What Journalism Can Learn From Adult Entertainment

One more interesting article, i found on net....written by Andy Medici on poynter

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Meanwhile, your legacy company is burdened with an outdated distribution system and is trying desperately to adjust to a new world in which having a local monopoly is not an option.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.