Porntifications

Posted by mikezillion at February 28th, 2008

The folks at Hulu are using the old broadcast interruption advertising format online, and having some success with it. Now it’s time for them to take their advertisers by the hand and show them that a web-based viewer is not the same as a television viewer. That’s something the porn industry needs to keep in mind as well. Single-handed mousing is not the same as single-handed remote control television watching.

Hulu seems to be up for the challenge. According to MarketingVOX, the Hulu is recommending its advertisers look to more interactive advertising formats. It’s never easy to tell your advertisers what they should be doing. I wish them luck.

It’s about time, though. I’m almost ready to shoot that stupid Intel microprocessor. The same annoying 15-second spot running six times in one program; it’s worse than Head-On!

And when is the porn world going to come up with a good parody of the Head-On advertisements? The challenge has been issued!

Posted by mikezillion at February 27th, 2008

A marked decline in the popularity of search-based advertising has Wall Street in a panic. Advertisers have been quickly adapting from the old-media model to click-based online advertising. But the news from comScore shows that browsers are becoming less and less likely to click on search-based advertisements from Google and others. As a matter of fact, in the past two months Google’s market value has dropped by almost a third.

Interruption marketing used to be based on broad nets, thrown to capture the common denominator of viewers or readers. Search-based advertising takes advantage of the content being viewed to present targeted ads to likely potential customers. However, sophisticated web users have begun to challenge the increasingly deceptive advertising practices of companies looking to generate as much attention as possible with less relevant ads.

And where is porn in all of this? Porn continues to advertise like hookers in the streets of Paris: put a pretty shill out on the sidewalk to lure in the customers, and then charge them for someone less appealing in the dark hallways of the brothel while the shill returns to the street.

Yes, you wanted sexy pictures and you got sexy pictures. But what you really wanted was the model in the ad. What you got might have been comparable, but it wasn’t what you were expecting. If it was free, and it did the trick, you’re not likely to complain.

Remember that the porn consumer is just your average consumer, who happens to be shopping for porn. The failure of contextual search-based advertising to sustain the growth patterns of the past few years is just an indicator of what lies in store.

Publishers need to think carefully about how they market their goods as potential customers become more familiar with misleading marketing techniques online.

Posted by mikezillion at February 26th, 2008

In a great follow-up to the emerging discussion about what a “free” really means for the marketplace, Alex Iskold has posted an article with a solid warning about the dangers of “free”-dom.

It’s not only the impact on the seller. The customer gets stuck with whatever the suppliers choose to offer when the market is controlled by free providers. And this is certainly something the average porn consumer is seeing.

Remember the days when a VHS copy of your favorite porn title cost $79.95? There was a plot, there were characters, and there was this sense that all of those hot, sexy people were somehow safely unattainable except in the realm of fantasy. The customer’s experience was usually either mail order, or at the counter of a store on the outskirts of town. This was a market which knew what it wanted, and was willing to stretch to the limit in order to obtain it.

Nowadays, a porn consumer need only click on the same mouse he uses when paying his taxes, writing letters to his mother, or updating his blog. There is rarely the need to pay for porn, since a single click will adequately verify that the viewer is a legal adult–if the website hosting the porn is even responsible enough to ask. And what comes for free is often just as effective in satisfying the needs of the viewer as what he might otherwise have to buy for $29.95 a month, or $49.95 on DVD.

How hardcore does a fan have to be these days to shell out $49.95 for a permanent souvenir of 90 minutes of porn featuring his favorite performer?

But free porn can only be provided by the biggest companies, who can afford the luxury of giving away their products without driving their business into the ground. These companies survive on the hope that a free scene will sell a subscription to a site that offers more of the same. That means that the innovators at the fringes of the market must make do with less and less in order to sustain themselves. And the general market must settle for more and more mediocre product that looks just like everything else out there.

Sounds a little like Hollywood, or TV, to me. The passionate indie filmmakers operate at a loss, hoping their success in something that fuels their passion might translate into a cushy studio job turning out the same mainstream schlock they can’t stand to watch.

You can get depressed, or you can get angry, but you can’t blame the customer. Free is a very compelling marketing pitch. Customers will always take free. Beware of the business that seems to be offering more for free than you can offer.

