NEW YORK CITY – A helpful article recently posted by BlackEntertprise.com provides 5 lessons startups can learn from the porn industry, encouraging businesses to keep their websites visual, interactive, simple, navigable and responsive.
For example, “the old adage ‘show, don’t tell’ should not just apply to porn but also to startups,” advises Samara Lynn, the author of the piece. “Invest in stunning visuals: high-resolution images, high-definition videos, crisp slideshows are all attention-getters.”
Lynn’s five tips represent a good start, but why stop at just five lessons when common online porn industry business practices have so much more to offer?
Accordingly, here’s five other lessons startup businesses can learn from porn.
Everybody loves pop-under ad consoles. If surfers didn’t enjoy closing mystery windows that spawn every time they try to click through to another page, start up a video, or hurriedly try to close out their viewing session when they’re mother suddenly walks in to their bedroom, the world’s most popular porn sites wouldn’t use such ad consoles, right?
On a related note, the porn-surfing world must be horribly deprived when it comes to having heard of Live Jasmin, because every goddam tube site on the planet sure seems to be on an awareness-raising campaign of some kind for them.
If one quickly renewing “trial offer” is good, three more hard-to-spot ones must be great. Seriously, if your customer didn’t want to be billed four times for a total of $120 when signing up for a $1.99 trial, he’d just stick to the tube sites, right?
Intellectual property, intellectual schmoperty. When was the last time listening to a lawyer’s advice made you money, as opposed to costing you at least $400 per hour? Sure, your business model probably violates nearly every tenet of copyright and trademark law, but nobody in the industry except the occasional gay porn studio (and maybe Jason Tucker) is going to bother suing your ass, so fuck it, just steal content like crazy passively accept uploads from third parties over whom you have no influence or control.
When all else fails, offer a porn job to some reality TV shithead. For businesses that can’t explicitly advertise their products on most traditional and new media outlets, publicity can be hard to come by. Fortunately, this can be mitigated by offering to pay irritating former reality TV stars to suck dick on camera.
Granted, if your startup business is selling auto parts or offering accounting services, it might be hard to exploit the potential of the porn-job-offer-to-reality-TV-idiot approach, because nobody wants a “teen mom” doing their company’s books — even if she does suck their cock first.
If anybody asks, you’re richer than ever, the company is growing like mad and everything is going unbelievably super well. As my high school football coach often said: “Success starts with believing you’re already successful.” Apparently, this is true even if you’ve just been accused of sexually harassing the head of the English department at a recent faculty retreat.
As a practical matter, based on the instructive model of internet porn companies, this means endlessly boasting about your company’s tremendous financial success even as you’re explaining why you can’t pay one of your advertisers right at the moment, maybe not until June, because the accounting department has already gone home for the quarter and their phones are on the fritz and the CEO is in the middle of a divorce and the dog ate their “rogue designer” — but don’t worry and definitely keep sending traffic, because their newest site is “converting like it’s 1997,” despite not offering any content shot since roughly the same year.
Yes, all you aspiring entrepreneurs and startup business owners, there is indeed a great deal you can learn from the porn industry. For that matter, we’re still just scratching the surface here. We haven’t even touched on how your accounting firm can stretch its dollars by simply repackaging their clients’ prior-year tax returns as filings for the current year and calling it an “exclusive filing,” or the most efficient ways to store the documents that prove all your company’s auto parts are at least 18 years old, for example.
Tune in next time, when we’ll look at five things molecular biologists can learn from California Psychic hotline operators!
