I blatantly ignore the blatantly obviously wrong. Private's figures don't make a scrap of sense if that's the whole business. They simply could not of afforded to produce the content they did on the numbers there. They couldn't of afforded to fly whole crews to Thailand, Seychelles or the Caribbean, or hire great big mansions and shoot the features they did. If you knew enough about the business you would understand that.

With 0 effect to their online business???? That's what you don't understand, they had big clients saying "if you go online in a big way we won't buy your product."

Which can be cut down to 5 scenes. Most men watch a scene at a time. They aren't there to see a feature porn movie for 90 minutes. It's about a 20 minute jerk off. Then the next day watch the next scene. Tube traffic proves given the choice consumers prefer a 20 minute jerk of to a months membership.

And yes the customers did have massive amounts of content, that they wanted to download in a month, cancel and not join for months. If you believe what the online gurus were saying. And surfers, they want to download as much as possible for as little as possible and then not pay for months.

Then boot out the guy on your team who accepted that Irish Jig scene. Put the scene up on Pornhub. You ignored that point. :1orglaugh

Rubbish. Most companies would of gone bankrupt if you're right. 2,000 copies selling wholesale = $20,000 per tape. Didn't cover the production costs. 5 scenes for $4,000 :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Maybe for Amateur. Which as you said was a small market offline.

Again you ignore the biggest part of offline porn's income. Retail sales. You compare your retail sales with their wholesales sales and cover it with a phrase about evolving market. I'm saying about porn income 15 years ago. Which was hugely about retail.

You don't even know where a very large part of that income came from and ignored that part.

So I will tell you, it was RENTAL. Rental of porn tapes was a huge earner. Customers who rarely bought a tape, were very happy to rent one. It more or less doubled a porn shops income.

A shop marking up 200% :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Again you display a lack of knowledge of offline. If you had been a porn shopper you would of known about rental and that porn scenes couldn't be shot, edited, packaged for $4,000 per scene.

Paul, I misread something in PRVT's filing. They sold 160k videos/dvds a month. So we are at roughly 4000 copies per title now. But again, PRVT was by far the biggest seller. Their product cost was 25k to 125k per title.

I am also not comparing online sales with production, I am comparing it to retail...

Even if retail was 5000 videos per title on avg, all you get to is still only 50000000 copies sold a year, that's 4.166m a month, 140k a day. At $30 a pop. At 1.5 months retention on avg for a paysite at the same cost that's 92500 sales a day needed to achieve the same results.

That, for the whole internet, is not at all a high number. Not in 2000 and also not today. And on top of that, the DVD market is not completely dead either, it still does 500-1000 dvds per title on avg.

So taking all that into account, and taking discounts for back catalog into account, you are looking at roughly 3000 full priced releases per title more back in 1990s compared to today. So it ends up being only 55555 sales a day that only has to produce to cover this. Or 83333 members a day. With 83333 members a day, and an avg member value across all online products of roughly $60+ (cams, dating, paysites, dvd mega sites, vod and so on) You can compare this to 41666 members only needed, and again, I can guarantee you that number is being hit today.

You keep trying to argue my points by completely twisting what I say btw... that's just silly.

When selling a repeat buy product to a repeat buy customers confidence when buying is the most important thing.

Examples on a tour are good. But if the customer has been fooled before by a sample that showed a good but tiny bit of a few scenes and after spending his money he finds the content is not living up to his expectations. He becomes harder and harder to convince.

People bought a DVD brand they liked over and over again because they were confident it delivered what it promised. I bought Private, Ben Dover, Ed Powers and Buttman's videos because I knew it was good. I sometimes tried someone else's videos.

If they produced I added them to my list of favored sources.

Online is no different. Maybe a surfer sees a sample on a gallery or Tube, from a producer he has been pleased with and needs no more prodding. He knows the site updates, knows the content meets his needs and is happy to part with his money.

Or just hit's the site and says to himself "Fuck me this is good and not the normal type of porn." And whips out his CC.

We went another route. We decided to spend 50% approx and all our efforts on sending traffic to sites that surfers increasingly became disillusioned with. Look at your ratios to see the decline in ratios. Yes a lot of the new traffic could not spend. But a lot were just hard to persuade.

How many times do you need to be disappointed before you become hard to sell to?

The surfers who have abandoned paysites for Tubes clearly don't care enough about HD TV, big screens and 1920 x 1080 and bitrates of 10,000 plus video... or anything else to spend money. Tubes meet their needs far better than paysites and the sad part is paysites have done little to ADAPT. :Oh crap

Maybe that kind of adaptation is cheaper than shooting content that really grabs them by the balls and holds them.

So an average title made $40,000 wholesale. And cost between $25,000 to $125,000 in production cost $75,000 on average? So what am I missing? Seems to me they would of gone out of business in no time at all.
Silly me. I need you to explain to me how they can spend more on producing a title than they earned. :1orglaugh

You also miss out rental. A few years ago Rental in all videos was huge. Including porn. If you had read AVN's stat you would see they listed rental sales. Yes AVN wasn't the most accurate, but it was still listed.

Paul, considering PRVT is almost broke, maybe they actually did over-spend? :)

Dam, those are new sales or are also rebills included on them?

