If you run at least one successful adult Website, you already know the drill: stay on top of the latest trends, evolve your content, add new features, improve your customer service, internationalize your audience, and by all means implement the latest technologies. As if all that weren’t enough, now you need to look beyond content for the home computer itself, since the newest technologies include delivering adult content to cell phones, PDAs and even digital televisions.
If you think it’s all just a passing fad, and that no one would ever look at porn on their cell phone, think again. According to a recent report from mobile industry analysts with the ARC Group (www.arcgroup.com), by 2008, mobile entertainment services alone are expected to generate over $27 billion from about 2.5 billion users. A hefty chunk of this business will come from adult content, and if you’re not taking that seriously, there are plenty of other people who are.
Porn to Go: The Wireless Web
In a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, surfers are going to want to move from their favorite Website and continue browsing via a PDA or cell phone or even on TV. Needless to say, delivering adult content across platforms like this brings up a host of challenges ? distribution issues, billing, marketing, and legal. Like anything that’s new in business, these obstacles can be met and overcome, so that the potential for profit can grow.
Seeing that potential takes real vision, however, since (much like the early days of the Internet) some of this technology is still rather crude. The cellular platform is not the best for transmitting graphics, for example, but a look at the hard facts shows true potential as the technology continues to evolve. Surprisingly, some of the most popular sites on the wireless Web are porn sites designed for Palm Pilots and the like, despite the poor quality of the images.
Current statistics from Click4WAP.com, a wireless search portal, show that its traffic has almost doubled since they started including links to adult content. Another PDA site, PhonErotica.com, racks up about 600,000 clicks a month for its free selection of porn, while PalmStories.com has already proven that wireless porn sites can be profitable. After just two years of operation, they now have over 500 paid subscribers at $5.95 a month.
“There does seem to be a market for it,” says Bjorn Blomqvist, Webmaster of GayDemon.com, “and with niche or gay content this is often due to the viewer not being able to download and enjoy it at their work or home. Solving the problem by using devices such as PDAs and cell phones… I believe this will become a much larger market as the technology develops further, especially since it allows surfers privacy they might not get on their own PC.” Privacy is indeed one factor that makes wireless porn more convenient, but portability is the real driving force.
“As humanity and technology become globally more mobile, use of cross-platform technology is bound to increase,” says Jason Stuve, marketing director at 123Bill.com. “People will not be tied down to a desktop, but will be literally doing business of all sorts through cell phones and PDAs. Through proliferation and demand, the technology will continue to evolve and become available at lower prices to more of the population.
“Eventually,” adds Stuve, “we will have a generation that can't remember what life was like without a small, portable, permanent wireless connection to the rest of the world.”
Actually, we already have that generation, and they’re growing up right in front of us. Those of us old enough to be reading this may still be getting used to the idea that our world is about to become totally portable. “People need no longer to be stuck at their work station or unable to leave their desk at home,” says Lisa Turner, CEO assistant at Badpuppy (www.badpuppy.com), “but they still have access to much of the same information, and it’s often being delivered to them just as quickly as if they were plugged into a network.”
Badpuppy is putting their money where their mouth is, and is providing wireless content while building an infrastructure for their future. “We have taken a step toward the wireless market with our site QueerPalm.com,” says Turner. “We can deliver our GayToday.com news stories to one’s PDA, cell phone, and some smaller handheld computers.
“When accessing the items delivered to the wireless devices,” explains Turner, “QueerPalm.com looks at the browser type being used and automatically formats the items accordingly. This allows us to provide to the consumer the same information for viewing whether from a desktop or from a wireless handheld device.”
I Want My ITV
But what if you don’t pine for portable porn? Some people want content from their favorite site right on their television, and the concept is not far from current reality. Cable companies like Comcast are already testing on-demand porn to help pay for their Video On Demand upgrades, although they likely won’t be making that public any time soon. Their testing shows that VOD buy rates are higher than traditional adult pay-per-view, even though one potentially lucrative segment of the market ? gay porn ? has yet to be served.
“To the best of my knowledge, there are no current cable companies that offer gay porn videos as a part of their Video On Demand menu,” says Turner. “I personally believe this is a mistake and one that certainly is cutting out an entire market where there is very good money to be made. Then again, I'm not sure that John Q public is ready for this.”
Blomqvist agrees that it might be a hard sell right now for some markets. “Gay and straight, we all find different things a turn-on,” he says. “Interactive TV will for a long time be restricted to a mainstream market. Gay surfers buy membership to sites that offer them exactly what turns them on, and sites that do not look and feel corporate. Of course, in most cases these sites will not be the ones on Interactive TV or any other new media first ? they can manage to offer video over the Net but it may still be too expensive to offer it any other way.”
The infancy of any new technology is always problematic, but rest assured, fully interactive adult TV of all flavors is coming soon. Digital cable and the proliferation of HDTV is a start, but a major catalyst for change will be the mandatory shift to digital broadcasting that will encourage consumers to buy advanced digital televisions – thus dropping the price and bringing interactive capability into millions more homes. The line between the home computer, the telephone, and the television will continue to get even blurrier.
That fusion will be furthered by services like TV Chat, which lets two people write notes to each other while watching a television program. The next step is almost cetain to be the creation of original programming for singles, so they can flirt with each other while watching the show, and even cruise for other singles in the show’s chat room (already being done to some extent in Europe and Asia). Interactive shopping for the TV remote adds yet another dimension, as was proven by Wink (an interactive TV shopping service) who reported last year that 49 percent of their subscribers requested more information about Viagra after seeing a commercial for the product.
