Page 37 - AVN June 2015

Does that brand of integrity translate into unique loyalty on
the part of his directors?
Absolutely. I have been in some tough meetings
with these guys over the years, having some tough
conversations, and these guys don’t blink: ‘Whatever
John says.’ Their loyalty to John is shocking. ‘Well,
if John thinks that’s the right thing to do, sign me
up.’ I have never seen an adult company with so little
squabbling.
Can you really run an ethical company and still be on a
successful upward trajectory?
We do and we are. Our directors get paid in full
the second business day of every month; no one in
this business pays quicker than that. We have no
cross-sales on any of our websites; we have nothing
misleading on any of our movies. If we replicate a disc
and then realize there’s a name on the art that isn’t in
the movie, I can guarantee that it gets shredded that
day. I don’t care what the cost is. The core value here
really is about delivering a product to consumers that
is packaged and marketed correctly, and that their
expectations are met every time.
About cross-sales. You say you have none. Is that a
policy set of affiliate program Famedollars.com, or is it
your policy?
It’s John’s policy. ... John will not do it because he
thinks it is fraudulent toward the consumers, period.
And he thinks that if Evil Angel has one asset it is its
reputation with the customers to provide the product
as advertised and nothing less. He feels that it would
tarnish that relationship with the customer.
This sort of raises the question of branding—which
also raises questions about whether it is Evil Angel
that will be branded, or the directors or certain titles,
or all of the above.
Enviably, Evil Angel has been so successful in its
history that I don’t think anyone ever paid much
attention to branding. This company made a fortune
from what I call the two-percenters, the hardcore
porn fans. … This company paid its rent very
comfortably not working about the other 98 percent.
Evil just did what it does, and a certain part of the
market came with it, and it never had to worry about
anything. … Looking at it now, however, at everything
we do, whether it is the website, broadcast or DVD,
I can look someone in the eye and say, if a customer
takes the Pepsi challenge, we will come out ahead.
The analogy I use is wine. I’m not a wine guy—I
can’t tell the difference between a $25 bottle and a
$250 bottle—but the guy who can tell, can tell, and
I think the same thing can be said about porn. A guy
who doesn’t care is probably not going to be able to
tell the difference between an Evil Angel Rocco movie
and a 4-hour LeisureTime comp, but the guy who is
a real customer and spends money is going to be able
to tell. And one day he’s going to rent that first Evil
Angel movie and go, “You know what, this is better
than that other stuff, and I’m going to spend more of
my porn budget on that stuff.”
Can you define quality?
I think at Evil Angel there are 18 different definitions
of quality because every director has a different
style. Someone at first might think Mike Adriano
and Jay Sin are interchangeable because they’re
both about gaping anal, but stylistically those are
two very different guys, especially for a connoisseur
of anal porn. So, from a distance, there is a certain
consistency across all of it, but to me what quality
means is that it is all created with care; from casting
to photos, from the camera work through editing,
it is done with care for the purpose of making sure
that the person who consumes it down the road gets
the best product that can be presented from the raw
ingredients. …
It’s the same task as in theater or mainstream film;
it’s the director’s job to take that lump of clay and
bring out the best in it. To me, what separates the
amateurs from the pros, or the pros from the hall of
famers, is when a performer shows up hung-over and
in a bad mood; some people are going to end up with
a bad scene and others, through the trial-and-error
they’ve developed over the years, save the scene,
usually because of what the director got out of them.
Is quality the answer to getting people to pay in the first
case, even when it comes to millennials? Can that work?
It is working. On a purely accounting level, 2014
was the best year we’ve had since before the global
financial crisis of 2008. So, yes, it’s working.
But revenue is also coming from far more diverse places
these days, isn’t it?
Yes, obviously it’s more of a mix than it was in 2007.
The hard goods part of our business is less than half
what it was, which has been the case for the last few
years. But it’s not considerably less than half. Believe
it or not, we still sell a significant amount of DVD at
a really high price.
If you want we can go back to the warehouse and
see the guys packing boxes. We’re releasing five or six
new releases a week, and people are buying them.
Domestic and international?
Domestic is atrophying quicker than international on
the DVD side, but the web side is growing quicker
domestically. The good news for us is that the drop-
off of hard goods has been more than eclipsed by the
growth of digital revenue, so top-line is growing and
bottom-line is growing.
I’d like to revisit my definition of quality for a
minute. I think quality is a subset of value, and is also
a factor in every market. Every consumer wants to
believe that they are getting value that exceeds what
they paid for something. What are the components
of value? The price you pay, the quality of what you
get, the user experience, the customer service; all of
these things get bundled into this soft word, value.
So, for us, quality is probably the single biggest slice
of that value pie, and it has resulted in things like our
website subscription revenue growing every month.
Since Gamma and FameDollars took over the
site, I don’t think we’ve had a month-over-month
downturn, and we believe that it is because we are
fixated on making sure that the value of what we give
a customer exceeds what they paid for it. …
I am not terribly interested in the market of porn
consumers. I am far more interested in the market of
porn customers or prospective customers. There are
a certain percentage of people—a 19-year-old in his
dorm room who has no money in his pocket but has a
high-speed internet connection—who is never going
to spend money on porn, period. And then there’s the
65-year-old guy who has money but maybe a small
window every week to go watch porn, who doesn’t
want to fool around with broken links or whatever.
He’s going to pay for it, by subscription or by the
minute, and those are the guys we’re interested in
locating and attracting, and that’s also where the
value formula comes in, when they see what we
provide for them is equal or more than the money we
are asking of them in turns of money.
For the guy who perceives the value to be lower
than that, good luck and god speed, but I’m not that
stressed out about marketing to those people. I know
it’s very different from the MindGeek approach,
because their flagship products are really appealing to
those people, and hey, that’s their business and this is
our business. I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it.
Do you lose sleep over the Torrents or any methods of
substantial piracy?
We do everything in our power to prevent things.
We work with Nate Glass over at Takedown Piracy to
handle the tube takedowns, we work with different
enforcement companies all over the world to handle
BitTorrent abuse. I go to sleep knowing that with
the technology available to me that day I have done
everything I can to combat piracy. If I get hysterical
worrying about someone watching one of our movies
for free, I would never get any sleep.
Are you saying there really are budding porn customers in
all those non-paying porn consumers?
Yes, life events happen. Someone just told me that
it used to be that we got a new customer whenever
someone turned 18. That doesn’t happen anymore.
Now we get a new customer when a life event
happens. Turning 18 is no longer that life event;
getting a first well-paying job is a life event.
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