Did some maths, dam bro! thats makes me hope, between the cross sales sites you have ( lets say you convert 10/20% of those ), and keeping a small ammount per signup, lets say 10$, which you off course keep a whole more probably as you invest a lot in advertisings and buildings your own sources of traffic, you do a dam whole bunch of money :) You say the top 10 companies have these numbers? That gives us a lot of hope :)

btw, would you also GUARANTEE whats the top 10 companies average rebills retention?

And if i'm not pushing it too hard, whats the % of the generated revenues you can GUARANTEE top 10 companies use on advertising, or at least Brazzers does? I can easily see you guys invest a lot and other huge companies invest too less IMHO :P

Love having real inside information ;P Many people throwing numbers but they can't back them up :P

Thats the problem for both of us. There are very few real figures to back up what he business makes. Will Fabian produce Manwin's balance sheet to back up his claim?

Or any other online porn company?

It's all speculation. We're all guessing. What we all know is it's getting very tough in the business. People are leaving, boards are closing or grinding to a halt, shows are giving away free passes to get people to attend, they are not the shows of the past, earnings are being cut, content production and prices are being cut. A thriving industry doesn't cut production of the product it sells. And the generally mood is one of pessimism.

Ignore the trolls saying it's never been so good. Because many would disagree with them.

All I know for certain is after going into many offices of porn companies and meeting many executives and owners of them they seem to be making a lot more money than the people I met in the online porn business.

All we do have for hard facts is Lensman sold Adult.com and all it's other businesses for $9 million. He was meant to be one of the big players. $9m is a nice chunk of change, but not an indication of a big business. The price was after Playboy read their business reports.

Private were in no way the biggest. Fabian kids himself. They were never as big as LFP, PRO and many others. Scala, Magma, Silwa, Bookpress, Score, Crescent, Swank, Playboy, and a lot more were far bigger than Private. And they were just the wholesale end of the business.

The biggest slice of money from porn came from the shops, porn shops, video, shops, newsagents, etc. Anywhere selling a magazine, video or renting one out.

The idea that people couldn't buy porn, in major countries, prior to the Internet is wrong. Playboy sold World Wide as did Hustler, Penthouse, Mayfair, and 100s of others. If you can't get girls being gang banged by 5 dogs, you will jerk off to the underwear section in a mail order catalog if it's all that you have. But they didn't they had magazines and softcore videos.

Otherwise it's like saying a starving man who prefers meat isn't going to eat fish. In 1960 in the UK we jerked off to whatever we could buy. Usually a magazine with girls topless. Parade was one of the top sellers.

adding the lowest price and the highest price and then dividing by 2 is not an average it the medium (unless your only making 2 movies :winkwink:)

if say they shot 199 movies at 25k and 1 movie at 125k (so they could brag about spending the money) the average cost would be 25.5k.

you might want to lookup the mathimatical terms before talking out of your ass.

i hate to say it but Gideon is right :winkwink:

Private produced many shitty movies and the occasional hightlight. i once had the pleasure of discussing that with someone who actually shot for them and got the budgets

Lots of people who wouldn't have bought it before through fear of getting caught by their wife/family, now can buy it online. The Internet certainly increased the amount of people buying, no doubt about it.

I know shooters who were selling to Private in the 90s and early 2000s and they were getting $25,000 for five scenes.

I also know that, but back in 1995 to 2000 they were spending money on shoots that no online company will.

Even today some offline shoot a level online can't or won't afford. Seems every day I get something like this from Xbiz.

http://www.xbiz.com/news/132254

And who is spending money to sue Tubes? Gay offline are.

http://www.xbiz.com/news/132263

And still Private employ Bill Wright and I heard Jack Harrison.

And then there's this statement.

1,000 DVDs at $10 = $10,000 with a guy in Prague shooting scenes at 800 Euros ($1,126.61) for 5 scenes that's a bill of $5633 for the content only. $4367 to edit, duplicate, box, distribue doesn't leave much money. Can't be done on 500 duplicates.

Maybe a few are doing it, but not an entire industry. Especially those who are in the middle to top.

No one knows for sure except those who were getting the checks what content was worth and only the bosses know what the company was making. We're all guessing. Even Fabian, but for sure those figures from Private don't make sense, there was other incomes. Their Cable TV channel and shops?

Obviously gideongallery is clueless about the number of good movies they made. Maybe he should go and buy a membership and find out. http://www.private.com/movies/

Compare that content with what's on most non online only porn companies.

did you even look at link you sent

http://www.private.com/movies/pg-2

14/24 moives on that list are "best of" dvd which basically clip together previously shot scenes.

let not forget the entire audition

and the woodman casting line.

your dreaming if you think those DVD cost 25k to produce

Exactly right but generic material is now basically free due to forums/p2p/leech sites/tubes/mu/RS

The custom niche producers aren't going anywhere though. Sometimes the solution for the Internet's expansiveness is to go narrow and deep instead of shallow and wide.

Micro niche is called micro niche, because they're small.

For a few there will be a living to be made, right up to the time they open Tubes sites for micro niches. Have they done that yet?

Sorry, can not guarantee much more :)

It's hard to factor rebill retention since there also is rejoins and all that stuff to consider... Brazzers uses roughly 10% of revenue on ads currently. Not more than that. I do not feel like looking up exact numbers...