The navigation, content and structure of the new portal has been designed based on feedback direct from consumers, company officials said.
Cherrysauce's business-to-business and direct-consumer channels grew considerably during 2005 in terms of both global reach and revenue, according to the company.
“There was some doubt within the mobile industry about erotica throughout 2005,” Cherrysauce Managing Director Julia Dimambro said. “But these results show that consumers are just as interested in adult content on their mobile phones are they are online and on their TVs.”
Dimambro added that the new portal is designed to encourage further growth. The site, which launched in October, contains numerous feedback options on every page to help the company gauge what their customers think about the site.
“I didn’t expect the sheer volume of feedback we received,” Dimambro said. “The users are more open than I ever expected — they just needed an outlet. We have had several thousand comments about content preferences, including which areas they think are cool, [need] improvement and expansion, and how much they are enjoying the site. We arrived at the conclusion that a re-design of the portal's structure and content would give our consumers an even greater experience and encourage more pick up and return visits.”
Dimambro said one of the biggest changes to the portal has been the “adult” and “soft” division content featured on the site. The first version of the site contained an equal split of content, but the softcore content produced less than 20 percent of revenues.
“It doesn’t make commercial sense to invest as much time and resources in these areas if our customers are more interested in +18 adult content,” Dimambro said. “The new version of Cherrysauce has a much greater focus on areas such as ‘latest,’ ‘recommended’ and ‘hardcore’ and has created a smaller clearly labelled ‘Babe Zone’ for the less graphic content.”
Cherrysauce also has partnered with U.K.-based company CC Media, which is providing live and interactive video chat service for the website. The service allows chat hosts to be video streamed to 2.5 and 3G phones, coupled with a text layer allowing users to text and see hosts simultaneously.