Images aren’t the only form of Adult titillation; text and audio are turn-ons, too. Testament to the endless appeal of aural stimuli is the success of National A-1.
In addition to fuelling a hugely successful flagship VoD site, National A-1 is one of the nation’s largest providers of audiotext services, offering voice personals, virtual chat, and live one-on-one phone conversation with paid professionals.
With a 15-year history, National A-1 employs over 350 people, operating from a 40,000 square-foot office building in Philadelphia. A variety of high performing sites can be found under the National A-1 banner, including VoD stronghold HotMovies.com, as well as Singles.com, Spanking.com, Diet.com, and Fantasies.com. The company also has a webmaster affiliate program for HotMovies.com at MovieDollars.com.
National A-1 alsoserves as a major service bureau for many companies who refer their telephone traffic for credit card processing, and for their back end technical systems.
According to Richard Cohen, head of National A-1, “The core premise of National A-1 is to offer customers a good product at a price that is lower than a majority of our competitors. Our strategy has remained the same from the inception of our company. Our main audiotext service is virtual chat. Men pay from 45 to 69 cents a minute to connect with women, who call for free. We advertise in over 200 publications of all types”.
“Our company is owned and operated by two hands-on partners who run the businesses on a daily basis. Our clients include movie studios, television advertisers, and others who place ads in various publications and want someone to handle their calls. This arrangement is similar to an Internet affiliate program,” Cohen adds.
“Our first goal was to build a Web site customers would return to again and again. We also wanted our customers to feel they received a good product at a low price point. The site we would need to create would let people to come and go as they pleased and offer them the chance to watch what they want, when they want.”
HotMovies.com now boasts over 15,000 movies from top Adult studios, with daily new releases. HotMovies.com is a non-membership site with no monthly fees; users can watch at any time from any location for as little as 8 cents per minute. Customers simply choose a HotMovies.com time package and receive the number of minutes they want, allowing them to watch all or part of over 15,000 movies.
“When we launched our most successful Internet site, HotMovies.com, in December 2002, there was only one large competitor in the field. We believed there was room for another company to embrace the Video-on-Demand, pay-per-minute, and the soon-to-come pay-as-you-go billing models. We also felt that we could do a better job than our competitors could,” Cohen revealed.
After several years of operating traditional, membership-style Web sites (these included Girls.com, Kinky.com, Teens.com, and many others), National A-1 decided it was time to offer a new billing model for Internet users. The primary billing model, reliant on recurring billing, cross sales, and what Cohen calls “undesirable tactics,” was clearly losing steam and money.
“It became obvious customers found very few Adult Web sites that they wanted to join or use for few hours, let alone a few months,” Cohen says. “We decided to leave the traditional Web site billing model and reduced the ones we operate to only a few sites. We took our many premium domains and pointed them to affiliate programs and pay-per-click search engines.”
“Because many people have operated the traditional Internet billing method for so long, they often have a negative reaction when we tell them what we do and what we offer. After we convince them that our billing model is the future of the Adult Internet, they quickly discover why we are proud of what we do.”
“Since we createdHotMovies.com and its associated programs, studios and affiliates have recognized our foresight and have come to love the billing model we use. They know that it creates loyal customers and additional, monthly revenue. They realize that pay-as-you-go and VoD are the future for Adult content.”
“We offer customers Internet services they enjoy. Our repeat visitors and customers who consistently reward us with a substantial revenue stream prove this day after day and month after month,” Cohen said.
Asked what sets his company apart from competitors, Cohen cites the “unlimited spending power.” He adds, “For this project, National A-1 is able to spend whatever it takes on equipment, programmers, design, domains and, most importantly, advertising to make HotMovies.com number one in our market niche.
“Recently, we spent $350,000 on a SAN, which is a massive storage device that replaces multiple servers and gives our customers the best possible experience. Our business is booming and we are doing whatever it takes to become the top company in this field. We have sponsored and exhibited at over 20 worldwide shows this year. We plan a radio and television campaign for 2005. In October, we printed our millionth HotMovies.com ‘free minutes’ card.
“We also believe that we offer a consistently higher quality customer service than is offered by our competitors. Our customer service staff is available 24/7 to address the needs, service issues, and technical issues our customers bring to us.”
Cohen says that National A1’s in-house programmers developed a Digital Rights Management (DRM) program that can modify the company’s software at any time to meet the changing needs of a rapidly expanding and ever-changing market.
“We also encode all the movies we offer in-house,” Cohen adds. “This gives the content providers with whom we work an extremely fast turnaround time to see their movies appear on HotMovies.com.”
National A-1 also licenses its proprietary back end software to other companies who want to do their own credit card processing, integrate its billing model, and also offer the company’s 15,000 movies on their Web sites. TLA Video and Hustler are two higher profile companies who use the National A-1 platform.
Of the future, Cohen says his company has recently purchased VOD.com and VideoOnDemand.com, and is working on a non-Adult version of HotMovies.com. “There are many advantages to this. One is to be able to advertise in mainstream media that will not accept us now,” Cohen says.
“The future could not be better for HotMovies.com, pay-as-you-go billing, and Video-on-Demand. Both Verizon and Cox are rewiring their cable markets with new fiber optics. This will increase home Internet speed fourfold, thus making it possible to download a movie in 20 minutes or less. Japan and Korea do this now,” he adds.
Looking further down the road, Cohen cites the significance of Microsoft’s Media Player that will enable customers to connect their computer to their TV sets. “In five to ten years, the majority of people will no longer buy or rent DVDs as they do today. They will download the content and either burn it to a DVD or watch it full-screen on their television. HotMovies.com, Video-on-Demand, and pay-as-you-go billing are the future,” Cohen says.
At this month’s Internext, National A-1 is set to introduce a new billing method for HotMovies.com: “True pay-by-the-minute” technology which has seen the company adapt its proprietary telephone billing software to the Internet for current beta testing. In addition to selling blocks of time as it currently does, this billing model will allow customers to pay only for the minutes they use.
