TAMPA, FL—Clips4Sale.com was founded in 2003 as a simple, user-friendly website designed to allow adult content owners to deliver their videos to a large online audience on a per-scene basis. Six years later the site has become a respected adult brand among consumers and webmasters, with an Alexa ranking under 4,000 and more than a million clips available in its archives, supplied by thousands of producers serving nearly every fetish niche imaginable.
“What we offer is a place for the amateurs out there to make money from home. We also offer more traffic than the competition,” said Neil Orkin, owner of Clips4Sale.com. “The biggest challenge was finding good traffic and finding good amateur producers to produce quality content.”
For many years the “all you can eat” monthly subscriber business model dominated the adult online industry. It used to be common for a site with 20 or 30 scenes to attract a membership of hundreds of consumers, each willing to renew their subscription for several months while enjoying weekly updates.
However, as recurring billing began to decline and sites continually grew their collections each week, the cost of updating a site remained high while the monetization amount per scene dropped quickly and began to make many sites less profitable. When Clips4Sale came on the scene, it provided site owners with an easy way to upload videos and get paid for them on a per-scene basis instead.
Video on demand had been a successful model for a few very large sites with the resources and traffic to sustain payment-per-scene billing methods. But back in 2003, for most webmasters the idea of adding per-scene sales options to their website was a daunting task. The launch of Clips4Sale.com changed the equation by opening up per-scene sales to even the smallest sites, making direct “homemade” content sales a reality for even the least technically savvy amateur enthusiasts.
Today, in less than an hour, any content producer can register an account and create an online store on the Clips4Sale website complete with their own self-branded page headers and sales images. The site has become very popular because it allows customers to browse the aggregate of a massive amount of clips from thousands of unique content partners through one simple website interface. Clips4sale has also undertaken a robust marketing campaign and become a high-traffic website capable of bringing many new buyers to hundreds of content owners.
Some amateur content producers have made Clips4Sale the exclusive sales portal for their videos online, offering hard-to-find real amateur content priced per scene with all of the backend management, bandwidth and billing methods taken care of in a turn-key manner. This enables anyone with 2257 documents, a camera and a dream the opportunity to create and sell their own adult videos online.
Professional webmasters have also found ways to integrate Clips4Sale into their business plan. A site owner with a monthly subscription paysite can upload content and earn additional revenue on a per-scene basis while simultaneously promoting that site to the entire Clips4Sale audience. Many webmasters upload select individual scenes with watermarks and branding images, thus ensuring that any sale becomes a powerful marketing tool to drive customers who want more content from the same source to visit their monthly-priced paysite.
Another interesting usage of Clips4Sale by professional webmasters is test-marketing new niche ideas and content concepts. Traditionally, a studio that had a fresh idea for a website would need to invest in acquiring a dozen scenes or more, designing and building a paysite, creating a CMS, and doing all of the other work associated with establishing a new web property. Now, it is not uncommon for a producer to make a handful of “test scenes” in a store on Clips4Sale to see how well they do before ramping up to the creation of a stand-alone monthly subscriber paysite. Interestingly, Clips4Sale has unequivocally proven that a substantial paying audience exists for micro-fetish videos featuring sneezing, tooth-brushing, yawning, flossing, spitting, crying and other seemingly mundane activities.
“The most rewarding part of this business is to see people making money who have been hit hard by the economy,” Orkin said, “seeing and hearing from people who can pay their rent, mortgage, car payments and even put their kids through school. In the next 90 days we should be launching several new things. MyC4S will be the first, and then an amateur fetish cam site which will be geared toward popular fetishes on Clips4Sale.”
The continued evolution of online content requires successful adult companies to maintain a forward-thinking approach to marketing and content production, while reducing overhead and maximizing resources. In many ways the Clips4Sale site has simplified the entire process by eliminating barriers to entry. Providing the marketing and means of distribution for amateur creators allows “homemade porn” enthusiasts to focus solely on the art of generating quality videos.
Even more importantly, the site continues to add functionality and expand its reach with innovative new offerings like MyC4S, cam stores and a clear eye toward making content deliverable across a variety of mobile platforms in the near future. That means amateurs and webmasters can focus on other aspects of their business and rely on their strategic partnership with the Clips4Sale development team to find new revenue streams and methods of publication for their content.
Perhaps the greatest beauty of the arrangement is that Clips4Sale does not take ownership rights of any of the content, so even the most conservative commercial artists and site owners can make full use of the marketing potential offered without having to dilute their rights to their own intellectual property.
In an increasingly tight economy with credit lines being lowered and recurring monthly memberships dwindling, Clips4Sale provides a combination of advantages that allow many content producers to remain profitable. These include virtually zero overhead expense using a revshare agreement, the ability to test-market new ideas with very limited resources, and a massive audience of repeat customers who prefer to purchase their fantasy videos one at a time without any long-term subscriber relationship.
An idea that was launched in 2003 may be even more applicable to today’s market than ever. The thousands of content producers who earn payouts every month would certainly agree—and they show no signs in slowing down in their production of new clips for sale.
For more about the company, go to Clips4Sale.com.
This article originally ran in the January 2010 issue of AVN.
