Page 62 - AVN September 2016

by STEWARTTONGUE
The Value of Free
Industry execs prepare for ‘Free Porn Day’ experiment on Sept. 8
may sound like a fan’s dream, but thanks to some innovative minds FreePornDay.com is becoming a business reality on September 8,
What if all porn was free online, including the top paysites on the planet, and consumers could just go watch whatever they want? That
2016—and the hope is that it will do a lot of good for the bottom line of many adult site owners. In an industry that has always been
dominated by bold moves and outside-the-box thinkers, Free Porn Day is the newest tactic designed to teach fans about the joys of
high-end porn and the value of paying to see it any time you want.
“Free Porn Day started as a seed of an idea at Evil Angel,” explained Adam Grayson, chief financial officer at Evil Angel. “Our VP of
Product Chris Gentile said, ‘Man, wouldn’t it be great to have all those tube-only users take the Pepsi Challenge for a day to see
what they’re missing?’
“The more companies we approached about it, the more positive the reaction. Do we think we’re changing the
business? Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. However, it’s important to experiment, especially when trying to reach
potential customers that are pretty much off the grid for membership and VOD sites. The most exciting thing
has been the communal energy of 20-plus companies working together to build a great event that fans will
really enjoy. Our team believes that the quality of tubes has declined tremendously due to better policing.
That’s good for content owners, and bad for tubes. I don’t think a lot of their users have quite
realized it yet, however, and hopefully this juxtaposition shakes something loose.”
The reality is that in the early days of the free tube era, there was a massive amount of
piracy that put all the best porn out in the open for fans to watch for free and download
any way they wanted. That era was actually relatively short lived, in large part
because so many studios and shooters felt the financial pinch and opted to license
their content on to brokers or the tubes themselves for pennies on the dollar
of what content used to cost. For quite a while the tubes provided the
same or better viewing experience as most paysites because they had
access to such a massive amount of top-shelf content. Sure, there
were some user-uploaded files, but the bulk of what drove
traffic to the tubes were the same high-quality videos that
used to convert tour visitors into paying customers
for paysite networks.
In the last couple years porn companies
have consolidated; litigation has made
running user-uploaded content
sites more difficult; and the top
studios have started to pull
back from the tubes and
are licensing older
scenes, lower-
quality
content
and
FEATURE
shorter
clips than
before in an
effort to make
their paid content
portfolios more
desirable.
Most of these changes
are happening in the
background, and the average
porn fan is unlikely to have taken
notice of just how much better paid
porn has become than most free site
offerings. To give you an idea of just how
stark the difference really is, take note of the
fact that free tubes have started buying entire
production studios or launching their high-end
niche labels to feed quality content to their fan base in
an attempt to blur the difference between free and paid
content quality.
That’s where this Free Porn Day initiative may gain the most
traction: by enticing free fans to visit paysites and watch the very
best content produced recently without having to pay a single penny.
The air of transparency also helps to convince fans that purchasing
memberships is safe, secure and likely to lead to a satisfying collection of
content worth craving each time they sign up.
“We will be participating in Free Porn Day,” said Michael H. Klein, president
of broadcasting and internet for Vivid Entertainment Group. “Our content will be
free, but we will require credit card data since we feel that is the best way to verify that
someone is over 18 years old before viewing the site. The Free Porn Day initiative is a test
marketing experiment. We think it is a good idea to make people aware that if they want true
high-quality premium content in its full form, there is an associated cost in order to ensure that
we can continue to supply new content. We applaud the effort to try something fresh to attract a
wider audience and we will just have to wait and see if it is successful over time.”
Since Free Porn Day is an opt-in idea that includes a loose consortium of companies rather than one or
two brands, each participating site is free to use whatever definition of free they choose. Some of the sites
we spoke with are requiring credit card information, others want an email registration, and some are not going
to ask for any user data whatsoever when fans come to have a free look inside. There is debate among site owners
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