Klixxx Home
> Webmaster Article Archives Home > Web Mastery
Getting the Right Stuff!
The adult Net is thriving despite the dot-com meltdown -- but it still takes skill to build a successful sex site: Here are some key factors worth considering.
"Adult e-commerce is one of the few profitable online enterprises, and it is already raking in more than $1 billion per year," says Theresa Lutge-Smith in an article appearing on adult.tophosts.com. Smith points out that the Internet adult entertainment industry is the most active and lucrative area of digital commerce, with 80-90 percent of all online business being conducted at adult sites. "Some top sites regularly garner more than three million hits per day, which puts them well ahead of such corporate sites such as General Electric or Boeing."
Content, in partnership with effective e-business models, is the basis of that success. And in fact, adult sites have proved so successful that mainsteam dot-coms (those that have managed to stay in business) have been looking to adult e-commerce for ways to make their own sites more profitable.
In a recent article in Editor & Publisher Online "Lessons From the Online Sex Sites," Steve Outing agrees that, during this depressed period for online news and content, mainstream sites should be looking at what the sex industry is doing. "It's no secret that sex and pornography is online content that is successful at bringing in money. Adult sites employ lots of techniques that mainstream content and news sites have avoided, and the sex industry has been successful online where mainstream publishing has mostly failed - in charging for content."
And mainstream business leaders are definitely getting the message. The June Internet Content West conference, in Los Angeles-a major meeting focused on mainstream sites-has adult-industry leader Danni Ashe on the speakers list. She is also speaking on technical matters at a streaming media conference in Hong Kong.
According to Frederick Lane III, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age (Routledge, 2000), adult sites have been successful at selling content because they understand how the value concept works: "There's a lot of competition among adult paid Web sites, and monthly subscription prices (the most common model) have been going down as a result. The typical monthly rate for a niche sex site is between $9.95 and $14.95. (Broader-content sites tend to charge more; Danni's Hard Drive charges $24.95 a month for its "HotBOX" membership, and CyberErotica charges $39.95 a month for access to several hundred thousand images and videos.)
But what the consumer gets for that significant amount of money, Lane points out, is access to thousands of photos and videos, and other "goodies" like live Webcams and interactive chats. By way of contrast, the consumer who buys a copy of Penthouse for $5 on a newsstand only gets a couple dozen photos - and no video.
Killer Content
Content, of course, covers images, audio, streaming video, video files, stories, games, animation, live video, chat - and probably marketing tangibles. Elements like hosting and site design are, of course, important, but really, content is king.
One developing trend is incorporating mainstream content, or otherwise deriving revenue from mainstream traffic. In a recent KLIXXX article ("Cleaning Up," KLIXXX #5), The Hun pointed to two of his current projects as an example: "I have amazingjokes.com, which could be considered mainstream. It's pushed from the Hun's Yellow Pages, but it doesn't link back in any way, shape, or form. Another project I'm doing is linkshelf.com, which is 100% mainstream. It gets a lot of traffic from the Hun's Yellow Pages, but doesn't link to any erotica sites itself."
Danny from adultwebmastergold.com noted that another mainstream market that has been united with porn is the stock market. "Several sites have emerged at which you can check stocks, keep a portfolio, etc. and check out some girls along the way." But the big example that comes to mind is, of course nakednews.com, with its CNN-like newscasts presented by naked newscasters (now including a male one). There is general industry consensus that adult sites can make money with mainstream content; and a growing number of sites are giving it a shot.
A broader content trend is discussed in the Steven Outing article mentioned earlier. He notes that there is now a definite tendency for adult sites to be more niche-oriented than in the earlier days of the industry: "Mega-sex sites, that featured content from all forms of sexual preference, have been whittled down to fewer than 10 major players. (The adult Web industry has experienced the same dot-com shakeout that hit mainstream sites.) The remaining leading mega-site, CyberErotica, has several hundred thousand paying subscribers. Plentiful are smaller niche pay sites, which typically have a few hundred paying subscribers interested in particular types of adult entertainment. These niche sites are where the money is."
It's estimated that small niche sites typically generate about $30,000 to $40,000 in revenue per year, while medium-sized sites can generate several hundred thousand. He says that the largest sites can generate millions per month; Danni's Hard Drive is said to be earning over $10 million annually.
As far as killer content is concerned, Danni Ashe would have to rank high on the list. That content, however, has a twist, since it relies heavily on branding. And branding can support repurposing and extending content in many ways. In a recent interview for Media Life, Ashe commented that the DHD site is based on a subscription model "but one sort of rooted more in branding than in the numbers game that most of the adult Internet runs on … the only pure adult Internet brand out there. Now we're moving it into cable sales, pay-per-view, video/DVD and other ways of exploiting the brand on different media."
Video Content
There is a second, and more recent aspect to DHD's killer content-the combination of Trinity, a high-end video production system, and DHD's proprietary streaming video encoder and viewer, Dannivision. These result in exceptionally high-quality video, compared to much that is available elsewhere on the Web.
The Trinity system, manufactured by Play, whose assets were recently acquired by GlobalStreams (www.play.com) is pure digital. Ashe has said. "It goes straight from the Panasonic DV cams, broadcast quality three-chip digital cameras, out onto the Internet through this Trinity system." DHD has been beta-testing it over the past year.
