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For the DVD industry to survive you have to contemplate several other factors. The internet/VOD aspect as been cannabalizing DVD sales. Why buy a DVD of 5 scenes for $19.95 or even $29.95 when you can buy a website membership such as Bang Bros for the same price and literally get 100s of scenes or join HotMovies and pay .08 by the minute.



VOD may be canabalizing DVD sales, but from my own personal experience, customers are spending much more on VOD. Before VOD I would buy 4 or 5 DVD's a year due to various factors such as not wanting adult material in the house. I was also very particular about what I would buy. I look at my gamelink account and it shows 600 movies since 2001. Thats $6,000 spent on porn. Had I still be applying my DVD purchase habits it would have taken 30 years for me to spend that much. I'm also less selective and will buy a VOD if it remotely interests me. If I like a performer like Lela Star or Bree Olson, I will see what else they have done and buy a few more titles.

If adult companies are not making money on VOD, then they are doing something wrong. There's clearly a new paradigm.



I think VOD and Gonzo are made for each other, although I get the impression that Gonzo's nature makes it a little bit more susceptible to piracy than features.

Feature customers tend to want the whole 'coffee table porn' package...big-budget script driven feature plus all the trimmings such as a DVD commentary, BTS featurette, Easter Eggs, soundtrack CD, fancy packaging etc. etc. which, by and large are things VOD can't provide. By and large, good features are 'keepers'.

Gonzo customers, on the other hand, just want to see what they want to see, i.e. Amy Ried taking it in the ass. Scenes are utterly interchangeable between one volume and the next, and rather than purchase decisions being 'package-led' as in the case of features, with gonzo it is more talent and/or act/niche/fetish led. If you have the right girl doing the right thing, you'll get your sale without the need for CGI skeletons or a pirate ship.

However, the advent of VOD nullifies the power of these scenes. Pre-VOD, you could sell an entire DVD on the strength of that one 'must see' scene, even if the remaining five or so scenes were shitty. Now, in the VOD era, the customer just purchases the scene they want to see and leaves the filler scenes untouched, and essentially 'unpurchased'.

This is why I believe producers need to band together and crack the whip on online piracy...the availability of one key scene can negate an entire DVD purchase, let alone a VOD purchase, and hence that scene may in fact be worth 100% of the DVD's unit or retail cost as opposed to 1/6th (for a six scene DVD).

How does all this play into the performer rates question? Simple...I can see a time where gonzo producers will no longer shoot 'movies' per se, just scenes. Stripped of the various financial and logistical obstacles inherent in the 'hard copy' DVD business model, and emboldened by the immediacy of the VOD medium, I think producers will be able to approach the Amy Ried's of tomorrow with offers far and beyond today's apparently inflated rates. You might even see something like a percentage split of profits between performer and producer.

Let us imagine that there are 10,000 people in the world who would like to see (for example) Aria Giovanni do a b/g hardcore scene. Let us also imagine that these selfsame 10,000 would be prepared to pay $10 to see it. This would give you a gross of $100,000. Even if we imagine a 60-40 or 70-30 gross split in the producer's favour, this would still mean that Aria (or Kyla Cole, or Jana Cova) would be making $30-40,000, which is a touch more than the current $1000 average.

I realise there are some deductions to be figured in...production costs, VOD service commission, affiliates, etc. before a net figure is established, but by the same token, I think an event such as the one described above would also be worth more than $10 a head, and there might well be more than 10,000 interested customers too.

Of course, not every girl/act combintion is going to be in such high demand, but I still that if this came into being, it would raise rates across the board to a level that would leave the current ones...even the inflated 'Amy Ried Anal Rates'...languishing in the dust. I think you'd quickly see a sliding scale of rates which would differ wildly, with the best girls taking home the big bucks and the lesser performers getting comparatively smaller rates...a pornographic meritocracy, if you will!

Whether this will come about or not is a story for another time, though....