By Peter Berton

ALAMEDA, Calif. – As anyone in the adult entertainment industry knows, internet surfers don’t want to pay for online porn. At the same time, they will pay to download music and other content from à la carte websites like iTunes.

Content leasing and management company SexEntertain has devised a solution addressing both issues. VendContent is a video e-commerce platform enabling clients to sell clips directly to penny-pinching surfers.

“VendContent makes it simple for adult webmasters and studios to create their own iTunes-like stores to convert those visitors who do not buy memberships but are, in fact, willing to pay à la carte for rentals or purchases of scenes, DVDs, episodes or bundles of content,” SexEntertain Chief Executive Officer RJ said.

YNOT.com put him on the spot with questions.

YNOT: First things first. What does SexEntertain offer to adult webmasters?

RJ: We focus on high-end, exclusive or hard-to-get content libraries. We service leading studios including Vivid, Dorcel, Private, Hustler and Lucas Entertainment, for example, in addition to Adult Source Media, the leading source of animated content. Since webmasters are focused on conversion and retention, expanding existing sites or building new ones with content from brands that consumers recognize is naturally a great fit.

This effort then expanded our managed services business, which essentially are outsourced marketing and sales, to help clients expand their brands to more online consumers and drive organic traffic to their online properties.

Who uses VendContent?

Grooby Productions, a leading transsexual content producer that operates a set of membership sites, is rolling out a VendContent-powered site to directly rent and sell their content to visitors who don’t buy memberships. This solution improves conversion and monetization rates, lowers chargeback ratios and the cost of each acquired customer, generates organic traffic from repeat consumer visits, and extracts more value from their content library while improving their brand.

Consumers who like Grooby content but do not like memberships now can choose the high-resolution, high-quality content they like, the purchase package they like and watch on any device they own. It’s a great deal, even for those customers accustomed to viewing free but low-resolution content on tubes.

HentaiKey, which operates a set of membership sites, uses SexEntertain content to add value to their membership offer and just rolled out a private Roku channel running off our platform with access limited to their paying members. This solution improves conversion and retention while giving HentaiKey’s paying customers a better value for their membership and more ways to watch their movies.

We have domain owners using VendContent filled with SexEntertain’s leased content libraries to monetize their traffic directly and extract value from their online customer accounts as leads for dating and cam businesses.

The VendContent model allows adult websites to profit from iTunes-savvy surfers. What other market needs are you trying to fulfill?

For our business clients, we focus on boosting customer acquisition and retention rates, lowering customer acquisition costs and extracting maximum value from content libraries.

For consumers, we focus on creating exceptional online shopping and entertainment experiences that provide many choices about how they access and pay for online entertainment.

You also offer a full range of services for newbie webmasters. What do they need to know?

Newbie webmasters can work with SE to speed their entry into the market using our content services, tools and retailing systems. For newbies who also produce their own content, SE recommends skipping over the traditional membership-only business model and instead using VendContent, which provides a more flexible platform for consumer sales and conversions. Since VendContent offers more than one type of user account, a newbie can create a membership site and an iTunes-like store at the same time.

Even an effective, well-designed membership site with great content converts roughly 4 in 1,000 visitors. Newbies should focus on the other 996 visitors, too. Since VendContent is compatible with leading affiliate tracking systems such as NATS, Mansion and CAKE, as the newbie’s VendContent-powered business grows, they can also work with partners.

SE also has developed delivery channels for mobile and Roku, among other platforms. Why are these delivery channels important?

Consumers now have any number of screens they use to access the internet, communicate and entertain themselves. We live in a pay-once, watch-anywhere world, and consumers now expect any entertainment they consume to be accessible regardless where they are and which screen they are using at the moment.

SexEntertain recognizes this and views mobile devices and Roku as access points for our services. We provide our business clients with the resources to service their consumers, who now expect the entertainment they paid for to be accessible where and when it suits them.

What are the biggest errors adult site operators make when it comes to making money from their content?

Our smartest clients now recognize that some of their past decisions resulted only in good short-term benefits and did some long-term harm. Here is what they tell us:

Invest to succeed. Spending $3 to make $10 is a great idea. You can’t rely on revenue-share deals to meet the demands of the market.

Avoid relying too much on distributors to sell your content if that means you lose contact with your customers. For example, contracting a video-on-demand site to premier a new movie for a studio means the studio does not know who watched the movie.

Customers are king. Most adult site operators still think about “traffic” when they focus on marketing instead of focusing on marketing and selling to consumers who have many screens and different preferences.

A great example is mobile traffic, which so many site operators push to distributors rather than making their sites responsive for their consumers. Engage and know your customers so you can sell to them directly again and again. Better to focus on the trees, not the forest, these days.

Is it still possible to make money by selling porn online?

Certainly. In fact, the market is amazingly fertile for smart operators.

In the past 10 years, 2.2 billion more people came online. Now nearly 40 percent of the global population can access the internet for entertainment, and many use several devices every day to do so. That is an amazingly large demand pool with great spending potential.

Smart operators recognize that delivering real value to consumers is the only way to reliably make money. This raises the bar considerably for many adult site operators who have not adapted their business in some time.

Delivering real value directly to customers means having offers that appeal to more consumer segments, knowing much more about each consumer and their preferences, treating each respectfully, anticipating their needs and exceeding their expectations. In other words, success requires good consumer marketing, smart content packaging and pricing, and solid customer service.

This is why we made our VendContent system for content publishers and owners. The system makes it very easy to evolve to meet the demands of an increasingly savvy and selective market.