The Year Ahead
Posted On: 2007-12-12
The end of the year is almost upon us and that's the time when people start wondering what's going to happen in the year ahead. Hopefully most of them are looking back over the preceding 12 months just to measure how well or how bad they've been doing before they look too far ahead.
But for pundits and gurus ... and even simple writers like me ... there's always some mileage in being able to look into the future. Sadly few of us can really see what the future might hold but we still churn out a lot of words just to be able to sound as if we really know what we can only guess about.
Other lesser mortals are also wondering about the year ahead and some interesting threads are beginning to appear on adult message boards around the Net. As per usual we have some interesting and thoughtful posts, we have the 'sky-is-falling' type of posts and we have the 'head-in-the-sand' type of posts too.
In lots of ways it's just a case of the same old thing over and over again because this is the way it goes every year. Every year we see all these posts and at the end of the next year we see them brought out, rinsed off and repeated. The ultimate gloom and doom never happens, the bright spots are never as bright as we all might hope for, some people will leave the industry, some people will enter the industry and basically things stay the same.
So this year I'm not going to make any outlandish predictions. All I'm going to say is that this business will continue to exist, it will still be hard for newcomers to survive and grow and it will still be just as hard as it was this year for those who are established to continue making a profit.
There will still be threats of government intervention via 2257 and other zany pieces of legislation that clueless legislators might try to cook up in an election year. Billing companies and a scrub rate that seems to rise and fall will still remain a mystery to most of us and sales will continue to drop gradually.
In other words what happened this year will go on happening next year.
Now those predictions may not be as dramatic as you might like and I'm sure you will wander around the boards looking at what others have to say. As you do trek around the boards I'm sure you will come across lots of interesting predictions and comments and you can revise your business plan based on what you read if you think that's appropriate.
But before you do spare a moment to consider the person who makes them and their motivation for making those comments; look at the comments from every angle and you may decide that they're worth following after all.
Three predictions that I saw today are worth commenting on. The first prediction was that tube sites would see the demise of sponsors' sites in this coming year. Now there's no doubt that the tube sites are definitely pulling in a lot of traffic that might otherwise come to us but will they kill our industry?
I don't think so because tube sites have their own problems and monetizing them is just one of the problems they face. The fact that they are burning through massive amounts of bandwidth every month yet aren't seeing much of a return on that investment in monetary terms just might be their undoing.
The second prediction suggested that this coming year would see a massive exodus of affiliates from adult to mainstream. Well that's something that has been talked about for years and people do cross over ... in fact I've been suggesting for years that people do work both sides of the fence.
But a massive exodus of affiliates to mainstream? No that's unlikely to happen and if it does there are going to be a lot of very sorry and very new mainstream affiliates. Over in mainstream you're facing lower commissions, greater competition from huge affiliate businesses and a whole new ballgame that you have to take the time to learn. And most experienced affiliates in adult understand that.
The third prediction suggested something that I think will have some traction this year and that's the idea of members may not want to pay for a whole month's membership. Instead sponsors may be able to generate more sales and more dollars if they offer their content on something close to a pay-per-view model. Perhaps we are getting to the stage where that will work.
In all this talk of what the new year might hold for us there is one other certainty though. There is no doubt that, just like every other year, the year ahead is going to be interesting and I'm looking forward to it.