Page 86 - AVN April 2018

FEATURE |
(Continued from page 59)
FEATURE | By Sharan Street
In a word, the changes are about experimentation. “There are all these times
when people come to us with interesting things or interesting people and we
say, ‘Well, we sort of have this rigid structure where you have to put out movies
this often and you have to put in this much money.’ So we’ve tried to be a little
more creative with making things happen. Proxy Paige is a good example. Proxy’s
somebody who shot for a competitor, Legal Porno, for a long time. She was very
good friends with John so she was kind of extended Evil Angel family. We’d just
never figured out a way to work together, and I think last summer we started
talking and we’re like, ‘What the hell do we have to lose here? She’s clearly
talented, she clearly makes content that our core customers like because they’ve
mentioned it from other sites it’s been on, so, why not?’”
As a female director, Paige “sort of breaks the mold” in a company that has
“historically been driven by male performers who are currently or previously
male talent,” Grayson says. But she’s hardly the first. Aside from the now-retired
Belladonna, there is Aiden Starr, who is “becoming central to a lot of what we’re
doing here,” Grayson says. “I look at her as one of our big success stories over the
past few years.” In the beginning Starr was shooting content that didn’t seem to
be connecting with consumers. “It was right when we were building our business
intelligence stack and gathering data, and I went to her and said, we need to
break this down,” he recalls. Since then, Starr has diversified, which has led to
commercial success. “She’s shooting the family stuff and the TS stuff and the IR
stuff, and I look at her numbers and she’s really successful. It’s really worked. She
is great to work with. She really wants to know what’s happening. She’s not afraid
of criticism or suggestions. She’s really on our team. She wants us to succeed so
that she succeeds.”
Aside from that, he also gets a kick out of Starr personally. “She’s got a
different kind of mind. I introduced somebody to her in Vegas [at the AVN Adult
Entertainment Expo]: ‘This is Aiden. She’s awesome, you should meet her,
but you can’t unhear the things she might say.’ She said that was a pretty good
summary of her.”
I DEFINITELY COME INTO EVERYTHING
ASSUMING I KNOW NOTHING, I HAVE NO
EXPERTISE, AND I HAVE NO INSIGHT. AND
I REALLY THINK THAT’S HOW EVERYBODY
SHOULD COME TO WORK EVERY DAY.
Finally, there’s the newest female director in the Evil Angel stable. The deal with
Lisa Ann “landed in our lap, frankly,” Grayson says. “I wish everybody who worked
with us was quite as deadline-driven and organized as she. But that’s not reality.
I think of myself as extremely disciplined—she’s way more disciplined than I am.
She’ll text me, ‘I just did this, this, this and this.’ And my response is usually, ‘Do
you sleep? There’s no way you can do all this stuff.’ In between running her site
and blogging and doing her Sirius show and doing all these radio pickups—multiple
radio interviews every day with all these local stations—she’s traveling and she’s
gonna feature, and she’s doing this, and then she tells me, ‘Anytime you want me to
do a store signing, you’ve got it.’”
Consumers vs. Customers
Grayson identifies two factors that are key to Evil Angel’s commercial success:
content and user experience. “More than ever, people are judging EvilAngel.com
against Netflix,” he says, laughing about the inequity of comparing a multibillion-
dollar mainstream brand to any adult company. “But we’ve accepted the fact—that’s
the yardstick. I think the industry in terms of content and UX is better than ever. I
think it still has a ways to go. I think it’s a pretty good time to be a porn fan.”
But, of course, many of those fans don’t actually part with any money to watch
porn. “We started partitioning this idea of consumers and customers a few
years ago. It used to be a perfect one-to-one in our business, right? If somebody
consumed your stuff, they paid for it. But now it’s probably 10,000 to one, or
something.” Operating on the theory that everyone has a tipping point at which
86 | AVN.com | 4.18
they tire of wasting time on subpar free content, Grayson says his goal is to “be
in their consciousness for those first few websites that they go to and say, ‘Maybe
I’ll pay for porn this month.’” Toward that end, Evil Angel sinks considerable
resources into social media, and has amassed some 235,000 followers “How many
of those guys are Evil Angel members? Fewer than I’d like,” he muses. But it’s still
a positive change that “being a fan is less in the shadows than it was.”
Those fans who do make the leap to become paying customers are willing to
pony up for one of the most expensive sites in the adult industry. Grayson says
they believe it’s a fair price, given the quantity and quality of the content.
And there’s always room for improvement, of course. “The sleight of hand for
me is when you can get a guy who’s not planning on playing with his dick to log
into the site to see what’s going on, what are the new updates, what happened
in the forum—that’s amazing if it can function even for five minutes like Reddit
or another community like that. Let’s call it a stretch goal … creating longtime
stickiness in the member area.”
Profitability, content production and providing a good user experience all seem
to rate much higher than tech bells and whistles to Grayson. “A lot of what we
do is figuring out how to exploit our existing content on as many platforms as
possible. That’s really why we have a TV division. … The whole purpose of this
is to monetize Evil Angel content, and to make Evil Angel and our directors more
money. I don’t think we’re ever chasing the tech trend. … I mean, we don’t have a
Roku channel. And I have Rokus all over my house. I love Roku. I’m just not sure
it’s in the long run going to be a significant profitable opportunity for us. That
could change tomorrow.
“But when we sit around and evaluate these things, it’s always about revenue
around here, because the directors get a share of revenue, so I need to make them
enough money to keep them wanting to make movies for us. But it’s also a profit
argument. There are a lot of things we could do that would generate revenue for
them but wouldn’t necessarily generate a profit for us after operating expenses. So
it’s balancing those two needs.”
Plus, before the company jumps into something like virtual reality or other
new tech, the quality needs to be there. “If we’re going to put our name on it and
expect people to pay for it, it better be really good. It better not just be OK.”
No matter what he thinks today, though, Grayson reserves the right to keep an
open mind. “I definitely come into everything assuming I know nothing, I have no
expertise, and I have no insight. And I really think that’s how everybody should
come to work every day. It’s like you’re constantly running a treadmill to catch up
with something, and you’re not even sure what you’re chasing. If you sit there and
assume you know everything, before you know it, everything’s going to pass you
by because things change too quickly.”
Asked about what things about the industry irk him the most, Grayson says, “I
would have said probably a few years ago that people think in terms of the wrong
time horizons and make decisions that are too aligned with short-term goals. I
think it’s getting better. I think there are more people thinking in terms of years
and decades, and not weeks and months. …
“A lot of this business was built on get-rich-quick mentalities. But I think it’s
less now than it’s ever been before,” he adds.
“Honestly, on the whole I think I like it more than I did 15 years ago. I think
there’s a different caliber of people running it, especially on the video side. …
Now I’m surrounded by people I really enjoy sitting down with and talking shop.
Jon Blitt’s a great example. … I think we’re going in the right direction in terms
of how companies and executives attack problems and try to solve them and
provide customer value. I mean, look at Gamma Films and what’s happening with
Bree Mills and all that. It’s a total step forward. And Greg Lansky—that’s about
delivering customer value that people want to pay for in the long term. That’s
what we should all be doing.
“I think if more people do good work that customers like, it helps us all. It
raises the water level, if you will. I very much believe that. So I think that Bree and
Greg and Angela [White], through what they do, in a way make Evil Angel better.
Because not only does it force us to be better, to compete, it also trains customers
to pay for good stuff. And to look down their nose at stuff that sucks.”