Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 251 with Alan X of Alan X Films

This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we’ll be speaking with Alan X of Alan X Films. We’re proud to announce we’ve launched a new website at adultsidebroker.com. This attractive new site is easier to navigate and now includes this podcast inside of it. Check it out at adultsidebroker.com. The first sellers or buyers to us at adultsidebroker and our affiliate program ASB Cash will pay you 20% of our broker commission. This can amount to tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Check out ASB Cash.com for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles on age verification laws and more on the industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on us. Go to thewaronporn.com and check it out. Now time for our property of the week that’s for sale at adultsidebroker. We’re proud to offer a white label cam site that’s rapidly growing month over month. In fact it’s more than doubled its business from 2023 to 2024. As of this we’ve had no other alternative but to raise the price. This is an excellent opportunity if you’re already in the live cam business or want to enter it. All traffic is either direct or organic. This is excellent for a company with cam traffic or one willing to purchase more traffic for the site. Best of all the site is easy to maintain. Someone could easily add additional sites through the admin system without doing any more work. This gives you truly passive income with zero hours required to maintain it. Only $504,000. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on adultsidebroker talk is director Alan X of Alan X Films. Alan thanks for being with us on adultsidebroker talk. Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Alan X is a veteran award winning director specializing in the lesbian genre. He’s the founder of Alan X Films. Alan started girlsway.com and girlgirl.com before starting his own site in 2000 called she seduced me.com which is dedicated exclusively to the art of lesbian seduction. The pandemic taught the industry a lot about the value of owning your own content and Alan has tried a novel and progressive approach to building a site, partnering with models as the co-owners of the content. Over 300 scenes later the idea is a hit and models are thrilled to be able to produce and own studio quality lesbian content with high production value they can sell directly to their fans. Alan is proud that he’s empowering models to be content owners. So Alan how did you get your start in the adult industry? Well I was a fan of adult entertainment when I was in my early 20s and teens and at some point I watched a couple of movies that were like a BTS kind of nature and that was a little bit more novel back in the 90s. It seems a little bit more obvious today but cameras I guess were in shorter supply back then. But anyways I watched it and it seemed doable and fun and like everybody there was really enjoying themselves and I said you know what at the time I was working as a graphic designer Boston where I grew up and I said to myself you know what I’m going to go and try to do a graphic design for these people. I’m going to move to California where it’s sunny it was like freezing in the winter at that point and I’m going to go get involved and I did. You wouldn’t be the first or the last to leave the east or the midwest for sunny Los Angeles now would you? No, no and I can see the appeal the weather here is pretty dynamite. It definitely is. What’s it like having worked on porn sets for over 20 years now? Well I’ve seen a lot and I’ve seen a lot of change. I’ve worked on literally thousands of movies over my career and I remember some of the early people that I used to work with and some of those people phased out and I’ve seen over my time many generations of people come and go and certain people stick out in my mind and certain companies stick out in my mind. For the most part I worked for almost all of the companies certainly a couple years back I would say all of the companies. Now I would say almost all of the companies. Are you still doing work for other companies? I am. I’m actually having a dinner with one of my clients tonight over in Santa Monica but yeah I do. I try to keep a couple of clients I’ve been working for for years and I’m about I used to be 50/50 now I’d say I’m maybe 60/40 in terms of my website how much of my time that I spend working on my stuff versus that stuff. I don’t mean to put you on the spot but you’ve worked with a lot of performers over the years. Who comes to mind when you think about that? Comes to mind in terms of some of the best that I’ve worked with or some of the most memorable. Yeah. Yeah certainly some of the names that stick out are Isabella Nys, Cherita Ville, Adriana Chetchik, Lena Lopez. There’s a lot of girls that I’ve worked with over the years that I had really good relationships with. You know, a lot of Ken and James have a really good relationship with. There’s a lot of girls that I’ve been working with for many years at this point and you know it’s great. I’ve seen them develop as performers. I’ve seen some girls I’ve seen go from teen to babe all the way to milf. I’ve seen the whole evolution. Interesting. Yeah we had Cheri on our 200th episode about a year ago. I love Cheri. She’s one of the best. She’s one of my favorite milfs. She’s awesome. She’s an awesome lady. There’s no two ways about it. And her personality, I love her personality especially on social media. She’s fun to follow. That but even her