from www.adultcybermart.com – It’s only the 3rd of the month, and the crystal balls are already boiling.
On the Tarot front for November, I wrote: “For the porn business I’ve been predicting downsizing and consolidations for some time, and now with Jupiter actively in retrograde, this is about to occur in full force.”
Then,bingo, Mike South headlines a story on his site: “Manwin Buys Reality Kings”
I also predicted: “On the legal front, the ‘Judgement’ card refers to decisions made by the courts. We just saw this in the Arrow vs. VCX lawsuit and we’ll be hearing of more decisions come November.”
No sooner said than done. On November 1st, the courts had ruled that Jimmy Flynt couldn’t use the Hustler trademark www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=51399
Exxxotica Expo settled its lawsuit with the city of Secaucuswww.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=51420
Savanna Samson’s husband is getting sued for an amount close to $8m. [Read the story HERE]
And it was also announced that companies belonging to Richard Cohen – National A-1 Advertising and R.S. Duffy Inc.- had to fork over $6.4M in fines to the Feds in what was a money laundering operation. www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=51400
The Feds also made it clear that Cohen wasn’t charged with any wrong doing which is their polite way of mollifying an issue as long as you pay them lots and lots of money. Technically, Cohen’s companies were held accountable for running Escorts.com, an escort site.
You’ll recall that the Feds drove up in a U-Haul truck and raided Cohen’s places of business on 7th Street near Chestnut in Philadelphia, October, 2010. It was speculated at the time that the raid had to do with the hooker end of the business. Cohen also runs phone sex lines and HotMovies.com which takes in an annual $20M.
This week I began running my ad on Adult Cyber Mart for Tarot Card readings [Read the story HERE]
Perhaps Cohen should have his own cards read; maybe he already does. Back when I was living in Philly, Chestnut St. was full of gypsies and swamis with different bags of tricks.
The Philadelphia Daily News in its follow-up on the Cohen money laundering story has called Cohen “one of the smartest business men on earth”. Maybe for Cohen, $6.4M is the cheap price of doing business.
A look at Cohen’s cards will tell you he’s a very clever and successful man, but not necessarily a very happy one. But the cards don’t have to tell you that. That dour look you get when you Google Cohen’s image [pictured] could have been a mug short or that of a Boston Red Sox or Phillies baseball fan this year.
In a story that appeared four years ago on APCmag.com, Cohen laid the whole thing out about running a successful porn company in today’s age. Cohen was appearing at a seminar in Vegas when he made these comments.
And, as I suspect, most of you weren’t taking notes. Cohen talked about streaming video.
“Ninety-Eight percent of the business is streaming,” said Cohen.
I don’t know how it is now, but at the time, Hotmovies.com was charging its customers 10 cents per minute to watch the skin flick of their choice.
“Customers do not want to watch entire movies,” Cohen went on to say.
“They want to watch scenes. They might watch a scene once or twice, then they move on – but they come back to the site over and over again.”
According to Cohen, porn is a particularly transient business.
“They [viewers] don’t want to own it, they don’t want to see it more than once. A lot of them don’t want it on their hard drive, if they’re doing it at home.”
“We have iPod downloads, but they don’t really sell,” Cohen added.
The same applies to Amazon-style sell-through schemes.
“We have links on thousands of titles saying ‘buy this movie’ and it’s unbelievable how little people click on them. And download-to-own is the same. People don’t use it.”
Other people, said Cohen, go to extraordinary lengths to protect their anonymity.
“We get a lot of money orders from people who won’t want it on their credit cards. For a while, we went through PayPal, which was really a good thing, but they threw us out — twice.” (PayPal has a strict no-adult-content policy.)
The pay-per-minute adult business also provides an interesting example of the much-discussed long tail effect.
“Every night, there’s at least 38,000 of our 60,000 videos that are watched for at least 20 seconds,” Cohen continued.
“I couldn’t believe that at first, but I got our programmers to check.”
“We have studios where they film it all in their basement, and people still want to watch it.”
Cohen also predicted a rapid demise for ‘conventional’ adult sites which aim to achieve a recurring monthly subscription for a particular set of content.
“Membership sites for adult content are dying. The consumer is sick and tired of having to pay every month. We get so many emails from people saying ‘Please cancel’, and we have to send a mail saying ‘There’s nothing to cancel’.”
Cohen conceded that more competition is likely if that happens, but he didn’t seem worried.
“It’s like Las Vegas: they keep building more hotels, and people keep coming. Pay-per-minute is going to grow the entire market.”
Like I said: smart guy, dumb industry. So, with the $6.4M hiccup in Cohen’s life from yesterday, I see, according to the cards, that while he’s fed up with some aspects of the adult business Cohen’s not leaving or going anywhere.
The cards advise him not to stress out so much, which is his tendency, and for him to use the time between now and the end of the year to kick back a bit.
[Actually Cohen has a good reason to stress and have cause for concern, because someone in his company is stealing money. Which is not really going out on the limb because theft is rampant in this business.]
I see two major projects that Cohen would like to get off the ground, and one of them is considered his crown jewel; but the way the cards are playing out at themoment, this particularly employee or employees are obstacles in the way.
Success in those ventures is virtually assured, provided….
Proof of how successful Cohen is, the cards say that the $6.4M forfeiture hardly make a dent in his bank account.