Getting the Goods Out There
As stated earlier, this kind of cross-platform delivery creates a host of new marketing and distribution challenges for anyone who is attempting to segue their content to devices other than the standard PC. “Regarding distribution,” says Turner, “it would not be any different than how we deliver content to one's computer, other than the file formats and sizes would need to be much different.
“The speed of delivery to a wireless device such as a PDA or a cell phone is much slower than the cable and DSL we have become so accustomed to,” she says, “but with a little bit of knowledge and a bit more effort, it is certainly something that can be done without much difficulty.”
That may be too optimistic for some, but the point is to meet the challenges head on. “The first thing that I see as a marketing challenge,” continues Turner, “is that it's a more limited and specific group you'd be targeting. But in addition to this market growing at the capacity it is, so will one’s ability to sell it more effectively to an increasing number of individuals. You would look to advertise your cross-platform content in a location where it would be easily seen by that market, or to individuals looking to enter that market and become a member of the wireless community.”
The Billing Quagmire
Perhaps, as Turner says, the challenges of delivering content can be overcome with a little determination, but there are other issues that can seem insurmountable at times – namely legal concerns, and billing issues.
“If you can't bill, then being a Webmaster doesn't pay,” says Mitch, manager of English-speaking markets for NoCreditCard.com, pioneers in dialer and short messaging service (SMS) technologies. “The main effect of the Visa limit [on chargebacks] is that more and more Webmasters are focusing on growth in new markets and local billing methods. We've seen a 35 percent increase in the number of new clients above expected growth since the Visa limits came into play. Existing clients are optimizing their paysites ? placing the dialer on their join pages, decline pages, and exit chains ? and their free sites by increasing the amount of dialer promotion. The average client is seeing between a 15 and 20 percent increase after making these simple changes to their sites.
“We are also the only company able to deliver live sex shows to phones,” Mitch explains. “We developed this technology and are presenting it for the first time at this year’s 3GSM conference in Cannes, France.”
This is one obvious application for the naysayer who thinks that porn and cell phones don’t mix: Phone sex with a live person, where in some cases you can even see them do what you ask them to do – although of course a headset would be preferred for this particular application.
Is SMS billing the solution for cross-platform adult content? Bamse, a technician at AdultSMS.com, spells out the pros and cons from her perspective:
Pros:
•It’s fast (immediate reply to an SMS with a code to use; no need for entering any personal information on the Website or phone)
•It’s secure (all billing transactions are handled by the wireless companies which offer security Websites often lack)
•It’s anonymous (no personal info is needed and all is handled as content services on the bill from the wireless company)
•There are more users available (more people have mobile phones than credit cards, for example, and they're less afraid to send an SMS than enter their credit information).
Cons:
•It’s only suitable for smaller fee amounts
•Wireless companies tend to steal quite a big part of revenue gained
•Availability is on a per-country basis (different shortcodes for different countries, different payouts, etc.)
•There are different rules for each country (some countries forbid adult billing via SMS).
It should also be mentioned that SMS billing through television is not yet in place, nor is the capability to start a transaction on one platform and finish it on another.
Besides SMS billing, there are other solutions in the works, and we only need to look to the cutting-edge billing services already functioning online. For example, 123Bill offers an alternative billing solution to online merchants that opens up the market to any U.S. citizen 18 or older. “We require no credit cards, checks, dialers, or 900 numbers,” says 123Bill’s Stuve. “We simply verify the consumer's identity using a few pieces of personal information. Once approved, 123Bill grants access to the consumer and sends him a bill in the mail. Merchants subsequently receive a guaranteed payout from 123Bill regardless of our ability to collect from the consumer. Once established, consumers only need their username and password to shop online at participating merchants.”
Hot Markets and Cool Products
Even with seamless billing and distribution solutions, you’ll need to identify the hottest current markets while looking at where cross-platform content is headed.
“I'd say currently the hottest market, particularly from the gay adult side, is text-based erotic stories, gay news, and porn blogs,” says Turner. “This is because text is much easier to download and view from the average PDA and cell phone at the moment. Some things I have not seen a lot of that I think would be hot commodities are Homoscopes (horoscopes), text video reviews of gay video titles ? with or without a few small images from the videos, when permitted ? and internal member text messaging or text personals with optional photos.”
MMS (multimedia message service) is already popular in some countries. MMS can transmit messages containing text, graphics, photographic images, audio, and even video clips between mobile devices using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) as bearer technology and powered by the high-speed transmission technologies EDGE and GPRS.
“MMS is becoming more widespread and billed MMS is starting to pop up,” says Bamse. “Following this, there is a whole new scene for what can be done with help of immediate two-way user interaction. Imagine, for example, an MMS chat where the end-user sends in a picture of himself with a text and the girl replies with a picture of herself and some text. In the near future, MMS will be widespread in the U.S.A. and Canada, and it's already available in Thailand, Singapore, and other Asian countries, as well as Australia.”
If the software doesn’t convince you, emerging hardware products just might. Philips has just released a portable video screen that’s 5 x 5 inches of high definition when unfurled and the size of a pen when it’s rolled for storage. Combine this with advanced content, and you’ve got an irresistible match.
“Cross-platform content dissemination and billing will be pivotal for our industry,” says Mitch. “For example, in our live sex shows, streaming content feeds over fixed line and GPRS/UMTS/WCDMA wireless networks ? the same content delivered over multiple digital touchpoints paid for almost seamlessly via your telephone bill. As they say, the future is already here.”
Brandon Palmer has a B.S. in Advertising from San Jose State University. A successful business owner and lecturer, he has also published dozens of magazine articles, mostly on marketing and advertising.
