Part of the series Running an Independent Small Porn Biz in 2016
Everyone has an opinion about the current state of the adult industry when it comes to making money. What I have to say is, of course, my own opinion. With that said, here is my analysis of the current state of commercial photography in adult.
I started out in nude photography with purely artistic goals. Business goals were a distant second. I wanted to make what I considered good images that I could be proud of on the inside regardless who might see them in the future. Personally, this is the only trait that should matter; the only reason to do anything creative at all. Doing it to make money is something altogether different.
Since the dawn of time, as any artist will tell you, it has been nearly impossible to make money creating art. In the present digital age, this has become even more true. The large scale of available consumers is weighed down by the equally large amount of content to be consumed. This creates the appearance of a “flooded market” and applies equally to all forms of content, from news articles to feature films.
So how can you make money off pics? How can you make money off of any creative product? For us, it has come down to knowing and understanding your paying audience. Trying to sell sand in the desert is generally a bad idea, but that is close to what this business model looks like. It’s very hard to sell sets of photos alone as simply sets of great photos. No one cares. If I want to jack off to three girls giving one guy a blowjob, I’ll just type “3 girls bj” into Google’s image search and be done with it in around five minutes. Everyone knows this business problem all too well.
Thankfully, there is another aspect of human habit that is very beneficial to the working artist: the need to give a higher value to one thing over another. A big part of assigning value to things involves putting out hard-earned cash for something — and there lies the secret to making money from creative works. The person who decides to buy a product — let’s say a member pass to a photo site — now has a psychological disposition to be fulfilled by the new purchase. Human vanity takes over from there. No one wants to think they are an idiot for buying something. They also seek self-gratification in new purchases: Girls keep on shopping for shoes even after buying 30 other pairs that month. People will always want to buy “stuff,” including photography.
So, the question becomes “Can I make enough money from a photography business?” I believe the answer to that is a matter of sheer scale. If you run a site that features naked young girls in nature, then how many girls do you have? How many sellable photo sets do you offer? The problem for small studios is that content put out by other companies never really expires. So that means good content that people actually buy is already piling up into gigantic mountains, by both you and your competitors.
The sheer scale needed to make enough money from this business model alone creates a real barrier to success, even survival. If you combine the scaling problem with a drop in general consumer demand for still images, then you might come to think pics are no longer worth anything. If you really want to make money in adult photography, buy a large, well-established site network with thousands of models and millions of high-quality images. Then, become 100-percent focused on marketing alone. Or, you could run a small photo studio that serves an established niche and be happy with whatever profit you might make for as long as you can make it.
What is the real value of high-quality adult photography for the average studio now? I personally feel high-quality pics are worth most as an advertising tool for the brand, which can be pure gold. I’ll not go into brand-building here, but I believe that is the only true key to making a successful business of any kind. Your company exists as an entertainment provider. You will make money as long as you are providing the entertainment your audience wants. Today they want everything, including great pics.
What is a better business model compared to the photo studio model? A few years ago I caught on to the fact that everyone wants video content about twice as much as photo content. So, yeah, the better business model is a well-made package of photos and videos together. I don’t think this is any secret. But photographers are not always videographers, and they certainly aren’t cinematographers. Luckily, I already developed a natural segue into filmmaking shortly after photography. The video business is different from the photography business in many important ways. Personally, I find video much more rewarding throughout the creative process. Photos do have the ability to tell a story, but film’s only purpose is to tell a story.
The good business news is that people always want a new story, no matter how many stories they have already experienced. They are also much more selective and judgmental when it comes to video, which helps dramatically with the problem of “scale.”
The problems facing adult video, aside from piracy, have more to do with the assumed sophistication of the audience, or lack thereof. Does the audience want 2,000 blowjob scenes, shot the same way, to randomly consume? Or do they seek out the specific styles of video they find most appealing? Do they want only the quick POV 10 minutes of action, or would they love it much more if there was a reason to care about the characters on the screen? There are a million of these types of questions when it comes to motion pictures. Questions like these make video a much more sophisticated and differentiated product than photography.
With that said, I believe it is an excellent business strategy to be in both businesses under one brand.
