Hmmm.... It would appear that about half of the DVD replicators and duplicators serving the adult industry have gone out of business in the last 6 months. Is this a sign of the times? One duplication house I talked to that was still in biz attributed this to Toshiba cracking down on licensing. Sounds like a good marketing angle, but is it true? Inquiring minds want to know!

Over the past year, we've all seen the huge increase in adults sites offering HD video content. It started out with promises on paysite tours that the 720p videos await in the member's area. But, as with all "mission creep" in our highly competitive industry, HD clips are being generously offered as free promotional content by almost every major program.

So, this now leads to a somewhat ironic parallel between the DVD war between HD TV and Blue Ray formats, and the quandary of which encoding platform to offer on the web: WMV HD or Flash?

Pros for WMV? Surfers like them because they can download them!

Cons for WMV? File sizes are huge and there continues to be a substantial player failure rate if the surfer doesn't have exactly the right codecs. Oh, and let's not forget the pesky Mac issue: Quicktime for Mac will not play WMV's without the end-user finding and installing Flip4Mac.

Pros for Flash? Although some surfers don't like them because they can't download them, Flash has an extremely high penetration rate on both Windows and Mac machines and if the videos were encoded correctly, they play flawlessly. And let's not forget about the file size saving of up to 50% over WMV with no loss in video quality.

Cons for Flash? Well, anybody that has tried to encode in Flash will know that processing time is deathly slow! Average 1:9 time ratio, which results in a one hour film taking 9 hours to encode. YIKES! Oh, and not to forget that if you put them in the member's area instead of downloadable WMV videos, cancellations and complaints will result in biblical proportions!

Wasteland.com offers both HD formats, depending on the site purpose (i.e. free sites get Flash only, member's area get both) and, although time consuming and bandwidth intensive, seems to strike a good balance.

So, now that these XBiz blogs have added the fun feature of you being able to post comments, pipe in with your experience and opinions!

Spotted Quentin's blog posting about this topic today and followed his link over to GFY to see what all the buzz was. Very interesting thread on a lot of levels, so I thought, as one of the veterans of the bdsm content industry, I'd add my two cents....

Shooting BDSM is a very different thing than the rest of adult erotica. The first and most obvious difference is that the entire goal of each scene is to produce pain and psychological/emotional submission. Sure, sometimes there is sexual activity, but the true heart and soul of a bdsm scene lies within the psychodrama of what we call "Erotic Power Exchange".

This can lead to some occasional difficulties when working with models and actresses that are not "into" the bdsm scene. These can range from not being able to leave any marks on the model because she is booked the next day for a glamour shoot, to discovering on the first spank that she has very little pain tolerance and really is not a good candidate for performing a realistic bdsm scene. And then there is the emotional issue. Models with little experience in bdsm play can at times have deep feelings come up when being punished or humiliated in a scene.

For these reasons, over the past 12 years of shooting for Wasteland, we have always tended to work with "lifestyle" bdsm players that know exactly what they are doing, and enjoy every minute of it.

My advise to any new folks that are planning on producing bdsm content is:
1. Hire a very experienced Dom or Domina to "run" the scene. This is critical, as he or she will know the protocol, and have the experience of how to best work with a submissive for maximum effect;
2. When hiring submissives, try to recruit from within the bdsm community, as well as models that specialize in this sort of activity. This will go a long way in minimizing "surprises" during shooting, as well as get the most intense performance footage for your library.
3. With those two assets in place, scene planning, negotiation, establishing limits and safewords and the rest of the bdsm protocol fall into place very nicely and pretty much guarantees a successful experience for everyone.

Okay, I like Google and YouTube as much as the next guy in line, but I have a little beef this holiday season...