Posted by mikezillion at February 25th, 2008

We’re all noticing it. Porn is pretty much a free commodity on the Internet these days.

That’s not to say that there isn’t porn that’s worth paying a premium to see. But so much of the porn distribution going on right now is based on the notion of free loss-leaders that people are having a more difficult time understanding why any porn has to cost money.

It’s possible that our cutting-edge industry has misunderstood the Gillette notion of giving away the razor and selling the blades. For the most part, porn is the blade that sells cable subscriptions, Internet access, computer hardware, fancy televisions, DVD players, and soon Blu-Ray players and HD video downloads.

Maybe we should be selling porn to the companies that make these products and services, rather than trying to squeeze the last few pennies out of the consumers who buy them.

Visualize that for a moment.

Without porn, there isn’t much of a market for cutting-edge passive entertainment electronics. That may sound like an insular position from a pornographer like myself, but give me some credit. I’ve seen the history of entertainment media. Passive entertainment like TV, movies, and porn is losing precious attention share to interactive recreational entertainment like mobile phones and video games.

We’ve already got video games pushing movies and television out of the way in terms of economic impact, and blurring the boundaries between entertainment and recreation. Passive media is hurting badly, and Hollywood is racing to integrate porn elements into everything they do, whether it’s bouncy babes with big titties selling the latest teen flick, or increasingly exposed hot young beefcake stars drawing in viewers for yet another cookie-cutter reality show. That’s porn. Most of it would have gotten the producers and distributors thrown in jail forty years ago.

Folks are losing interest in passive media. Porn generates interest. Human nature seems to dictate that it’s the cock, tits, and ass that we haven’t seen yet that we most want to look at, so new porn will always have a built-in audience. It’s the freshness of porn that keeps viewers coming back. And without those passive viewers, there isn’t going to be a market for those high-end entertainment products and services. Porn drives the infrastructure of the media industry. With so much free porn available, it’s no wonder that one of the few areas of our economy where prices are getting lower for products with better and better features is entertainment electronics. And media companies try to sweep up the dregs by selling consumers the same old content in the latest format.

We’re not going to stop making porn. Folks aren’t going to stop watching it. The market won’t stop allowing much of what we make to be available for free online. The idea of paying for porn, music, movies, television, articles, etc. may seem strange and archaic to the consumer of 2012. He may pay a monthly service fee for a hardware/software/network access package. He may never see any advertisements which are not positioned as product placement. He may pay for personalization of his services only in bulk, but never pay for individual content items. His attention is what he brings to the marketplace.

We need to consider today what that consumer of tomorrow would be willing to pay for.

Posted by mikezillion at February 14th, 2008

I know this is a bit off-topic, but bear with me. It turns out that there is an epidemic of teenagers and pre-teens actually choking themselves and each other with bungee cords, ropes, belts, or anything else handy. They say that the effect when the choking cuts off is a dreamlike state.
Now the Center for Disease Control has issued a warning to parents for telltale signs. Apparently some 82 confirmed youth deaths have been linked to this practice.
This makes me wonder about the practice of auto-erotic asphyxiation; a similar practice in which men cut off the blood supply to the brain at the point of orgasm to achieve a more powerful sensation. There are close to 1,000 deaths annually from this. It’s not the sort of thing that I imagine folks discover too often on their own. It has to be learned from somewhere. Probably more folks know about it now thanks to the Internet than ever before. Just the way kids are learning from their peers online and offline to strangle themselves for the temporary high that results from blood loss to the brain.
The question in my mind is one of censorship. Folks try to censor porn all the time, arguing that it is an unhealthy expression of sexual deviance since it takes sexuality out of the context of a committed monogamous heterosexual lifestyle. But only the most extreme voices (like the late Andrea Dworkin) argue that porn is harmful in and of itself. More rational minds agree that porn should at the very least not be made available to minors.
But is it legitimate to try to control the sources of information which spread the technique of self-strangulation? What about simply trying to control the spread of that information to minors? And what about the argument that teaching kids not to strangle themselves is just an invitation for them to try it in order to see what the fuss is about?
I would be interested to hear more opinions about this.