LAS VEGAS, NV — Wednesday’s schedule at the Xbiz Summer Forum included a seminar covering a topic about which members of the adult internet industry alternately express optimism or skepticism: mobile porn.The message of the Potential of Mobile Porn seminar can be summed up with a refrain that should be very familiar to adult webmasters by now: “The market for mobile porn isn’t here yet, but it is coming…..”
Text Bill CEO Sean O’Connor, Edvin Aghanian of WAAT Media, Zachary Pfeiffer of ZA Media, and Todd Spaits of YanksCash were joined by moderator Steve Javors of Xbiz for the discussion.
One of the central questions examined by the panel was summed up quite simply by Javors; why does the US mobile adult market lag so far behind the European market?
O’Connor noted that there’s a long list of factors that hinder the market for mobile porn in the U.S., the most significant of them being the reticence of any major carriers to “attach their names to porn.” By contrast, O’Connor said, “Europe embraced it.”
In addition to the reluctance to adopt the adult entertainment industry into the overall fold of the U.S. mobile market on the part of carriers, Aghanian pointed to a “technical gap” in the American market and said that European consumers are generally more comfortable with mobile technologies as a means of both payment and content delivery than are their counterparts stateside.
Spaits noted that carriers in the U.S. are “not on the same page, not working together,” and as a result, the U.S. market is hodgepodge of competing technologies and standards.
“It is coming,” Spaits said, “we just need to catch up with the rest of the world.”
Aghanian underlined the difficulty of supporting a wide range of devices, formats, and standards, noting that a new mobile device is released to market on an average of every six days.
“This is one of the complexities that people don’t see,” Aghanian said, adding that, unlike on the Web, where one only has to worry about a few different varieties of browsers, in the mobile market there are hundreds of different varieties of phones and other hand-held devices.
“Mobile presents both limitations and advantages,” said Pfeiffer. “One of those limitations is that your user has to be ready and able to view your content,” and have the technical savvy to conquer the learning curve of their own mobile devices.
On the other hand, Pfeiffer said, mobile offers some intriguing advertising avenues, like podcasts, and the opportunity to obtain traffic from mainstream sources that are typically closed to the adult industry.
O’Connor said he sees a more fundamental reason for the lack of webmaster-level enthusiasm for the mobile market in the US; the current lack of compelling payouts on mobile content sales.
“The reason webmasters don’t like mobile is that the payouts are garbage,” O’Connor said flatly, adding that he worried he would “scare people away” with his comments, but that it was important to confront the reality of mobile in the U.S. as it currently stands.
O’Connor said there’s no question there is some money to be had in the current U.S. market for mobile adult content, but “when you try to share the money, that’s where the problem comes in.”
In other words, for webmasters used to earning $30 per signup for adult sites, getting small percentage of a $2 sale is far less interesting.
Aghanian said he sees the “a la carte” method that many approach mobile with as a large part of the problem.
“WAAT wants to change the way people buy mobile content,” Aghanian said, adding that the company plans to develop subscription-style mobile billing options, which could open up the commissions more and make the market more palatable to the affiliate-driven business model.
All panelists agreed that the bottom line is that the options for monetizing mobile income streams in the US adult industry are fairly limited. So what is a U.S. adult company that wants to make inroads into mobile now to do?
“The best route for marketing mobile currently is to your own members,” said Spaits, an assertion that drew nods of approval from the rest of the panel. “Use it as an upsell properly, and the opportunity is there to make some money.”
Until such time as the U.S. carriers soften their stance on the delivery of adult content across their networks, however, the operative word in the above statement appears to be “some.”
The panelists were unanimous in the opinion that “the day will come,” but given the complex set of issues involved, the precise timeframe for that day’s arrival essentially remains anybody’s guess.
