The consensus among five adult industry pioneers serving as panelists on an Internext seminar addressing the future of adult entertainment was that content will remain king although the delivery mechanisms and the conduits of power are almost certain to change as the adult industry as a whole continues to evolve from its traditional model toward a future dominated by video-on-demand and IPTV.
Panelist Steven Hirsch, co-founder and co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, acknowledged the widely held belief that the adult market was currently oversaturated with content, predicting that over the next five years the industry would experience a shakeout that would create new centers of distribution, profit, and power driven by the Internet. "The key to being successful is to position yourself to take advantage of this new world. To be the producer of movie number 50,001 and to get it out there and be able to monetize it is the challenge we face," Hirsch said.
Besides Hirsch, the panel included industry notables HotMovies.com CEO Richard Cohen, Video Secrets President Greg Clayman, GEC Media founder and president Gregory Dumas, and Mike Price, CEO of Price Communications.
As noted by moderator Paul Fishbein, president of AVN, the companies represented on the panel owed their success in part to their ability to brand their products extremely well, so it was no surprise that the panel as a whole stressed the competitive edge that marketing efforts can provide a company.
Cohen recommended new companies "keep advertising all over the place. After they've seen the ad 4 or 5 times, people might ask 'What is this?' and check out the site and hopefully stick around."
GEC Media's Dumas, who got his start in adult as a marketing director for Hustler, advocated trade show exhibitions as a way for a company to raise its profile. "I've always had booths at shows. That's as good for marketing as any banner you can buy."
The abundance of free clips online was pointed to as an obstacle that content producers and aggregators must consider when developing their business models. "I think it hurts, but I understand why everyone does it - it's a way to generate traffic and it's a way to make money," Price said, then suggesting that the key to competing with free content was to have content that was unavailable elsewhere. "I think it really comes down to having exclusive stuff."
Hirsch expanded upon that point by adding, "You have to have unique interesting content that is updated frequently."
Clayman, whose Video Secrets specializes in live adult content, noted that one advantage of his company's model is that the content on his sites has to be paid for. "That is the one strong benefit of live content is that it can't be shared and it can't be stolen."
