It’s the time of year for predictions, right? And I have a whopper of a prediction. It may come true, or I may be overextending here just a bit. But what the hell, it’s all for fun, right? But fun or no fun, I do truly believe my prediction will largely play out in 2005.It’s the time of year for predictions, right? And I have a whopper of a prediction. It may come true, or I may be overextending here just a bit. But what the hell, it’s all for fun, right? But fun or no fun, I do truly believe my prediction will largely play out in 2005. So here it is: pay site webmasters who don’t produce their own content will be largely unsuccessful in the coming year.

The traditional “old school” pay site is all but dead. In the past, building a pay site was all about quantity. A webmaster could lease a pile of pictures from a few image brokers, then add some plug-in content like live video feeds and movie clips. These sites would choose a general niche, like “teens” or “Asians.” Whatever. The biggest affiliate programs were founded on these types of pay sites. CyberErotica.com dominated in this manner for years, and it still uses this approach. Yet I predict that if you try this approach in 2005, you will fail.

Quantity marketing has lost much of its effectiveness. Consider the changes of recent years:

First, if quantity is what your surfers are after, a peer-to-peer network like Kazaa can give them all the quantity they need – free. Beyond that, TGP sites also dish out quantity of the free variety. For old-timers, there’s always the newsgroups. Your site has 200,000 images? Big deal, Kazaa has more. Free.

Second, video is ever-important in a broadband world. For most successful pay sites, picture galleries are merely an added bonus for their members. And since the standard video clips cut from porn movies can be had on Kazaa too, the video content that presents a compelling and continuing storyline has the best chance for success. Can you license this kind of content? Rarely. And if you can license it, so can a few thousand other webmasters.

In 2005, the webmasters who want to survive the pay site game will need to produce their own content. For amateurs, this is nothing new – it’s business as usual. But for the old-school webmasters, producing content might be a chore. Just to clarify, nobody is saying that you will have to shoot your own content yourself – although I suspect a lot of you wouldn’t mind that fate. For the budget conscious, the better approach might be to hire established photographers and videographers to shoot exclusive content that you can use on your own sites.

Sure, securing exclusive content is more expensive that simply licensing a few CDs full of pictures – but it may not be as bad as you’re thinking. Sites that offer original content need not offer the same quantity as those old pay site models. So $200 a month for a CD with a few hundred images and another $800 a month for licensed non-exclusive video feeds… or, $400 per week for a steady stream of exclusive video content plus additional bandwidth costs – your expenses may go up a bit, but the alternative is to suffer from an incurable case of irrelevance.

The bottom line is that if you can’t afford to produce your own content in 2005 then you should probably start thinking of doing something other than pay sites. For a while now I’ve been arguing the importance of content with context. It’s nearly impossible to build a great pay site with a compelling storyline if you don’t produce your own content. So where does that leave those of you who don’t want to produce exclusive video in 2005? Easy, you simply partner up with a pay site that is already producing this kind of content. You may simply join their affiliate program, or if you have something to offer then perhaps another deal could be had for content.

So you heard it here… with a few rare exceptions, the quantity pay site will officially die in 2005. So produce your own content, or leave pay sites to those who do and focus your efforts elsewhere.

Connor Young is Editor-in-Chief of YNOT News. He has been involved with the online adult entertainment business since 1997, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors for the Internet Freedom Association (i-freedom.org); He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of The ADULTWEBMASTER Magazine. Connor can be reached at connor@ynot.com.