Strange Bedfellows: What Journalism Can Learn From Adult
Entertainment
Posted by Andy Medici at 6:25 AM on Jun. 3, 2010
Let's role-play for a second.
Imagine
you are working in an industry that has been battered by the recent
recession and rapid advances in technology. Instead of paying for teams
of professionals, people are going online to find new content like
yours or create their own. The Internet has opened the door to
thousands of competitors, all offering content that appeals to just
about any niche or taste.
Meanwhile, your legacy company is
burdened with an outdated distribution system and is trying desperately
to adjust to a new world in which having a local monopoly is not an
option.
Sound familiar? Well if you have been working in the
adult entertainment industry for the last few years, then this isn't
really news.
In normal times, journalism and the adult
entertainment industry would make strange bedfellows. After all, the
first is tasked with upholding our democracy and the second is ...
well, sometimes literally about strange bedfellows.
The two
industries share many of the same problems, and a lot of the
handwringing can easily be copy and pasted from one to the other. At
XBIZ LA, an event offering seminars on the future of the adult
entertainment industry, it's easy to see the anxiety.
Jeff Mullen, founder of adult studio X-Play and an adult-industry marketing
expert, echoed a journalism industry refrain.
"We have one product to sell, yet we collectively give it away," Mullen said.
In
a MarketResearch.com study titled "The Future of Online Adult
Entertainment: Surging Demand, the Rise of Free Porn and the Emergence
of New Business Models," the company laid out some of the key
challenges threatening the industry.
Here are some key tidbits. "Consumer
consumption of adult content has shifted from physical media to the
web, while online usage is changing rapidly as technological
advancements allow the deployment of more advanced and interactive
multimedia services." The wide range of content
available for free will continue to have a negative impact on premium
providers' ability to attract and retain fee-paying clients. This
all sounds so familiar. I think some people in the news media have
debated this whole concept of "free content" versus "paid content."
Here, here, here, and the list goes on and on and on.
In
a press release in January of 2009, Hustler founder Larry Flynt said
that DVD sales and rentals had fallen more than 22 percent, as people
have turned more to the Internet for content.
What contributes
to the plummeting revenue? Part of the blame falls on the meteoric rise
of free content. And just like the journalism industry, that content is
coming in niche form, custom-made for the user.
Stephen
Yagielowicz is both a writer for Adult Entertainment News Site XBIZ.com
and a homegrown purveyor of adult content since 1993. He sees the
growing amount of free content as a generational issue -- younger
people just aren't willing to pay for what they can get for free.
He
said there are still opportunities to sell content, either through
mobile phones or by selling videos for a much lower price (think iTunes
and its .99 cent price point). But he still thinks that paid and free
can exist side by side as long as adult Web outlets begin to focus on
marketing their content, building a loyalty base and offering new
products in a variety of formats.
"The bottled water guys sell
you water all day long even though you have a tap in the house,"
Yagielowicz said. "They find a way."
One adult entertainment
company used the market downturn as a chance to reorient its business.
Pink Visual saw traditional DVD sales plummet in 2004 by about 50
percent. That forced the company to revisit how it attracted customers,
and it helped focus the company's attention on the Internet and mobile
market.
Now more than 40 percent of Pink Visual's 800,000 daily
unique visitors are coming in on mobile platforms, and Quentin Boyer,
the director of public relations for the company, said that they try to
adopt new technology as early as possible. He said they are
"practically camped out on technology blogs" looking for the next
mobile platform or tablet coming out on the market.
Pink Visual
was one of the first adult entertainment companies on the iPad, taking
advantage of its large screen to show its wares.
Boyer said that
as readers become used to incredible amounts of content, they are less
willing to pay for the content itself. He said that users are more
willing to pay for formats that work better on their mobile phones or
tablets.
"People are not so much paying for content as they are paying for convenience
and ease of use," Boyer said.
He
said that Pink Visual has rebounded over the last few years, and is now
almost at its pre-2004 levels. He is not sure where Pink Visual will be
next, but he has no doubt that as mobile technology evolves, the
company's unique brand of content will evolve with it. The journalism
industry should take a lesson from this playbook, and be a part of
cutting edge technology, not racing to catch up.
Satrio Arismunandar
Executive ProducerNews Division, Trans TV, Lantai 3
Jl. Kapten P. Tendean Kav. 12 - 14 A, Jakarta 12790
Phone: 7917-7000, 7918-4544 ext. 3542, Fax: 79184558,
79184627 http://satrioarismunandar6.blogspot.comhttp://satrioarismunandar.multiply.com Verba
volant scripta manent...(yang terucap akan lenyap, yang tertulis akan abadi...)
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