So, how come the porn industry is so stupid it hasn’t copied the model yet?

Degban, the popular anti-piracy snake oil peddlers are back to the boards!

This time, they are making up words!

Any idea what the following mean:

Surfacial, Forest (as in content discover forest), Multifold, Automaton, Deep Web,

Me neither, so I asked them. And they admitted they make them up.

SNAKE OIL PEDDLERS LISTEN UP

If you are trying to gyp a tech savvy audience, don’t try and bullshit them with make up stats, made up words, made up technology. It won’t work and makes you look stupid. Rely on making up stuff about happy customers you are unable to name and propietary software that does things you cannot explain. Makes you look MUCH less moody.

HTH

Damian

So, here is a list of ten things you can try today to make more sales.

1) Change your pricing
This is so simple to test and measure. Set up 3 price points, test it over 3 months, work out the lifetime value of each customer, work out which price point netted you the most cash.

2) Offer non-pirateable content
Why not offer things you cannot download. A hand written letter? A pair of panties?

3) Offer limited edition content
This is from the idea that NiN front man made 750k in 3 days selling one of his albums, that was also available on torrent sites that he had seeded himself. He offered very limited edition stuff too. Blurays with all the tracks raw from the album so people could remix, photos, etc right up to 5 limited edition hand painted pieces of art. Offer your surfers something RARE.

4) Sell bespoke content
most people want to see roughly the same sort of thing. if you are on a stocking site you want to see stockings etc. But let one member a week suggest a plot for something shot for next month’s updates. This will increase retention and interaction…

5) Live interaction
A cam show. I know, the most obvious idea, but one that really works, even if it’s just once a week.

6) Change your business model
30 bucks a month isn’t working. 99 cents a song is. what can we learn from that? Free is also working, with my free cams etc. How could you make money from your traffic if you gave all your content away for free?

7) Have more conversations
Comments on blogs, emails, twitter, youtube, there are loads of ways to have conversations with your customers. Do more.
Do something super special for the top ten% of your customers
What if there was something AMAZING you could do for, or give, the top ten percent of your customers?

9) Stop fucking your customers
This is a no brainer. Dialers, prechecked hidden sales, trials, card banging, spam, etc. We’ve spent years going from the most innovative marketplace out there to one that has to resort to blackmailing potential customers who share content on P2P networks. I mean, really? We are now so fucking desperate for cash we are SUING people who like our content but haven’t paid for it yet. How the mighty have fallen. But, really, if we stopped fucking over our customers, maybe we would have more of them!d

10) Make better quality sites and content
Yeah, you remember, shoot decent content? Make a nice site? How about that for a bloody crazy idea!

What are your ideas to make more sales?

I had lunch with Epoch in Amsterdam and they said that the decline in revenues over the last two years has stopped and they can see a steady slow climb on overall revenue.

The only possibly reason for this I can think of is that piracy has stopped.

It’s what every lame-ass idiot has blamed fallen sales on for the last two years, so it has to be real.

Unless of course, piracy has nothing to do with sales at all…

This is a bad idea on so many levels. Let’s back up.

So, you have someone who is a fan of Jordan Capri. They do not want to pay $30 a month to join a site. They might not have a credit card. They might have joined a porn site years ago and had their card banged, or hit with a hidden cross sale. Whatever. So they download a rip.

How do you monetise this as the content producer? Simple! You blackmail them! Get some dodgy legal outfit to get the IPs of the downloaders, get their ISP to give up their privacy, and then send them a letter saying you will go public, local paper, etc with info that THEY stole YOUR porn.

Now, obviously, it could be a kid in the house doing it. Could be your wifi is open and a neighbour is doing it. Could be that a grandchild is visiting and doing it. Could be spoofed IPs. Could be that the file called YOUR CONTENT isn’t actually your content at all.

Innocent until proven guilty right? That’s the genius of this. No one will ever prove anything. People, guilty or not, will settle for fear of embarrassment. Does the local head teacher download schoolgirl porn or not? Who cares about the truth, if that was on a website, or local paper his career would be finished. So he settles. It’s not worth losing his career over 2 grand.

Remember, several courts have ruled that a shared file doesn’t represent a lost sale. Electronics Arts even started that. So, these litigious blackmailing porn producers are literally stealing money from people that may or may not have downloaded a file that may or may not be copyright protected and they may or may not be potential customers.

One thing is for shitting sure, they won’t buy from you after you’ve fucked them like this!

This is a pathetic state of affairs. Why not work out how to make your content compelling enough to purchase rather that blackmail people that like what you do?

I read a piece on TechCrunch today about an anon source saying since Steam, they have stopped pirating PC games. Interesting stuff, fo’ sho’ Damian, but what the hell has it got to do with porn and the marketing thereof?

Good question, reader. Let me explain.

So, everyone in the porn industry seems to be convinced those Evil Pirates are why they are not making as much cash as they used to. I challenge this as you can see on previous posts here. Maybe looking at how another industry combated the exact same problem would be A Good Idea.

So, video games were heavily pirated all their lives. I remember dreadful copy protection attempts on cassettes for my Spectrum 48k back in 1983. They were hacked. And every single attempt at protecting games from piracy has failed since then.

So what did they do? Made online play an essential part of the game and worked out how to check the people playing had bought the game.

Now, what we could do is somehow package a live, online brilliant experience with a monthly membership. People would need a discreet app to access their smut. (As a bonus this removes any need for people to worry about partners and browser histories etc). This app would check that a current active subscription was tied to that IP and off they go watching the porn. Loads of different options. Could be free monthly usage of the system, and then pay for content. Could be per scene, per minute, whatever. Could be low monthly price with free cams included (have to compete with myfreecams). Etc. I am not saying I have the answers for the pricing. Testing and measuring would be the only way to move on that. Experiment. There is no right answer yet.