Every Christmas, I have enjoyed the Norad Santa Tracker on http://www.noradsanta.org/ For years, it has been a nice homespun series of animated movies with real military folks telling us where Santa is over the course of 24 hours. This year, much to my horror, the entire thing has been outsourced to Google Earth and YouTube!!!!!!! If we Americans can spend a million dollars to make a missile to blow up a donkey in a tent in Iraq, can't we continue to fund this great project that has gone on for so many years to the delight of families everywhere? I don't mind outsourcing at all, but this seems to rip the guts out of a grand american military tradition. Producing and broadcasting directly to the children.

My other less important, but still annoying beef is that Queen Elizabeth II is broadcasting her annual Christmas Greeting on YouTube this year. That just seems somehow strange to me. The Monarch of a 1000 year old Empire having her own YouTube "Royal" channel? This just seems wrong in so many ways......

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Colin at wasteland.com

Okay, I get it. In order to get blog traffic, one must actually go visit blogs and send the owner an email to get hooked in.

But, after a month of having my staff trawl the web for blogs that might be great connections for recip traffic to wasteland.com and sssh.com, it's now become pretty clear that about 50% of them have no way to contact them! No email link. No email form. Nada..... One would think that the first thing a blogger would set up in wordpress or blogspot is a link to exchange traffic, but this is simply not the case.

Now, here is the truly odd thing: of the 2,000 blogs we visited, about half of them had no way to contact them, and no links to many other blogs or sites. BUT! Most of them had a Google Page Rank of at least "4". What's up with that?????

Sure, I have blogs going to drive traffic to our sites, but all of this mystifies me. How can a blog written by a social balloon fetish club in Pittsburgh with 2 recips have a higher PR than most adult sites?

Anybody that has a clue is welcome to email me: mail@rowntree.net If you crack the code, I'll send you a fruit basket! (or a balloon) lol.

It's been a long time since I've seen one little addition to my biz model produce instant traffic and conversions, and am so happy that I stumbled across this one. Promises to be a Merry Christmas!

I, like all of the other paysite owners in the industry have screwed around for years with alternative consumer payment options, ranging from dialers (EEEK!) to all of the current alternative billing solutions.

The one aspect that I was just plain STUPID about for all these years was adding more "International Friendly" options to pay out my affiliates. "Check Only" was the rut we were stuck in.

But, late last week, I added Epassporte as a webmaster payment option and, frankly, I've never seen so many international webmasters step up to the plate after a small press release! Fantastic European traffic surge with some of the best conversion ratios I've seen since 1998!

Moral of the story? Look at things from the viewpoint of webmasters not in the good old USA. They have a lot of the really good-converting traffic these days, and really appreciate a simple solution that pays in Euros and doesn't take 4 weeks for a check to arrive and clear.....;-)

I read in one of the adult board articles in the last week the opinion of the author that the adult industry has slipped very, very far behind from being the innovators of new technology on the web, to a stagnant pool of pornographers basically doing the least amount of work possible to make the most amount of money possible.

Having been around since the adult internet started, here is my take on that:

Back in "the day" (1990's to about 2001), our industry basically forged ahead with all new technology for web deployment of content. Remember the early days of "video" on the web? JPG push at one frame every 4 seconds as that's all that the pipe could handle. Chat rooms? Wow! We perfected that! Streaming video in 2000? We invented it! In short, the adult industry created the market for Cisco and the the backbone tech providers to create the technology to deliver porn, and that is a big reason why the internet grew up so fast.

But, here we are in 2007. Mainstream has in so many ways surpassed us. The really cool concepts like MySpace and YouTube now come first, and then are cloned by adult versions.

To make it all just worse, many of the best and the brightest graphic designers, programmers, and other folks we have always relied upon have figured out there is a LOT more money in working for non-adult than we can provide based on the shrinking market share and money that comes into adult. I certainly don't blame them for heading off into mainstream, but it is a growing trend for these guys to sign on to much more lucrative projects than what is offered in the adult world.

So, were do we go from here? At present, we have, in my opinion, a stagnant adult content world as far as the introduction of cool new features, faster ways to deliver content, etc..... Perhaps this is just "the way it is" and at this point, the adult content world can just never keep up and should be proud of what it did to build the internet, and continue to spend five times more to convert the same traffic from any source. The unfortunate result, however, is that to compensate for this, the content offered just gets more and more extreme to set itself apart form "the pack", but invites obscenity rulings every step down this dark path to be "special".

