YNOT – Chicago’s legendary Bijou Theater and parent company Bijou Video celebrate their 40th anniversary this year. Founded by GAYVN Lifetime Achievement Award Winner Steven Toushin, Bijou is one of the oldest and most diverse gay sexuality companies in the world, operating a portfolio of businesses including subscription websites, wholesale and retail DVD sales, and one of the only lawfully operating walk-in gay porn theaters in the U.S.
To celebrate the anniversary, the company has launched a new affiliate program, Bijou Bucks. The program pays 50-percent recurring revenue share and offers promotional tools like free-hosted galleries and deep links. Affiliates of the previous Bijou affiliate program managed by Epoch will retain access to their reports and related materials, but are encouraged to sign up for the new program in order to take advantage of new resources, a spokesperson said.
BijouBucks’ main consumer site, BijouGayMovies.com, provides daily updates of video scenes from one of the largest collections of classic gay porn available anywhere in the world. Launched in 2011, the site for the first time made Bijou’s best-selling content available to the public in a subscription format.
“The content available to a BijouGayMovies.com member is not your run-of-the-mill mass-market male erotica,” said the company’s marketing director. “Our videos are timeless pieces of gay porn from the pre-condom era which most gay men over the age of 30 have seen at least once, whether they knew it or not at the time.”
The Bijou Video library encompasses more than 200 classic gay films spanning the 1960s through the 1980s, many plot-driven. Many of the most popular gay content categories are represented, from college and school scenes to leathermen, twinks, bears, interracial sex, black men, Latinos and “men next door” from around the world. The library includes the entire collection of Nova Studios and Hand-in-Hand Films, and offers many titles starring legendary gay porn actors Jack Wrangler and Al Parker.
“Since beta launch, BijouGayMovies has converted traffic from members areas as a gay classic videos up-sell, from video hubs and TGPs, and from major search engines and blogs at anywhere from 1:10 to 1:200, even on higher volume traffic resources,” the marketing director said. “BijouGayMovies sells itself quite effectively as a full site, yet offers the ability to be marketed by featured DVD title for the consumers who know exactly what they want.”
