What if online adult entertainment providers abandoned the monthly membership subscription model? Would they survive? U.K.-based online retailer Strictly Broadband did that and much more, and the company thrives.
"The [monthly subscription] model started dying in the late ’90s, and it’s been in decline ever since. The conversions just go down and down," said Jerry Barnett, Strictly Broadband’s president. "They’re trying to sell the same product to every person who comes to the site. The same price, regardless of whether [the consumer is] just an occasional viewer or comes back and spends five hours a day on the site. So I felt the pay-per-view model worked a lot better."
Strictly Broadband offers video-on-demand adult movies, each sold individually. Barnett decided that for selling Strictly Broadband’s inventory of films, the company would take a cue from traditional movies theatres. "We sell tickets, and then the ticket buys the rental of any movie," Barnett said. "So people can buy one ticket for £7.99 (about $15). Then the tickets get cheaper as you buy higher quantities. We only sell whole movies. It’s a seven-day rental for the movie with unlimited viewing of all the scenes."
Each feature can be downloaded to a personal computer or an iPod. Alternatively, films can be viewed via streaming video online for the seven-day period.
Prior to Strictly Broadband, Barnett had a string of online business successes in the U.K. "About 10 or 11 years ago, I set up a technology company to develop websites," Barnett reflected. "And then fairly quickly one of our customers was a porn company. That website took off like a rocket, so we ended up building stuff for the porn industry. I did that for about 10 years."
Another business decision that sets Strictly Broadband apart from other companies is the firm’s ideology concerning creating adult films versus marketing adult films. "I just think in any business you end up with people who are either good at distributing or good at producing," Barnet noted. "It’s very rare that you will find someone who is good at both. If you start out doing both, which a lot of people do, you find that you are a lot better at one than the other. So, specialize in what you are good at." With the abundance of content already in the marketplace, Strictly Broadband decided to become a strictly retail outlet.
Gaining traffic was another area in which Strictly Broadband created its own path—relying on the existing U.K. porn industry for help.
"The first thing we did was build good local relationships with British studios and [started] building the brand," remarked Barnett. "The studios, being the only outlet here, were happy to promote us."
Barnett continued, "Like most adult sites, we spend a lot of time marketing and getting the traffic in. The first six months or so, it was hard work recruiting affiliates and so on. Then it reached a point of critical mass. It’s growing organically now."
Before branching out to the Canadian, European, and American markets, Strictly Broadband focused on its core market: Great Britain. "We started as a very British-focused business." Barnett said. "The idea is to provide the biggest choice; the best spread of content there is. American porn is quite different from British porn."
So Strictly Broadband focused on providing the U.K.’s homegrown porn stars to British customers. "The British guys are more interested in local porn stars here. In British porn, they follow a particular girl as opposed to a director or label."
Strictly Broadband’s latest endeavor, StrictlyGayMovies.com, has pushed the company into new territory.
"We’ve just launched StrictlyGayMovies.com, a gay only site. We decided to separate the gay content altogether [from Strictly Broadband]," Barnett said. "We’ll use the same model again and see if we can make it as popular as Strictly Broadband."
If the results thus far are any measure, things are looking good for Strictly Broadband. "We’ve got the model right. We’re a technology company, so we are into using technology in new and interesting ways to make the service better," Barnett said. "We always want to keep ahead of the curve. We make sure that the video quality is always at least as good as anyone else’s. When HD comes along, we’ll be in there with HD."
