Do American porn companies market their product overseas. If they do, how well does it sell. I imagine well in London, not so well in Dubai.

Generally not big numbers, but product shifts. Often times companies will just sell territory rights for a few thousand bucks because it's cheaper than going the spindle/replication route, particularly if the country you're selling into has tough censorship laws and means re-editing. Or they'll do a contra-deal like Evil Angel did with Harmony in England.

But then a lot of product isn't marketed at all. It's just pirated across the whole of Europe.

But I expect you could have got all of this from Darth.

The more I learn about the business practices in the adult industry, the more I think the Key Stone Cops would run things better. Some business professor should do a class on the adult industry to show how not to run a business. If some solid business management principles were ever applied adult businesses could probably make 600% more than they do now. The government won't need to lift a finger. Incompetent management will kill the business first .

So you have a glut of product, stifling completion and yet adult companies are ignoring the overseas market? Stupid is as stupid does. I've been a big cheerleader for VOD. Well one of the great things about VOD is that you can instantly sell across the world. Thereby, opening hundreds of millions of new customers up.

The reason I made this inquiry is that Hollywood now gets the majority of its profit overseas. How porn expects to ignore that market and survive I don't know.

Oooh...I can field this one!

I used to distribute videos over here in the UK a few years ago. As Conky says, most US titles could be snapped up for somewhere between $1,000-2,000 (Seven year deal, if I remember correctly), comps usually a little cheaper. (I just got all the addresses and phone numbers out of the back of a copy of Adam Film World and just rang up the US studios until they told me who was handling their overseas sales, like one of the Blatt boys, and took it from there ). For an average length title, you were looking at another £1,000 plus for certification at the BBFC (British Board of Film Classification, formerly Film Censors...new name, same censorship!). From then on out, you can only sell your freshly R18 rated product via a Licenced Sex Shop. R18 videos may only be sold by these stores in person...there's no mail order or internet selling allowed.

At the time I was involved in the business, I would guess that Private Stores (David Sullivan and co) owned somewhere between 80-90% of all Licenced stores in Great Britain, so if you didn't deal with them, you were fucked...this meant that they could play hardball on prices safe in the knowledge that you had nowhere else to go...because if the stores won't take it, you have no other legal means of selling it. People do sell stuff illegally, but there was simply no way I was going to do it...I'm strictly by the book.

I was very fortunate in that I selected movies with talent that I knew would sell like hotcakes (In the first instance, Tera Patrick and Zsanette 'Sandy' Egerhazi of Club Sandy) both of whom had regular gigs in Men's World and Club Magazine, meaning the average UK punter knew who they were and really wanted to see them in hardcore action.), because otherwise I would have more than likely been up shit creek without a paddle.

Bizarrely, Sandy outsold Tera for me by some margin, so much so that I believe I have probably shifted more copies of 'No Man's Land 30' in the UK than Video Team did in the US!

Most of the big store chains in the UK started licencing US material for themselves...Private Stores went for Private, and Harmony and ABS between them have got pretty much everything else...Evil Angel, Hustler, JJV, etc. I had originally gotten into the distribution business because I was working part-time in an adult bookstore in London while finishing up my MA, and had heard the whisper that both hardcore video sales and video sales by mail were both about to become a reality. Had the mail order part came true, I would have moved back to my hometown (where a Licence for a sex shop ran about £2,500-3,000 compared to the high £20,000's/low to mid £30,000's for London) and just set up a mail order business with no storefront.

( As a sidenote, Licencing laws for Sex Shops are drawn up on a floor plan. The store I worked in had a 'legitimate' bookshop upstairs and an adult one downstairs. If a wheelchair-bound customer came in and wanted to buy some porn, I could take him into the upstairs stockroom and sell it to him (because this is marked as such on the floor plan)...if I took a customer into the downstairs stockroom or the kitchen area and sold them porn, I could have got arrested, because these were not marked zones on the floor plan...thus it is conceivable that in a three-storey store, you might only be able to pay for certain goods on certain floors! My idea was to just set up a home office and Licence one room of my home where the business/transaction would take place.)

Anyway, the change in the legal status of mail order never came (and still hasn't), so this gave rise to a lot of 'grey' importers who just source original Region 0 DVDs from the US and sell them via mail order from overseas (usually Holland or Belgium). Even today, if you buy a DVD from a British producer like Relish, it has to be posted INTO the UK from abroad to remain legal. This is why Viv Thomas upped sticks and relocated his business abroad.

Whilst I could get VHS rights cheaply and easily, DVD rights were an absolute nightmare, but understandably so...unlike VHS, which comes in many different and incompatible varieties like PAL, NTSC, SECAM, etc., a Region 0 NTSC DVD will play on just about anything. Thus, it doesn't make sense for a producer to sell the rights to someone when they could probably make many times more money just selling finished US copies to one of the grey importers.

Taking into account the unfavourable business conditions for dealing in R18, and the fact they were only going to get worse, plus the fact that I wasn't going to be able to get in on the DVD side of things as I would have liked to, I decided to sell up my rights and stock and get while the getting was good.

The reason that most British porn produced today is so dreadfully cheap and grotty looing is because producers have to labour under these selfsame conditions where the odds are stacked well and truly against them. It's not worth trying to make a quality product when the stores are only going to offer you the same pittance as they will offer some guy who has shot some ropey amateur attempt on a home camcorder.

Me, I got out and went online instead, and if UK producers were smart, that's where they would focus the majority of their efforts as well...paysites and VOD. If I were a UK-based producer today, I would regard putting out R18 DVDs as an advertising expense by which to promote my website, nothing more, nothing less.

If you want to make big bucks in Britain, owning a chain of licenced stores is the way to do it. It goes without saying that the selfsame stores are the biggest movers and shakers in terms of keeping the status quo and keeping encrypted hardcore TV off the airwaves or mail order banned. It's basically just one big, legalised monopoly.

Dan, are sites like Naughty America, Bangbus, and Cum Fiesta accesible in the UK and other parts of the EU? If so, they would have a potential customer base in the hundreds of millions more than companies that remain addicted to DVD sales.

I don't know if their DVD content is available over here (I haven't been into an adult store in years), but yes, we can access their websites. There's no censorship of websites, although I wouldn't put it past them trying...

The web is where the smart producers are focusing their efforts...take Anjali Kara for example, who, simply by making sure the girls are well dressed, made-up, lit, and knowing how to work the white balance on the camera, is by default light years ahead of 99% of the rest of the UK 'industry'. She's more fun to look at too.

She and her hubby DiSanto run Killergram which I have no doubt will be a very worthy UK-based competitor to NA and Bang Bros., even more so when they launch their affiliate programme in a couple of weeks.

Thanks Dan. For now on I'm not going to refer to these posts as "Porn Economics" I'm going to call them "Retard Porn". You would have to be a retard to ignore a potential customer base of tens to hundreds of millions. The next time a vod/internet adverse pornographer complains about all the competition tell them to STFU and get back to driving their business into the ground.