A few days ago, there was an article published by ZDNet, a leading technology online magazine, which featured an expose on the adult online entertainment world.A few days ago, there was an article published by ZDNet, a leading technology online magazine, which featured an expose on the adult online entertainment world. The article, written by Randy Barrett, focused on the pessimistic side of this industry. The title of the article says it all: “For Cybersex Sites, Easy Money Is Gone.”

Some mainstream press would have us believe that the economic downturn has crossed over into the world of online adult entertainment. Just a handful of months ago, I remember reading various articles from non-adult sources saying how this industry was basically immune from the whims of our market system. While it’s true that for many adult webmasters, profits aren’t nearly as easy to come by as four or five years ago (maybe even two), in early 2001, the mainstream media focused on what non-porn businesses are learning from this industry’s business models.

Well, it seems like one of the only things that mainstream businesses have adopted from our sector, is unfortunately, those damn annoying pop-up consoles. And now, the mainstream media, as evidenced by the aforementioned article, is taking note that this industry isn’t quite the same gold mine it used to be. But how much is that because of the economy and how much is related to industry saturation? And are these reports the product of media hype?

The downturn in the American economy could indeed prevent more surfers from buying memberships to porn sites if the average American consumer has less money to spend. I don’t think this has much to do with lower sales figures; people need their porn and they are willing to pay for it. It probably does have more to do with industry saturation.

In his article, Barrett states, “It doesn’t help that the market has become deeply saturated, with an estimated 100,000 sites vying for an increasingly fickle, largely male audience. The result is a Technicolor riot of flesh – cloying Web pages that trap visitors in an endless chain of come-ons, applets that hijack home page settings and a tsunami of porn spam clogging e-mailboxes across the planet.”

This is a depressing sign of the times for our industry. This is what mainstream Americans think that the majority of adult webmasters do to make a buck.

The obvious answer to combating the scenario that Barrett presents is to continue to strive for the highest level of ethical standards, which will hopefully persuade and force unethical webmasters to change their tactics.

Beyond that, the saturation of content must be unclogged. The other key ingredient is to eventually do away with free sites that provide to children (and adults), unlimited access to explicit, hardcore porn.

For those webmasters out there that have been in a sales slump recently, check out the lead story on page 1 about European dialer systems. You are probably receiving up to 30 percent of your traffic from non-American surfers, so a good chunk of your traffic isn’t being converted. This is an article that will help you increase your profits, hopefully to levels you may have enjoyed in the golden years of the mid 90s.

All it takes is some time and research for choosing proper software applications that can convert your text into other languages so that your site will be user friendly for European surfers. You’ll also need to adopt Euro-friendly billing systems. These methods are discussed in the article, written by Eric Larcheveque, the president of Eurodialer.com, the first French affiliate program.

The whole world is waiting, waiting for you to make memberships available for non-American, non-credit card carrying surfers.

Referring back to the ZDNet article, Barrett’s statement also says that most buyers of porn memberships are male. In YNOT News, over the last several months, we have featured articles on how to market towards the female surfer. More and more women are buying adult entertainment on the Internet. There’s a huge, unsaturated market waiting to be tapped by the adult webmaster.

The term industry saturation is too hyped. There are ways around it. I’d like to see articles in the mainstream press within the next year stating that porn profits are now at an all time high, thanks in part to more women purchasing online adult entertainment and more Europeans shelling out dough for porn. Who knows? It could be Europe that pulls America out of its economic slumber. I’d also like to see within the next several years, more adult entertainment companies going public. We all know that big industry, such as the oil companies are a bunch of whores. It would be a natural fit if this industry joins them on the public markets…after all, aren’t we the biggest bunch of hos?

Cheer up! It’s not all that bad! Long live online adult entertainment!

–Judd Handler