Life on The EdgeXD

So… you’re launching a porn website.
Yes.

1997 just called, it wants its business model back.
(laughing) A lot of stuff got thrown at the wall in 1997, and not much of it stuck. EdgeXD will succeed in no small part because our search capabilities allow consumers to filter out the noise and find what they want quickly. A lot’s changed in the last decade, but there is still only 24 hours in a day, no amount of technology can change that. People want to find the videos that are meaningful to them fast, and we understand that. The current adult business, pre-EdgeXD, is just a game of monthly eyeballs and pageviews. They do not focus upon what their customers want, or who they even are, beyond the numbers in their churn rate. That’s your 1997. But nobody is calling them on it, they get a pass.

So what’s the difference between EdgeXD and all the porn sites getting a free pass?
For one, the original content that we produce for Edge is all shot in HD. The player which we have devised is bar none the greatest video viewing experience for adult entertainment on the Internet: instant play, no stuttering, no buffering, the kind of experience that a consumer in the era of 1080i has come to expect and has a right to demand. You simply cannot expect today’s savvy consumer to walk away from the HD flatscreen in his living room and be comfortable watching what passes for full-motion on 95% of the adult sites. I’m a TV guy, I’ve got very little patience for low video quality. Adult webmasters have always upheld — behind closed doors, of course — that due to the outlaw and addictive nature of their content, they did not have to compete on video quality. EdgeXD fires a shot across that bow. We sink them, actually.

So you’re the Hulu of porn?
That’s a part of it. We’re also the category’s Google. At a time when even the website for your local YMCA is providing internal searching and site maps, your average commercial porn site is no better than an online catalog, something to be paged through in the hope of finding an item you’d like. Our database-driven content discovery system provides a heuristic experience that not only makes it easy for our subscribers to find what they want, but lets them save every piece of media, every query, every object, everything good, in we’re calling their “stash.” We remember their preferences, and make intelligent, meticulously-curated suggestions based upon that knowledge. With each iteration of software, the beta is less like an adult site and more like a high-end gentlemen’s club. The difference between EdgeXD and its competition is as wide as the gap between a bit torrent and Last.fm or Pandora.com.

Last.fm, what does that have, about a thousand subscribers…?
Last.fm was purchased for 280 million by CBS, who are smarter than you.

You think somebody will pay 280 million for EdgeXD?
Again, that’s a very 20th century sensibilty, and it’s not the way we think. Our endgame is simply to provide the best user experience for the most compelling and addictive content within the most pervasive medium, and we are well-funded and in this for the long run. But I will say, there’s no longer enough oxygen in the room to support all these small random players. Even the old-century commercial sites, the Playboys, Penthouses, are cannibalizing each other, they’re in a death spiral, paralyzed by the free torrents. The entire adult industry — not just the Internet pie — is about to consolidate in a major way. Victory will not go to the fourteen year-old entrepreneurs who have amassed the most AVI’s of Jenna Jameson on a server in their mom’s basement, but to the company with the best complete consumer experience. EdgeXD is going to own that table at which everyone will want to have a seat.

Okay. So you’re wringing order from the damp dishrag of porn chaos.
Nice. We’re looking for snarky writers. You want a job?

Thanks, I’m good. But why will people start paying for porn?
Why do people pay for music? Because the user experience for the free offerings — and I choose the word “user” here purposefully, there is no sense of customer service — is dreadful. Apple launched iTunes at the very height of Napster’s popularity, and has grown it into a multi-billion dollar brand in a very short period of time. They gambled that charging a reasonable fee for high-quality customer service would trump free content, and they were rewarded with the first and biggest business success story of the 21st century. Napster hasn’t gone away, and bit torrent usage is even more prevalent now then when iTunes first launched, but the tremendous popularity of Apple’s venture only underscores the fact that it brought — it continues to bring — new customers to the genre. EdgeXD will have the same siren effect on the current non-porn consumer: People who never in a million years would watch adult entertainment in the garish low-rent red-light district that adult websites made out of the category will find the experience so compelling at EdgeXD they’ll be asking, “where have you been all my life?”

Okay. You mentioned Playboy. They possess one of the quintessential brands, and they compete in your space. Aren’t you scared?
It’s all past tense with Playboy, sadly. Forty years ago, Playboy was patting itself on the back because the manufacturers of truck tire splash-guards were licensing their bunny ears, and they still think it’s all about paper magazines and car air fresheners. Our idea of branding is to see the EdgeXD logo in neon above a bar in a space station within Eve Online. Our audience is the same demographic that’s made the videogame industry a twenty-two billion dollar business last year. They are young, they are gadgeteers, and they view Playboy’s quaint hedonism the way their fathers viewed bathtub gin.

The Internet tubes are littered with the bookmarked corpses of well-funded TV guys who tried to hang up a broadband shingle.
Most of whom deserved to die, but it really wasn’t their fault. Look, whenever a new medium starts to garner buzz, there is a migration of both content and content-wranglers into the new space. It’s a gold rush, but it usually results in “shovelware:” wrap your content in a new codec and just toss it onto a new distribution, with no sense of what makes that new medium “new.” Our Web experience will break new ground and be indelibly memorable for no other reason than we utilize the latest database and personalization technology to its maximum extent. But also the Web is not the be-all end-all of EdgeXD’s offering; the website is a nexus, a touchstone. EdgeXD content will be available on mobile devices, television, within virtual worlds — everywhere young people interact. Original EdgeXD content will be crafted to play across multiple media, video stories that begin on the site will continue as a text message, maybe end as choose-your-adventure interactive fiction. Our talent will interact with their fans on Facebook, share their playlists on Mog, they’ll twitter the blow-by-blow (one should pardon the expression) on the set as we shoot our original movies. Porn is the most intimate and personal of any entertainment genre, yet it’s presented in every medium as though it were pictures at a museum exhibition. Why are there GPS-powered mobile apps to help you find the best sushi spot near you, but none that provide the same kind of adult-themed utility?

There’s a sophomoric off-color remark I could make here, but won’t.
Good choice.