The adult entertainment industry is seemingly always the media early adopter of new technologies, such as faster streaming solutions, virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and now, blockchain.
A stark difference from most attention and dollar-starved media companies, adult entertainment sites are thriving.
At an initial glance, one might scoff at the idea of the same companies producing videos ranging from [expletive redacted] to [expletive redacted], and even the occasional [expletive redacted] being viewed as technological leaders, but it’s a reality that shouldn’t be overlooked.
The average consumer of adult media is biologically primed, if not addicted, to consuming a particular site’s content. They’re loyal, repeat customers that would disable their ad-block in a heartbeat to consume content– a dream that makes non-adult media site owners salivate.
Adult media companies are traffic powerhouses.
Pornhub ranks #7 on Similarweb’s list of top websites in the United States and gets more traffic than Instagram, Wikipedia, and Reddit. Instagram! How many times have you personally checked Instagram today? Instagram has over a billion users. Pornhub beats it.
The second and third top-ranking sites take #11 and #13, beating out Netflix, LinkedIn, Pinterest, CNN, ESPN, Foxnews, Yelp– even Coincentral.com.
On the international traffic front, the top three adult sites hold three spots in the top 11.
Every user earns the site ad money. Some users purchase premium subscriptions. Some even buy merchandise. Adult sites leverage their massive user bases to invest in creating new content,
While Wikipedia was begging users for spare change to stay alive, Pornhub was crowdfunding money to send people to have sex in space. The campaign ultimately missed its target for $3.4 million in 60 days but received pledges of $236,086.
Many adult entertainment companies are allocating a significant amount of capital towards exploring new technologies to keep their edge over the cut-throat and often shady competition. From artificial reality holograms (link NSFW) that make porn stars magically pop up in your living room on stripping poles to artificial intelligence “deepfake” porn that seamlessly superimposes non-performer (celebrities, people of interest, maybe even you) faces in sexual scenes, the adult entertainment space appear to be miles ahead of not only other media sites, but of full-on film production companies.
Some companies have even taken to blockchain monetize, protect, and further distribute their content– potentially serving as future excellent case studies for all content production companies struggling to monetize.
Enter Naughty America CEO Andreas Hronopoulos
We got a chance to interview adult film studio Naughty America’s CEO Andreas Hronopoulos on how the company has been exploring and innovating new technology to make a better overall experience for its customers. Find out the impact blockchain for adult entertainment can have on the overall media industry, and how a leader in the space plans to prove it.
Why are adult entertainment companies always on the innovative edge?
It’s in the essence in that adult entertainment fulfills a need, like breathing air. There’s always a demand for [our content]. For people creating products around that need, there’s a fast process of iteration and you can see if there’s an interest in the new product or not.
It’s very binary. If you work in the adult entertainment space, you know you’re going to be doing cutting edge stuff all the time. Pushing the envelope; how we can help people find their fantasy? Linking tech and sex. There’s the demand, and we want to apply the tech and see if there’s a fit or not.
Could you walk us through a day in the life of Andreas Hronopoulos? What are the typical daily decisions that need to be made?
Simply just finding new ways with tech and finding how Naughty America can help people in the adult entertainment industry. For us, we’re going in line with where blockchain is.
This is a great era for our organization because we’ve always looked at how our content can help other companies. How can we take our library of content and help other companies with their business? I bring Naughty America to the table, and how can we help you? It’s about the simple idea of trading.
The blockchain industry seems to be ripe for partnership with a content-rich company like Naughty America. So many projects are working on solutions that require some volume of users and content.
My daily to-do list revolves around our brand and our content can help other people grow their companies. We want to bring our assets to your ecosystem. That’s the beauty of Naughty America, it travels. We’ve invested a tremendous amount over 20 years in content, and we’ll continue to invest in it.
We’ve been very welcomed by everyone in the space to bring our content into their ecosystem. It’s an exciting time, blue ocean, it’s a new day, it’s so different than where we were 12 years ago. We’re [digital media companies] in such a radically different world from just around a decade ago.
We’ve always seen ourselves as a media company that utilizes technology. The adult entertainment industry has always been ahead of the curve. Being a media company is where we want to be. We don’t want to be a tech company. There are a lot of brilliant engineers out there, and we want our media to be there to support them.
Could you tell us more about Naughty America’s relationship with blockchain?
We first started accepting bitcoin as payment in 2014. We had a big uptick of people using it, but then that number declined. We were getting Bitcoin for our content and we just didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it. To me, it was like someone paying with Apple Shares for a cup of coffee.
That’s the fun of working with all these blockchain ecosystems now. We have companies hit us up all the time to accept their payment coin, but that’s not really how it works. We provide our content as an ecosystem – as far as payment solutions there’s nothing better than accepting Visa/Mastercard.
In 2016, we started investing time and energy to go about leveraging the value of our digital asset, our content library.
The first company we talked to was Decent. The ability to aggregate people’s content they’ve provided to us and provide them a record using blockchain to show that when content is being broadcast helped establish transparency.
In an unregulated Internet, having a blockchain record allows us to give our partners their ability to see when we’re aggregating their content for royalties and compensation, helping increase trust. We weren’t looking to accept Decent as a payment solution. This was purely an internal solution for accounting and records.
The second company in the blockchain space we got involved with was Ara Blocks, to help us in putting our own content out there on a Video On Demand basis. We come in from this in a few ways, one was aggregating content in the premium membership. The second one was to allow content to be individually smart contracted and allow people to pay with Ara.
The third company we want to do involves non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for Naughty America and content. We’re going to be utilizing some form of blockchain to track the content. People coming into Naughty America can buy NFTs that are tied to specific pieces of content.
What are some of the largest technical challenges the adult entertainment industry faces?
For us, it’s always trying to find creativity and how to create a more entertaining and memorable experience with whatever medium we’re using.
That’s what’s interesting about what we’re doing with these holograms. Our current challenge is finding out how to make the next best hologram out there. Holograms are the new tech for media, along with other advanced forms for entertainment. For example, I’m anticipating Netflix to get into video games.
You’ll see media companies focused on making better content, then utilizing something like the blockchain to syndicate that content.
Thank you!
Adult entertainment and blockchain make as good a pair as any content site and blockchain. As the conversation about blockchain’s practical uses in any environment heat up, companies like Naughty America are taking the discussion beyond pure theory. Blockchain for adult entertainment may end up being the successful data point that other media sites can leverage to make the most out of their content.
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