Phew… Hope you don’t mind if I chill out and drink a nice cold Diet Pepsi while we chat. I’m worn out… but I’ve learned a lot about buying content. As part of a big TrueCash upgrade, I’ve been buying and installing content in our paysites for the better part of three weeks.Phew… Hope you don’t mind if I chill out and drink a nice cold Diet Pepsi while we chat. I’m worn out… but I’ve learned a lot about buying content. As part of a big TrueCash upgrade, I’ve been buying and installing content in our paysites for the better part of three weeks. This is no small task when you consider the sheer number of feeds included in the video and photo content packages of today.
When we built the first iterations of our TrueCash paysites — we’re talking late 1996 and early 1997 here — we had to choose from feeds that cost upwards of $1,500 per month for the most stripped-down package, ranging to $5,000 or even more. That was for a single feed, mind you. They were quite basic, and just about all that the browsers of the day could support was ye ol’ JPG push: No sound and very choppy video. They crashed a lot of browsers, too, but, that’s what started the Internet porn rage. We even bought actual .AVI and .MOV video files which we offered for our members to download. (We still have them, actually.)
Content today has evolved signficantly. Broadband is rapidly taking over, thank goodness – although 56k is still far more common than cable or DSL. The content providers have kept up. Feeds of today offer multiple connection speeds, sound, 30 frame-per-second streams, automatic bandwidth sensing capability, auto-rerouting when an Internet pipe breaks somewhere, etc. It’s really getting to the point that a member with a reasonably powerful computer and a cable/DSL connection can have a “plug and play porn experience.” That’s good, because that means product value is rising.
Of course, this only helps combat the decline caused by saturation – a topic I’ve written about in past editions of YNOT News. Judd will provide a couple of links which you might find useful here: The Dangers of Industry Saturation ; How to Provide Innovative Products in a Saturated Market (As a side note, be sure to browse the YNOT News archives from time to time. There is some really valuable information here – the savvy webmaster will learn things which will fatten his/her wallet.) But saturation is a problem which is outside the scope of this article. The point I’m getting at is that the average AOLer running Internet Explorer might start seeing the value of a $29.95 or $39.95/month membership. That’s good for everyone.
The content situation is not all sunny weather and red roses, however. What I’m consistently frustrated by when I seek out content is the presentation. In some cases, it’s not good. The content itself might be excellent, but when the navigation is so poor that even I can’t figure it out, or the auxiliary graphics are broken on the page where the feed plays, you just have to wonder if anyone is manning the ship.
The other problem requires you to change your focus to really see it. Consider yourself in the shoes of the customer; you just joined our megasite, SexCamLive (http://www.SexCamLive.com); the site has tons of content. You click on a link to a video feed and you are transported to the content provider’s feed page – which looks absolutely NOTHING like the site the member joined. It can be so disjointed and confusing that the member has to re-login to the member site by typing in the URL of the site to get back to the home page. Not good… we are dealing, in many cases, with computer neophytes, or people who are easily confused by Internet navigation. I call upon the third-party content vendors to provide us with better tools to resell the content to our members! The content is already good – we just need to present it with the customer’s needs in mind. Simplify the navigation, make it more consistent, and of course, provide links back to the main members’ area. Some already do this, but not many.
To summarize? The content of today is good — VERY good — but we need to take it to the next level and maximize the user experience. I am sure there are quality-minded adult webmasters out there who will agree with me. What do you think? Send your comments to Judd at YNOT and if we get anything juicy I’ll respond to it in a future edition.
See you next week at YNOT News!
