Business idea for a smart hosting company
 

With tube sites now being a mainstay of the adult industry, tube sites are now virtually unavoidable for many webmasters. However, many smaller webmasters lack the technical expertise and funds to start good tube sites.

This is where a smart hosting company could step in.

There are many tube scripts, and most of them suck balls. They're often not scalable, don't handle design implementation well, don't do encoding, are not suitable for the adult model, etc. The fundamental problem is that in many cases, they simply aren't made with the adult industry in mind, or only function as glorified mgps.

A hosting company that had its own tube script developed and offered it as a ready-made integrated tube hosting solution could easily take up a fairly large share of the lower bracket of the market.

Now, at first glance, the lower bracket of the market might not seem particularly attractive. However, keeping in mind the relatively large part of revenue that tube sites spend on bandwidth, the outlook becomes quite a bit brighter.

It gets even better if you consider that the bandwidth would be sold at a premium because of the added service. This becomes truly profitable once sites start growing, and webmasters keep paying above-average rates for their bandwidth because their sites are locked into you platform.

Moreover, it would be fairly simple to increase additional profits significantly by striking up deals with design companies, content providers for seeder content, and of course affiliate programs.

The base cms for such a system would have to satisfy certain demands. It should be easily customizable design-wise, should integrate well with traffic management and ad management systems, probably shouldn't allow user uploads (to avoid content theft and the inevitable hassles it causes), would definitely have to support importing feeds from sponsors, and would have to support encoding of webmaster uploads as well.

So, initial investments would be sizable. The benefit of locking customers in to your platform and thus your bandwidth prices should easily make up for that, though.

Anyway, just a random thought.

Would these be legal tubes or illegal tubes?

Legal ones, of course. Illegal ones would be far too much of a hassle - apart from the obvious ethical problems.

That's why user uploads should not be supported, and why deals with content providers for easily importable video content could bring in significant money using a platform like this.

Yes, and offer FREE bandwidth!

The point is for the free platform to draw in customers who end up paying prices above the industry standard for bandwidth. So, ehm, no.

It's like the story of the razor and the blades - no point in using that business model if you'll give the blades away.

Hmm... I guess nobody's interested. Ah well.

Well, that would be a great way for everyone and their uncle's dog to have a decent tube site, which is just what we all need.

ummm the largest tube site owners are dying from the BW bill lol and desperately looking for advertisers and or a buyer

What's your point?

I'm not suggesting hosting companies start building their own tube sites, I'm suggesting a business model based around luring webmasters with a low startup cost way to try their own luck in the tube business.

Most would probably go for the tube-mgp model, though. 95% short sponsor clips, 5% longer vids bought from content providers. Profit margins for the webmaster would most likely be slim, profit margins for the hosting company would be larger - since the webmaster ends up spending most of his revenue on bandwidth.

There is already hosting companies which offer that.

I think you are NOT way off in your thinking. I see the market opportunity you are talking about and as someone who is toying with the prospect of a legal tube site of my own, my first intuition tells me to put a B2B spin on it since I have been building B2B companies for over 12 years...

With that said, I like what you are saying, and found out as I am considering starting my own [legal] Tube site that there is no cookie cutter solution, or even available software that is any good (for me anyway).

I have learned many years ago that just because there is a market opportunity or need, doesn't necessarily mean it will be successful.

If you like reading...here's a little personal story as an Example: Back in 1999, I was hired as Interim CEO of a web portal called Financialweb. I was only 29 but I had been SVP of another financial firm and was well in tune with the internet (having been logging on damn near since the beginning). The company had 300 employees and was publicly trading at $5 per share with $100,000,000 market cap (which is to say it was a big company with decent money behind it). We were in talks with yahoo and the newly announced google about acquisition. The point is that the Chairman of the Board of Directors (my boss) wanted a "hook". At the time the company had direct lines into all major stock markets which nobody had except reuters. Even they didn't have AMEX at the time. The firm also had great portfolio tools, and stock screaners and such like no other site at the time. How to use that advantage?

I pitched my idea, and we packaged the tools and live quotes into a co-branded product line to sell to other websites that wanted quotes on their pages. Now a site could co-brand our realtime stock quotes and such and pay monthly fees. I made it so, and hired a sales team. The revenue (all banner driven at the time) went from $136,000 per month to well over $500kper month within three months. BUT, it lay flat at that point. The reason? Nobody really knows. The ironic thing was since the decision was made to avoid acquisition by going B2B, the big portals were not interested anymore (they were strictly B2C at the time).

There was still a tremendous market need, price point was right, but it just didn't stick. in the end sneaky practices by the investors sunk the firm and got three executives put in prison, but I had gone on to start my own mobile software company by that time...You just never know. My first real learning experience about how hard success really is. Fortunately, I don't make the same mistakes twice.

The moral of the story. Market research. before you invest the time and money to put it together, you make sure you have a built in client base when you launch. You can do this in many many ways (such as putting it up here like you did), But never build it just because you "know" it will be needed. Sometimes shit sounds like a great idea, but more often than not it doesn't sell just because it is a good idea.

:2 cents:

How would the hosting companies make sure the videos that are uploaded are legal videos. I wouldn't want to worry about that as a hosting company

Ray - you make a very good point. I'm fairly sure there's a demand for this, but in business, there are no guarantees. There are a number of potential pitfalls for this idea - for example, it probably requires an established company with a large existing customer base to do well.

Another downside is that it would appeal mainly to individuals and smaller companies, and that those often expect very low prices - which the hosting company would not and should not offer. That limits the potential customer base.

And of course there's always the unknown factors, which can end up causing the biggest problems.

The worries would be the same as the ones for any other hosting company, since there are few that disallow their customers from installing tube scripts. In fact, since the platform probably wouldn't allow user uploads, those worries would be smaller here than they are for other hosts.

that would be a nice move from hosting companies

I'm not 100% sure about that minor detail, I don't think we are quite there yet, it's quite possible that a host could lose more $$ by openly stating that they support tube sites than actually gain from it...

If they'd support the illegal ones, I'd certainly agree.

However, when it comes to legal sponsor content and bought content, there really isn't much for others to complain about.

legal vs illegal is just one part of it which effects really only the producers....

the other part effects everyone and it's the idea that giving away good full-length content away for free is killing sales for everyone... that's the direction it's going anyway, but I don't think there is a need to make it easy for any idiot who can afford $100/month to start a tube site simply by signing up for the "tube hosting account"...