I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday and he pointed out that Prop 60 really doesn’t concern him and when he told me why it struck a chord. For starters he has always been condom optional but more to the point he doesn’t depend on Porn Valley any longer for his livelihood.
He pointed out that Porn Valley is dead and that the few zombies left wandering around there just haven’t figured it out yet. I kind of scoffed but then he challenged me…He said I will bet you that clips4sale.com sells more videos per day than everyone in Porn Valley combined.
Whoa. I thought hey Porn Valley is a multi billion dollar business that cant be so but the more I thought about it and the more I looked at the numbers at clips4sale…he is right. I know girls that pull 7K a month and more just doing one scene a week to update their clips4sale stores, that is way more than even the top pornchicks make on a per scene basis.
The future, as he pointed out is in direct to consumer sales, the days of a producer like me selling my video to a manufacturer who then sells it to a manufacturers rep who then sells it to a retail who then sells it to you are gone and the days of buying them straight from a manufacturers rep like an online store aren’t far behind it. Nobody seems to want porn cluttering up the video case anymore…hell there isnt a video case, everything is delivered directly via the internet, stored locally on a hard drive or in a cloud someplace.
As for Prop 60 there is a reason why HIV outbreaks are far fewer and farther between….it is because Porn Valley isn’t shooting anywhere near as much….I remember for example when Elegant Angel Video released 4 new titles per week, now it is 4 per month if that many. I remember when Vivid actually released videos…now they don’t Vivid only does celebrity sex tapes, they have diversified OUT of the traditional porn valley product.
Wicked Pictures seems to be keeping pace….an interesting thing about that is that Wicked is and has been, all condom.
My friend pointed out that the only people who give a fuck about condoms are the guys that can’t get it up while wearing one, the result on sales of condom porn are simply negligible. He points out that his condoms scenes sell the same as his non condom ones and I have to admit that to be the case for me as well. Maybe at one time the consumer cared but not any more.
In the end this pretty much makes prop 60 moot to all but a handfull of companies in porn who are still able to sell enough product to keep the lights on, and for those companys prop 60 is a sort of sword of Damocles, hanging there by a thread to finish them off.
5 Responses
There ya go… perfect explanation for why prop60 pass/fail won’t be limited to California. Every East Bumfuck USA town wants their piece of the pie 🙂
I think the shift in consumer behavior you described is spot on. I grew up in the era when you actually had to go to a theater or a dirty book store to watch porn. I would park the car and watch to make sure that no one I knew was walking down the sidewalk or out on the street. Along came VHS, and man was that a revelation – except that you had to worry that someone you knew would see you walking into the backroom of the video store. I always rented a regular title when I rented porn and put that on top when I put it on the counter. And, since I work at home, I’d go to the store first thing in the morning while everyone else was at work. Then, along came online video stores – but, hey, the postman still delivered it to your house. And, what if the mail came while my wife or kid were at home; or, I was out of town and my neighbor got the mail. Finally, online porn! Only thing I have to worry about is someone hacking my external hard drive and I can download just the scene I want.
Porn companies that are still following the old business models and gaffing people for $30-$50 a month subscription (for one new scene a week) and are still hoping piracy will be eliminated are dinosaurs on the way out.
Almost with exception, there is still a need for a middleman. “direct from the manufacturer” is always misleading, because most companies are unwilling or unable to process their own credit cards, and often cannot do their own digital fulfillment.
The result is sites like Clips4sale, Model Centro, and others that aggregate various producers and models into a meaningful overall product, and get their hands dirty handling the payment and fulfillment part of the business.
What it leaves out is marketing. Part of the distributor model is that they were able to get your product in front of enough eyeballs to make sales happen. Now that job falls back to the producers and models, and they are honestly mostly not up to it. That opens up a huge space for more middlemen to jump in.
Good news for people like me is that this process re-opens the field for affiliate marketing. Having people working the interwebs finding customers and promoting your product is key, and affiliate marketing generally works well.
Now if the tube sites would just go away…. 😉
With the exception of 1992-2007 the old saying still applies “Good porn is like finding hen’s teeth”