The company blurb says that Trinity combines all the tools of a television production studio into one powerful, comprehensive, and easy-to-use product. It redefines video production by providing integrated broadcast applications with real-time capabilities that meet the quality demands of prime-time television at a dramatically reduced cost.
It's a highly customizable product with a comprehensive array of features and capabilities - including live production, editing and graphics creation toolsets. Trinity's virtual set options and digital audio mixer allow for even further customization. Designed for complete integration and expandability, Trinity was developed with the flexibility to grow and change depending on the user's needs and preferences. Key features include:
eight input digital component production switcher
dual stream non-linear editor
real-time 3D and warp digital video effects
sub-nanosecond on-air character generator
paint, animation and compositing toolset
still and clip store
virtual sets with real-time video tracing
eight input digital audio mixer
The Dannivision encoder and viewer provide an alternative to existing streaming systems such as RealPlayer, Windows Media Viewer, and Quick Time. This is a good thing, since video has so far been a problematic content area for adult sites. An informative article on digital video for smaller adult sites, "Digital Killed the Video Star?" on TopHosts.com puts it in these terms: "While 'video streams' have appeared on Web sites for years, until recently the quality level has been questionable to say the least. We've all had a frustrating Web-video experience - waiting hours for the buffer to initialize to be rewarded with what was little more than a series of blurry 'stills' accompanied by unintelligible, out-of-synch sound. In an industry that thrives on motion, sound, and visceral flair, many adult sites went under due to a forgivable eagerness to provide flawless streaming media, before the technology existed to support it. Most other sites either got by, providing bulky MPEG files for download-putting themselves at a high piracy risk-or ignoring video streams altogether."
Therefore, quality is only one side of killer content-you have to be able to deliver it as well. And content can actually be too good, if half your customers can't access it:
50 percent of American Internet surfers use modems and dial-up lines, which means that streaming video and large images are problematic in the near term ... but a widespread installed base of broadband connections is certainly on the way. The current barriers are primarily availability and cost, but those barriers are falling.
Last year was a watershed period for residential high-speed Internet access in the U.S., according to research by The Strategis Group, who said the increase was a full 230 percent. Strategis also predicts a broadband market of 36 million subscribers in 2005, surpassing dial-up access. Broadband is certainly the trend and coming on fast, but those stats still reflect the fact that most surfers are currently using a 56K or slower modem.
"Clearly, the appeal of these broadband services is becoming more widespread," said Brenda McFarland, senior vice president of TNS Intersearch. "While the Internet delivery method of choice continues to be the dial-up modem at 50%, we are seeing that once the prices of these broadband services come down and they become more accessible, a large portion of Internet subscribers will choose those services."
Failure Is Not an Option
In his recent "XFL Parallel: Why Many Websites Fail?" on adultwebmastergold.com, TDavid says that, "Of the 30-40,000 sites that come out every day, less than 1/10 of 1% will ever become 'popular.' That's not very good odds."
He draws some very interesting parallels between the reasons the XFL failed and why a Web site might fail, and content is certainly one of these: "Hype your site all you want," TDavid says, "but if the content is uninspired when surfers arrive there, they will not bookmark, much less stay. Repeat visitors are essential … if there is no substance, the fish will not keep biting."
He continues: "Don't go overboard making things on your Web site 'cool'. Remember that content is key. Technology should be used to streamline your work, allow surfers customization, but if the content is not exciting, interesting, or entertaining, then the technology is all for not." Some examples he cites for poor use of technology, include Flashed sites with no non-Flash version, sites requiring higher bandwidth only, and sites requiring specialized plug-ins that don't come with the two main browsers.
On the subject of clever analogies, Busa, the lead designer for TrueCash (truecash.com) has a very useful two-part article, "Content Management," on theadultwebmaster.com in which he presents his City Dump vs. Buffet Style Organization models for photogallery content. One example of these useful guidelines is: "Show 'em the food from the front door. Members of your site are hungry for content, so don't bury it in the back. Like any good buffet, immediate access to the food is a must. Essentially, make it easy to access many different types of photos on your home page."
One surefire recipe for failure is using illegal content, particularly child pornography. There is less of this all the time, and the best sites are vigorously opposed to it. One reason this content is becoming more scarce, are the activities of ASACP (Adult Sites Against Child Pornography) at www.asacp.org. This is the non-profit site created in 1996 by HELMY Enterprises, now celebrating its 4th anniversary. It has some of the largest and most prominent adult Web sites on its side-including Cybererotica, Persian Kitty, Adam & Eve, and 1600 others. ASACP has investigated and assisted the U.S. Customs Service and the FBI in enforcing anti-child pornography laws against thousands of child pornography Web sites. The stats are rather scary. They get 30-40 child pornography reports per day. But they are also being effective-in April alone, ASACP helped remove 241 kiddy porn Web sites.
|
Need More Information?
Search the Webmaster Articles at Klixxx
Submit
an Article | Link to Klixxx
| Earn With Klixxx Cash
Become
a Sponsor | Advertising Information
Klixxx Home
> Webmaster Article Archives Home > Web Mastery
|