To stop piracy we have to make something BETTER than piracy. And something unpirateable (live cams, personalised interaction). The price has to be attractively low (see iTunes) and it has to be VERY VERY SIMPLE to use.

Now, one company like Braincash or NSCash could do this, but how much better would it be of there could be a massive colab where several large companies all put their content on the same platform and delivered SteamPorn or the iPorn Store to the world? A lot better is the answer.

Marketed well, priced aggressively, this could turn around the slump the industry is in.

Thoughts?

1) Piracy is NOT taking money from you
2) Obscurity is a bigger problem that piracy

So, give everything away.

That’s it. Give it all away. And have it ad-supported. This has worked for years for software companies and is working amazingly well for iphone apps. Here is a massive case study proving it.

So, why is no one trying this for porn. Get content. Give it away for free, but ad supported. Pay to upgrade for no ads and HD video. Not a tube, but a full on paysite.

I bet you 5 bucks it would work.

Let me start by saying I am not a fan of piracy, nor do I condone it. However, I think that some people have blamed everything to do with their falling revenues on piracy and I am not sure that is sensible.

The Music and Film industries have just come out and admitted they made up most of the figures about piracy. (No shock there). It’s pretty hard to keep saying an industry is being fucked by pirates that continues to beat all historical revenues.

The porn industry still claims that it is those devious pirates. But has no actual evidence to prove this. Clearly, tube sites have had SOME effect on porn sales, but they be all and end all? I’m not convinced.

What if it wasn’t piracy, but the industry itself that was to blame?

People who download stolen content do not represent a lost sale. They were never GOING to buy your stuff. Just like the x million that downloaded that last blockbuster movie. That isn’t a lost sale. It’s just someone downloading a movie.

Now, the record and movies had it right for ages, they could do anything and it would sell. There wasn’t much choice. The big five went through the vinyl revolution, then tape, then CD, then high end CD, and refused to accept digital. They sold what they wanted to consumers and the consumer had no choice. Then iTunes happened and there was choice and consumers bought digitally. Just the tracks they wanted. Low and behold, they make money. How successful is netflix? Why on earth would you PAY when you can pirate movies? Because it is good service? Good quality? Fair pricing? You can stream it to your xbox…

Porn has been fisting it’s customers for years. Diallers, circle jerks, hidden x-sales, banged credit cards, making it impossible to cancel (Playboy UK made people WRITE A PHYSICAL LETTER to cancel!!). etc.

Then comes the content. It stopped being good, didn’t it? Generic porn is everywhere. Shot by idiots with a camera and a copy of premiere of FCP. For every Dean Capture or Met Art there is a DVTimes or an ArseWithClass. They actually think they are making porn. They aren’t. They are pointing a camera at a naked girl. Not the same thing at all.

So, it kind of echoes music, doesn’t it? They fucked people for ages, then the people went ‘fuck you we are using Napster’. Then they said ‘ok you can download stuff but with DRM’. The people said fuck you we’re using piracy. Then they finally acquiesed and are letting people buy what they want how they want and it is working. They are making a fortune again.

Can you see the parallel here?

Why doesn’t the porn industry have a think about what they could learn from the mistakes the music and movie industry has made.

Did mass law suits stop piracy? No. It encouraged it by making people aware of thepiratebay etc. Did government legislation work? No, Sweden, France, China have not decreased piracy at all since they passed their laws. Sweden has increased the use of encryption though. The problem is the people making the laws have no idea how the technology works. And why it is pointless trying to stop it.

Maybe – and this is really out there – we should make a better product and sell it at a price people want to pay and make it easy for them to buy it?

What about the free-mium model? Works brilliantly for apps. Why not porn?

What about added value? Like NiN’s Trent Reznor making 750k in 3 days selling his last album even when he was giving away the songs for free on torrents?

Just some thoughts. Seems to be working for the other content providers.

Love to hear what you think in the comments…

You have a situation that is UNSTOPPABLE. It’s called piracy. Anyone with half a brain will realise this will never, ever stop. Logistically and legally you cannot stop it. This has been proven by the RIAA and MPAA in America who have A LOT more money that the porn industry to try and stop piracy. They have failed, massively.

You also have a lot of VERY PISSED OFF producers who think they are losing out on sales because of piracy. They think that everyone that downloads a torrent of their stuff was a potential customer. This is wrong, but let’s not go there for now.

So, you have people pissed off their stuff is being nicked. And you know you will never stop this stuff being nicked. So, you set up a business where you charge these pissed off and desperate people 500 bucks a month to google search some torrents sites and prepare a DCMA notice for the pissed of producers. You tell them the stolen content they were pissed off about has been taken off 5 sites.

The producers feel better because 2% of places you could find their stolen content no longer host the content. (Of course, the sites are still up and still showing OTHER people’s content, but who cares about that, right?

Genius.

It appears Remove your Content makes around 500 bucks a month from these people, every month, for doing a couple of hours of work (it really is very very simple to use a search engine to find torrents. Then you look on Usenet, add in some private forums you have lied your way into, job done). And the best bit? You can still find the producers’ content all over the web.

It’s the best business model I have heard of.

Producers are not stopping lost sales, they are just making RYC richer.

Producers – just pay me 500 bucks a month to do some positive marketing efforts. Actually make a difference and DO SOMETHING instead of moaning on forums and paying money to businesses that actually provide you a measurable service.

If anyone reading this pays RYC or similar please can you explain how you measure the success of your investment with them?