The new-look site replaces the one that’s been in use since the 1990s.
“We completely deconstructed all the content,” says Airek, the self-styled Shane’s World special agent. “We’ve redigitized it, and we intend to serve it up 2008-style. We’ve updated the technology, the content delivery and the cash program to bring our awesome pioneer reality product into the new millennium where it belongs.”
Although Airek declined to go into specifics, he promises that people in adult are going to be amazed at the online facelift.
“There are going to be a lot of surprises for the community, because we’re launching a brand-new business model,” he says. “I think a lot of people on the DVD side and a lot of the studios are going to copy this model, just based on the time we put into streamlining stuff like the delivery system.
“We’re really excited to get this out finally, because it’s been such a ride. I thought it was going to take me six or seven months, but it’s taken a year and four months. It definitely wasn’t cheap, but I believe that if you don’t spend big money, you don’t get big money back. We’re in such a pay-to-play environment on the Internet now that if you don’t spend money, you can’t compete.”
Airek believes the changes will be an enormous boost for the Shane’s World affiliates, because the new site will allow them to turn DVD titles into a web-based business model to make more money. And that’s always music to an affiliate’s ear.
‘We think we nailed the DVD model with this new formula,” Airek stresses. “The things we used to offer affiliates to promote us were never the best. Now we’ll give them what they need. The new setup gives them tools that will help them to qualify their traffic more, before it even gets to the tours. We’ll allow surfers to qualify themselves before they get to the tour, which will give affiliates a better conversion ratio.
“And I’ve logged all the scenes into their proper niches, so we’ll be able to direct affiliates to specific niches they want. Instead of just sending generic traffic to our tour, they’ll be able to send surfers to specific niches. Now we’ll have about 22 niches that affiliates can promote in Shane’s World. It includes not just college amateur sex and the frat house parties we offer, but other things like threesomes. And the content is about the most unsaturated and unpromoted available on the Internet.”
The new setup also will benefit the surfers, many of whom should be pleased that the archaic, hidebound old site — with its small screens and grainy videos — has been vastly upgraded. “Everything now will be high resolution, with 720 X 480-size movies,” Airek promises. “Surfers will be able to download what they want, and watch it in Flash. And since I’ve broken it down into niches, our library will be easier to navigate.”
Airek did reveal that the new site will feature a hybrid tour system, containing three different types of tours.
“One is a very unorthodox version that we’re not even sure will work,” he says. “We just wanted to take a stab at it, because it goes hand in hand with the online trend of people giving away content. Without saying how we intend to do it, we will attempt to feature a YouTube type of system. We’ll also have a traditional tour and an all-access tour. This makes the new system three times better, since previously we offered only one type of tour. And it will allow us to filter traffic much better.”
The content, however, will remain the same, because, “We do one thing, and we do it really well,” Airek says. But there will be a few new twists in the future Shane’s World content, too, because the firm recently has formed a strategic partnership with the European company, Porn Week, one of the overseas leaders in reality gonzo. Their joint efforts should result in fresh European faces in the Shane’s World library by year’s end.
The stateside new faces will include the company’s latest contract girl, Casey Parker, and “another new girl whose name I can’t reveal yet,” according to Airek. Their content will be produced in tandem with Hush Hush Entertainment, which was acquired by Shane’s World last December.
“The companies have a nice synergy together,” Airek explains. “Hush Hush already had a great Internet department, and Shane’s World already had a great DVD distribution department. It’s a good marriage. The transition has been smooth, with none of those power struggles that you normally have in an acquisition.”
Although Airek is excited about the new platform he’s created for Shane’s World content, he has strong reservations about how well that content can be protected from piracy. The firm was a major player in the recent antipiracy educational roundtable sponsored by the Free Speech Coalition at the Phoenix Forum. Airek said the company will work closely with the PAK Group, an antipiracy organization which grew out of a similar roundtable last September. But he’s not terribly optimistic, based on his personal experience.
“Yesterday we found a site that claimed it was selling 12,895 adult members areas through one password for $95 a month,” he reveals. “Basically, they’d just ripped all the reviews from TheBestPorn review site, and of course our stuff was among that. We learned they were hosted in Hong Kong through a shell corporation that used a disreputable processor that takes money from anybody for anything. We banged the host with a bunch of DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices yesterday, and today the website is down. But as soon as they find another host, it’s going to be back online, and we’ll have to repeat the whole process.
“We need the antipiracy laws to be rewritten, so they make sense for the technology that exists today, and not years ago when they were first written. Hopefully, the music industry will step up to fix this problem, because they have tons of money, and the adult businesses don’t. We’re a bunch of unorganized entrepreneurs. There is no ‘we’ in this business.”
