“That’s utterly preposterous!” I shrieked with unbridled alarm — yes, I do really talk like that — “What do you mean I’m wrong? I can’t be wrong; don’t you know who I am?!”
For those of you inclined to respond in the negative, I’ll briefly summarize. I accidentally stepped into the amusingly impulsive and unpredictable online adult industry seven years ago; a point in time when we had yet to discover just how volatile this business could become. Throughout the years I, like many marketers in the biz, have predominantly focused on optimizing a product’s revenue potential in order to establish and maintain a competitive affiliate program.
I have been driven by the understanding that successful adult websites are engineered, not designed. How a program manages to optimize the revenue of a website, or network of sites, determines how much money they can afford to pay out to affiliates. Of course, the more money they pay affiliates, the more affiliates and traffic they tend to get; and the more traffic they get, the more sales they can make. (If that’s news to any of you who already run adult websites I recommend you turn off your computer immediately and reconsider that glamorous career on Broadway instead.)
I’ve regurgitated the same message to half-full seminar rooms at least five times a year for the past seven years and received accolades in response: Oh, the brilliance! The genius! The undeniable logic!
“Yes, Aly, you’re very clever. But you’re still wrong.”
Some people sit and listen politely on their first day at a new job; still others jump in so fast with both feet that they step on everyone else’s toes in the process. Yours Truly however, took the characteristically candid approach of telling Rick Meunyong, the exceptional and celebrated Founder and Chief of TheBestPorn.com, her latest endeavor, that he was not only incorrect, but also clearly insane!
Rick was insisting that it would be in the better interests of online video providers to remove DRM from video downloads (this typically includes a product expiry or marketing mechanism) and let consumers actually keep a video once they’ve bought it. (Like, forever-ever? "Yes, forever-ever!") Good god!
Now, being a relatively narcissistic person, I immediately thought about myself. Have I been wrong all these years? Have I naively misled masses of webmasters by publicly trumpeting the powers of DRM?! Of course not! I was undeniably correct. Many of us have seen great rewards in taking full advantage of the potentials of DRM and I’m sorry if you missed that particular boat.
In this business, however, you have to be able to change your position periodically if you want to keep your sails full in an ever-shifting wind.
The reason for this latest shift surprised me at first, but then seemed surprisingly predictable in hindsight. For as long as I’ve been doing whatever it is I’ve been doing online, we’ve all agreed and proclaimed “Surfers are getting smarter!”
Back in 1999 that meant fewer of them were clicking on the grey trick-banner emblazoned with the heart-stopping alert, “You’re now downloading cumguzzlers.avi — Click Here to Cancel!”
What’s now an amusing anecdote really was a pity to behold at the time, “Damn! The surfers are getting smarter!” (Hey, maybe surfers are simply getting smarter on the whole because the dumb ones are all still waiting for that download to end!) So we shifted our positions appropriately and kept moving forward.
Consumer response has and always should be the fundamental element in any equation by which a marketing decision is made.
For example, the decisions to replace interminable exit pop-ups; to stop using trick-banners; and to remove aggressive advertising from members areas, would not have been made if consumers’ spending statistics had suggested otherwise.
In this industry, plastic talks, and those credit card-wielding surfers aren’t just getting smarter… the surfers are now getting smarter than us!
The recent “awakening” I experienced with regards to the new unbearably knowledgeable consumers took place after taking on Webmaster Relations at the massive online consumer guide, TheBestPorn.com. With high volumes of targeted traffic, a remarkable number of repeat users, and a categorized database of over 8,000 adult websites (gay, straight, and every grey area in between), this adult site buyer’s guide is fundamentally driven by consumer response.
As the sophistication and awareness of online adult surfers increases, their increased expectations swiftly make their ways directly into the general email box at The Best Porn. Lacking the archetypal flavor of surfer fan mail, these critiques largely reflect the knowledge, experience, and expectations of an adult who not only knows what they want (and unabashedly so), but is also critically aware of what’s possible, what’s available and, by some strange evolution, what’s acceptable.
Today’s adult surfer is very much aware of Digital Rights Management — and aggressively opposed to its use. DRM-wrapped content is not only negatively perceived, but also considered a very good reason to take one’s business elsewhere.
So I humbly concede. Yes, Rick, you were right. The collective voice of these petulant perverts undeniably provides a guideline by which we should all be building our businesses; I just hope the rest of the industry is listening.
Before assuming her current post, Aly Drummond was Director of Online Marketing for the AVN Media Network. She is a prominent and candid online adult industry veteran known for a wide array of accomplishments in online marketing. This includes the AVN Afternoons Radio show and the popular adult webmaster video show AlyTV, produced at the Channel 1 studios throughout 2004. She joined the industry in 1998 as Python’s Director of Marketing. She can be reached at: [email protected].
