Life on The EdgeXD

I get this all the time: “How’re you going to compete with the tube sites? Isn’t subscription adult entertainment dead? Who still pays for porn?”

Of course, these same doom-mongers were last seen dropping shovelfuls of dirt into the premature grave of the music industry – right up until the night Apple shot a bolt of lightning through the not-quite-dead-yet corpse and unleashed the monster that is iTunes. Now, I may not be Steve Jobs (I’m a snazzier dresser, for one), but it’s clear to me that EdgeXD is poised to have the same countryside-clearing effect on the adult entertainment industry.

Entertainment options across all media have increased exponentially. (I don’t know if that’s literally true, cuz I don’t know how big a number “exponentially” is, and I’ve never met anyone who did. But stay with me on this one…) The number of hours in a day, however, has remained the same, sadly. People want to find what they want to watch fast, and they want the experience of watching said stuff to be as big, beautiful, and bug-free as technologically possible. Organization matters. Search matters. The player and the streaming matter. And the tube sites fail epic in all these areas.

Now, I don’t see this in other mainstream online portals. Most outfits get it. The aforementioned iTunes gets it. Amazon gets it. They make finding what you are looking for fast and easy, It’s a combination of appreciation for their customers’ own knowledge respect for their time, and also a desire to introduce them to other goods similar to their purchases right at the point of sale. There is a joy in discovery, but there is no joy in slogging through screen after screen filled with box art for porn videos having absolutely no correlation to the type of content you want to see. If Amazon made you sift through the latest new releases of romance novels before you found the techno-thrillers for which you came, they’d be in the dot-com Loser Hall of Fame alongside Kozmo (look it up!).

…And if I hear the old trope about how porn distributors are the first to embrace new technologies – as if this somehow excuses geeks from providing proper customer service – I’m going to hit somebody with my Betamax player. The addictive qualities of porn may embolden some distributors to relax their customer retention efforts, but it does not obviate the basic shopkeeper’s responsibility of providing a neat and clean storefront. The Porn 2.0 industry has broken new ground with very sophisticated algorithms to extract and move content more efficiently from one distributor to another, and gobs more adult entertainment is accessible online than ever before. But none of these back-stage raised-floor server-room initiatives help viewers manage all that new content the way our Stash does. Distributors have become so fixated upon the mathematics of pornography that they have lost site of the art. EdgeXD is less algebra, and more elegance.

In the mean time, we’re having an absolutely amazing success with our SportsQuiz^XD (www.sportsquizxd.com). It’s distribution and popularity have gone viral, driving new subscribers to the site by the thousands. It’s the type of old school guerilla marketing that has never been taught in tube school, because it can’t be performed by a shell script. Ultimately, EdgeXD won’t be successful because it’s machines are making connections with another guy’s machines; we’ll be successful because we’re making connections with our subscribers.