I seriously just don't know any way we can continue to be the "for-front" of technology. But, a few things I DO know:

1. For our current business model to work, we need to get rid of ALL hardcore free content sites. TPG's, hosted movies, etc. Compelling text and banner links and softcore tpg's will do the trick. Sorry, but this is what I have been bitching about for the past 6 years. Hardcore content provided by sponsors as TPG material basically is like giving the cow away for free, including the milk. Let the paysites do their thing to do the conversions. If the surfer jacks off and logs off on TGP content, why would he/she buy a membership?

2. The new version of 2257, if enacted, will pretty much end the TGP game for a lot of reasons. Sure, there are a few TPG gamers that make really good money, but the majority make less than $300 a month and it's just not worth the risk for them to face jail and litigation time to defend the house of cards they are working out of to possibly defend a justice department investigation. So, there goes 95% of that traffic if they bail out. These players can quickly adapt, though, to text links and softcore content if it comes to that.

Sorry to be so glum, but I've been around this biz for 14 years now, and the current state of affairs is bugging me a bit!

Cheers, Colin

Every once in a while I stumble across a fun new feaure in the non-adult web. Here's one that immediately caught my eye as a great and funny time-waster. Click on the movie below to see some adult web industry veterans strut their stuff! (you might have to click play a couple of times to get it to play - welcome to the job-jab beta version. lol)





And if one wasn't enough for you, here's another one, featuring Traffic Dude, Bangwang, Tom Hymes and a few more to pick out in this thrilling horror feature just in time for Halloween!

God, just when I thought we had it all figured out as far as driving traffic around the web, along comes "web 2.0" - that mysterious set of new "Myspace" and "Tube" features that are sucking up more free "looky-look" traffic than The Hun it would seem, with conversions being even more of a challenge!

Although it's all fascinating to watch, my main gripe is the amount of infrastructure that needs to be added to paysites to attract this traffic. Last time I checked, over the past 6 months I have added a team of 6 dudes in Albania to manage web 2.0 postings, 4 friendly boys from Manilla to hand 2.0 SEO in the new terrain, and an unusual set of 8 ladies from South Africa that do nothing all day but spew blog postings about what fun they had last night experimenting with butt plugs and electro-stimulation! Oh, let's not forget about my in-house employee that writes erotic poetry all day to submit to Yahoo Groups! God! And I thought TGP's were a pain in the ass!

I did, however, come across what I would say is about the best platform I've seen recently released today. The fine folks at AEBN have launched a beta version of a social networking site for the "Kink" surfers and webmasters called Social Kink

But, aside from that sunny note (which I suspect I am going to have to hire and assign a new staff person to manage), web 2.0 is just a pain in my ass. Maybe I can just give my traffic managers that handle google, Yahoo, AOL, etc paid inclusions my credit card and tell them to "go for it"? Sigh.......

Back in "the day", I, as a busy webmaster, had a very nice repertoire of little companies that brokered adult content that I could purchase to put on my paysites to augment our original content.

Those days are, sadly, mostly over.

90% of the content guys have gone out of business over the past 3 years, mostly due to the new trend of webmasters creating their own content, and the big sites purchasing DVD rights.

Sure, the failing DVD-producing studios are dumping their own inventory onto the internet faster than a goose can poop, but that doesn't really help, does it?

Yes, there are a few Internet content providers still out there, but they are struggling against the tide of the big studios dumping their video libraries onto the web at a breakneck speed.

But, here is an opportunity: If you are running a website, please do your best to support these small businesses. You can find the few of them left them in the Service Directories of all of the main adult boards. It's sometimes fresh, it's hot and good (and, it's DIVERSE and adds a different style to your content offerings). And, most importantly, you are supporting "Old School" folks that have been around in the internet side of things since it started.

Colin