ripple effect" declining DVD sales have on other areas of the business - preparation people, artists, rental stores, manual laborers and others - affects everyone. However, like the music industry of several years ago, the adult industry is busy trying to figure everything out without leaving too many casualties in the wake of success. "[In the music industry,] companies that figured out how to work with downloads became the most successful," Knudsen noted. "Lots of bands now go directly to consumers."
In the adult industry, "the market is not necessarily collapsing, but changing," she added. "People are still trying to figure out how to make digital profitable. Every year, something new comes out and changes everything. It's hard to keep up."
Still, "more and more, there are bigger [video-side] dogs [getting onto the Web] every day. What everyone needs to remember is that new media isn't static. It isn't the be-all and end-all," Knudsen cautioned. "It's just another evolutionary step. Flexibility and fluidity [across the market] are very important.
"We haven't hit the final frontier at all."
