Page 38 - AVN June 2015
P. 38
TECH NEWS
STOP, THIEF | |By Nate Glass
So then the goal is to inform them that you exist?
Exactly, and that is the entire focus of our branding and marketing, informing
these people who are entering that customer pool that there is efficiency out there.
The one thing that most people will agree on is that trolling those sites is time-
consuming.
You mean the tube sites?
Yes, because the meta-tagging is poor, it takes a long time to find things, and the
efficiency of one’s time when you’re looking for something is more valuable to
some people than others. If you’re in college, you can spend 16 hours looking for
something. But if you are an executive with kids running around and a wife who
makes demands on your time, you have a very limited window to find something
and consume it. So in a sense we are selling people their time, and that’s something
we think about a lot, but again, it’s a part of that overall value formula. How can
we impart value to people? But I do believe that every day brings more people
traversing that chasm from being a consumer to a customer, because of a life event.
Do you brand Evil Angel or the underlying director?
I always talk about how every movie we put out has two brands. It’s got the Evil
Angel brand, which means something, and then it has the Joey Silvera or Rocco
Siffredi or Buttman brand, which mean something else. Interestingly, we look at
metrics from our website about who watches what, and there are certain clusters
of directors—like, a guy who is a Mike Adriano fan is likely to also be a Rocco
Siffredi fan, and a Kevin Moore fan is likely to be a Jonni Darkko fan, because of
the selection of talent, the way they shoot, the fetishes they choose to shoot, but
just because someone is an Evil Angel fan doesn’t mean they watch all the movies.
So what does the Evil Angel brand mean, then?
I think it relates back to the expectation that whatever I press “play” on will pass
a certain bar, a certain commitment that Evil Angel has made to the customer that
anything that ships out of our warehouse or feeds off our servers met a minimum
threshold. I think there are more companies like that today than ever before. John
and I talk about this a lot; that the overall quality of porn being made in the last
five years is at an all-time high, because people realized that you couldn’t sell junk
forever. …
For years, in terms of quality product, it was a race to the bottom. I will admit
that the first porno I ever bought was a four-hour Leisure Time comp. I looked at
this box cover, a mark who didn’t know anything, and I go, ‘Huh, four hours! 240
minutes! For $3.99!’ And then you look over and there’s an Evil Angel movie with
only 140 minutes (because they bought the best tape stock and that was all you
could fit on it), and it would be $54.99. That was an easy choice for me back then.
For me, it was about six months or a year of buying these four-hour things
before I realized I was starting to see the same scenes over and over again, and
that the girl on the cover wasn’t even in the movie. I remember the first Evil Angel
stuff I ever watched was Randy West, but I had to hop that fence in terms of my
mindset, thinking, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just rent it first because it’s really expensive,”
but the first few times I did it, it was very easy for me to tell the difference. The
light bulb really went on—and I don’t think I am that unique a person—where I
said to myself, “Man, this is really visibly better than that other stuff.” Whatever
“better” meant in that moment, it was better.
And from that point on, in my former years, it was Evil Angel, Elegant after
they left here, Anabolic, Diabolic, this stuff that had become very clear to me
was simply better. And then of course there did become a time when I had a few
shekels in my pocket, when I said, you know what, I think I will pay $39.99 for a
movie I’d already rented twice and knew I liked a lot. It was a gradual process for
me, as I think it is for many people.
Let’s get back for a second to your interest in increasing mainstream branding, consumer
exposure. There are so many avenues and platforms on which to communicate.
Social media is very important. It certainly skews younger, with people who don’t
necessarily pay, but as social media matures and as people get older, they’re going
to start paying for stuff, and we want to be branded, we want them to be aware of
us, even if they aren’t paying yet. For us, it’s about looking at the world around us
in a certain way. We may make porn a certain way, but we can’t be so arrogant as
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to think that we’re going to tell people what screens they’re going to watch it on,
or what payment system they’re going to use. I think there was a certain arrogance
for a period of time in which people felt that people who wanted porn would have
to come to them, but the world is so fluid now. I remember a few years ago John
asked, “What’s the new shiny disc?” And I said, “There is no disc. It doesn’t exist.”
I mean, VHS lasted twenty years, DVD really had a significant lifespan of eight
to ten years, and we could look at digital and web as one thing, but it’s bigger than
that. I also asked John a few years ago what this company is. His answer was that
we sell porn DVDs. Wrong, I said. We are engaged in the digital distribution of
content. It’s our job to get ones and zeros anywhere that someone wants to pay to
consume them. We do sell a lot of hard goods out of our warehouse, but it’s really
just about distribution digitally, which is exactly how the studios across the hill
are thinking about their business, despite the fact that people still go to theaters
to watch their movies.
life event happens. Turning 18 is
”We get a new customer when a
no longer that life event; getting a
first well-paying job is a life event.
—Adam Grayson
Is this where broadcast comes in?
Yes. In fact, this definition of what our business is led us directly to the broadcast
initiative that we began a few years ago. Christian and I came to a place where
we were trying to take a step back and see the big picture. How do we connect
the dots between the stuff we make and all the people out there? We came to the
conclusion that the traditional world of brokered distribution relationships was
just not going to be for us anymore because we were of a certain scale in terms of
the amount of product we were producing that we could do everything in-house.
It sounds like a sea-change sort of decision.
Well, the reason why most people want to get rid of third-party brokers is because
they take a percentage of the money; I think for us it was less that than that we
wanted to control the destiny of where everything goes, and understanding it.
In the analog world, everyone is selling territorial rights. But is your logo even
on it once it comes out in a particular country? Is it being re-edited? Is the box
cover terrible? There are so many questions that arise, and it just got to a point
where we wanted to control Evil Angel content from the presses to the customer’s
hand. It’s not that revolutionary; lots of other people in the business have taken
that stance, but when we looked at it, we found that the scale of this company
justified the cost associated with the decision.
We’d been working exclusively with Hustler TV for eight years. They didn’t do
anything wrong; in fact, we’ve maintained a cordial relationship after the fact, but
Christian and I looked at one another and said, “Why are we doing this here?” We
have enough programming. We’re pretty much the only—maybe MindGeek, with
all the different brands they control—but we’re the only studio in the traditional
sense that has enough content to power an entire broadcast business on its
own, and not have to go out and license. So why don’t we just do this? When
our movies were on VOD and broadcast for Hustler, everything was branded as
Hustler! Which means that if someone was watching something really good, they
didn’t know it was Evil Angel!
When exactly was this?
It was spring-summer of 2013 when we decided that we were going to let our
Hustler TV agreement expire and we were going to make a go of it ourselves. This
was just about controlling our own destiny.
Was there a weaning process?
They had a certain exploitation period, so we just stopped providing titles on a
certain date while they still had the rights to earlier ones.