opinion

Using Video Trailers for Promotion

With the rise of “transparent member’s areas” on paysite tours, featuring a thumbnail image and often a short, reduced quality sample clip from each scene on the site, owners have faced the dilemma of balancing enough samples with freely giving away too much.

This has led some operators to offer tour visitors a single, well-produced compilation trailer featuring snippets of their best scenes, in hopes that it will do a better job of selling the site, than will random, MGP-style clips for each scene, splashed all over the tour.

Perhaps it would be better to offer a high-energy “best of” trailer and use screen caps to catalog the scenes your site offers.

One problem with traditional adult “preview” clips, such as would be found on an MGP or typical “less-than-full-scene” tube site, is that they tell a story out of context — where a generic 30-second slice (often randomly selected by automated batch processing software, with no attention to cut-points, etc.), seeks to provide a comprehensive view of the content being marketed.

Perhaps it would be better to offer a high-energy “best of” trailer and use screen caps (treated to a dose of Photoshop) to catalog the scenes your site offers, than to simply grab a clip from each of your FHGs for placement on the tour.

This technique also allows the maximum image size and streaming bitrate quality to be used for the trailer, without killing your bandwidth bill. While paysite owners pushing their own content will have more flexibility in how they promote their site’s offerings, a growing roster of third-party content and feed providers is making it easier to advertise their materials.

For example, Webmaster Central recently announced that its leased content customers will receive “professionally edited video commercials designed by adult marketing experts to increase conversions ... [and] maximize sales.”

According to the company, the video commercials are formatted and optimized for both desktop and mobile viewing, and are accompanied by related high-definition picture sets that customers can use in tours or for other promotional activities.

“They’re designed for clients to show off the best of the content they’ve leased from Webmaster Central,” VP of Operations Joel Kapchuck stated. “Watch your conversion rates increase.”

Promotional trailers may also be a good way to mitigate some of piracy’s ill effects.

Consider that carefully edited trailers can easily contain effective advertising that is interspersed throughout the video clip, directing its viewers to the intended destination. Now, even if a pirate tube obfuscates your watermark, visitors will still know its source and see your marketing messages.

However you go about it, the use of promotional trailers is an underutilized resource for many adult entertainment marketers — and a valuable tool for monetizing content.

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