The landscape of business is littered with the fossils of dinosaur companies who couldn't roll with the punches, but emerging technologies don't necessarily need to kill a company. Case-in-point: National A-1 Advertising. Since 1990, when National A-1 began offering telephone entertainment services, the technology has gone from landline telephones and very few homes with computers (let alone Internet hook-ups) to the current backdrop of ubiquitous high speed Net connections and a cell phone in ever pair of cargo pants.
National A-1 has expanded and diversified its profitable telephone business by embracing new wrinkles in technology. "It boils down to equipment, software, and people," National A-1 president Richard Cohen tells AVN Online. "We've always bought the newest equipment, the newest software, and hopefully, we've always hired the brightest people."
National A-1's newest venture: HotMovies.com, a pay-per-view site with a per-minute billing model. HotMovies.com, which launched in January, currently hosts over 3,000 videos, covering the gamut of sexual niche markets, from bondage, to urination, to shot-in-Russia material.
Cohen believes that the site's per-minute revenue model is the future of Net porn financing. "When you can go watch a movie on any subject you want, and have your hour worth of fun and that's the end of it, why would you want to join a site?" Cohen asks. "It's not worth it. [Subscription sites] are okay, but not worth 30 or 40 dollars a month.... When I say things like this, other people in the industry don't love it, but it's the truth."
"Everything we see supports the idea that people want to get in, pay a minimum amount of money while they're there, and then be done with it," agrees National A-1's Marketing Director Mark Farlow.
Most of the HotMovies.com videos are produced by smaller production companies, and some by complete amateurs. "We wanted to incorporate a system where amateur photographers and videographers can get their content into our system," explains Farlow. "We have a site called Cash.net which is the submission area for HotMovies.com, so if you have content you want to get out to the public, you would submit it to Cash.net, and we pay you a percentage of the revenues that are generated by the viewing of your content."
Another iron National A-1 is keeping in the Web fire: its own affiliate program, at www.cash.com. Having launched only last summer, Cash.com is a latecomer in the field of affiliate programs and has experienced some of the hardships that come with that position. "It's slow," admits Cohen. "It's hard to get affiliates. It takes time. Most of it is built on relationships... all these people are saying 'higher payouts' and 'higher conversions,' but it's all approximately the same. If you're with [a particular company] and you're getting $35 a sign-up, there's not much more we can offer you, so it's relationships. It's getting people to be friendly with you and trying to do favors for each other." Cash.com's roster of sites includes 69.com, GreekSex.com and WatchMePlay.com, as well as a couple of free e-mail harvesting sites, Pink4Free.com and Gay4Free.com.
Partially to counteract some of the headaches of relying solely on affiliates for traffic, National A-1 has bought up a number of high profile domain names that generate their own unique traffic as well as benefiting from being Cash.com affiliates. Included in their sites are Girls.com, Kinky.com, Spanking.com, and Watersports.com. "We spent over $2 million for our domain names, for the purpose of getting traffic on our own, without having to rely on other people," says Cohen. "Every day, tens of thousands of people type in those names. If you were into spanking, and you went to the Internet, more than likely, the first thing you're going to is either put 'spanking' into a search engine or you're going to type in 'spanking.com' and either way you're going to come to us. Or 'girls.com,' 'teens.com,' or 'watersports.com'. That's our unique traffic, plus, with niche names, it's targeted traffic. We know exactly what they want, and hopefully, we can provide it."
National A-1's sites and affiliate program are run out of their Philadelphia offices. "We host everything ourselves," says Cohen. "We have our own servers and a full-blown computer room with a generator on the roof; whatever we need to get things right."
"We have a pretty big staff here. We have about 10 programmers, 10 graphic artists. The content department, the marketing, etcetera," Farlow adds.
National A-1 initially jumped into the Web relatively early in the game, focusing on more traditional products and services. "We started doing Internet sites about seven years ago," Farlow says. "At the time, we were doing mostly non-adult sites. We had Free.com, and a few other things, like a diet site and a watch store. They did pretty well initially. Most of them are still up and running."
According to Cohen, National's expansion into the realm of dating Websites was a consumer-driven progression from their phone services. "We went into the Internet because a lot of people, men especially, demanded the Internet," Cohen says. "They want to see visuals... it's a different experience, turning on your computer and looking at pictures is different than [just] talking to someone."
Beginning with Singles.com, National A-1 set up a group of dating sites that now includes KinkySingles.com and Spanking.com. Services offered to the more than half a million consumers hoping to combat their loneliness include photo personals, a detailed search feature, and even the opportunity to hear potential life-partners answers to interview questions like "what makes you unique?" and "what are three things you can't live without?"
In spite of their more recent stabs into the Internet, National A-1's main business has always been telephone entertainment. Phone entertainment is still a growing business, according to Cohen, and National A-1 employs over 225 people, with almost half working as telephone operators/actresses. National A-1's telephone services include local voice personals ads in 23 cities, voice mail, and chat. "We're one of the top three phone entertainment companies in the country," Cohen says. "We do mainly voice personals and amateur chat. About 75 percent of our phone service is the chat, where ladies, not paid, just regular ladies, call in from around the country to talk to men. It's not all sex, either. People are just lonely, they want a friend; they want to talk about whatever it is they want to talk about. The other 25 percent is the live, one-on-one phone sex, where we actually have the live operators in-house and around the country for the men to talk to."
Bridge Interactive is another telephone-based business under the sway of National A-1. Bridge is a service bureau that functions almost as an affiliate program for the phone-entertainment business. "If you want to get into the phone business," explains Cohen, "we'll do everything, and all you have to do is advertise the number."
Whether running Web affiliate programs or helping singles come together over the telephone, National A-1 is a company that is not afraid of trying out different avenues for generating revenues. "We like to test the waters when something new comes along," Farlow sums up, "and we've had a lot of great opportunities."