in-person personality, that girl always has a smile on her face and she always makes you want to smile and like I’ve never ever ever and I’ve known this girl like 10 years. I’ve never ever seen her like in a bad mood or like you know like she’s just really, I don’t know if it’s just how she is or you know maybe that’s just how she chooses to carry herself on set but she always just has that big bright smile on her face like this. Yeah that’s always how I think of her. She’s very positive and she seems to really love what she does. Yeah, that was she said. She’s doing very well. She’s doing quite well. But you know what? I think she’s a grand example to all the performers especially the young performers of what to do or I should say fairly new performers because she started later in life of what to do to become successful because there’s a lot of beautiful women out there and she’s certainly one of them but she works her ass off to promote and promote and promote. Yes, well that’s part of the game for someone in her position. Yeah, definitely. That is the main evolution I’ve seen in my career like when I first showed up it was all like people working for companies directly for companies you know and then things got a little bit dicey and it became an amaze of like producers who then sold the content to the companies. Okay, then after that these tube sites came and a lot of money changed hands but yet you know we were still going and suddenly we were all working for these like web kind of conglomerate companies like the MIND Geeks and the GAMAs and then from there it made the final crazy evolution that nobody saw coming to the only fans where all of a sudden like the meek and the heritage of the earth and the talent suddenly you know was running you know not all the talent but certainly some of the talent was running these huge production houses and they were making as much money as mid-sized companies. So yeah, it’s been interesting and now I you know the performers were always the disposable kind of people in porn it was designed that way you know like people would come and perform and well yeah it was designed to constantly keep a fresh like supply of people in front of the camera. It’s great to see the performers now in a position where they can sell directly to their fans without having to go through the companies you know and it’s great seeing them take on like a much wider role than they traditionally had. I mean before all you really expected of them was to show up and do a good job on set. Now they’re that’s the smallest part of what they’re doing they’re managing these huge social media accounts they’re managing production companies they’re managing makeup artists and camera people and you know they’ve turned into little like production houses. So it’s amazing and I love seeing it you know. Yeah I mean now the performers have the power. Yeah very much so much more so than in the past. Yeah because they were always the product okay the performers were always the product but like you said they were made a commodity by the production by the big production houses it was like okay we’ll get what we can out of them and we’ll move on to the next one. Now not so much because the performers don’t need the production houses now. That’s not entirely true one hand washes the other right the reason why everybody wants to watch Sheree Deville’s only fans is because they saw her on browsers and they saw her here and they saw her there and on girls wailing you know that’s why they want to watch her. One hand washes the other so the smart performers still perform for other companies they just try to perform for the biggest audiences they can and whatever nominal rate they get from the companies is irrelevant next to the potential you know tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars they’re making by directly like you know selling to this huge pool of millions of fans you know I think it’s good to write in sight. No you’re absolutely right and I think the way that you have gone about things is very very smart because it’s necessary and we’ll discuss that in a little bit. Talk about the thrill of being involved in an AVN or X-Biz award winning a production. Those are the the most intense productions in the terms of like you know the amount of work put in and also the amount of stress right like the the problem with those kind of movies is they’re big they’re expensive a lot of things can go wrong people get overly ambitious and days start to run longer. Yeah next thing you know it’s you know one in the morning or something and you’re all still on set and everybody’s upset about it that’s one thing that’s like a common fallacy about production a lot of people have the sense of like oh well I’ll just keep doing it again till I’m happy with it or I’ll just keep doing it again until it’s right and I don’t care and that’s a total bluff because the reality is you have a very limited amount of time with which to make your movie and you know if you spend time here then you’re losing time there and you’re dealing with a finite quantity you know like a finite quantity of time after a certain amount of time people get fatigued they don’t want to do as good of a job as they would have been refreshed you know hardcore professionals like Sherry will go till three in the morning and never miss a beat and I applaud them but not every girl is like that you know some girls you know they start falling off their operation suffers their attitude suffers so you know the more you do and the more times you do it you’re spending out of a very very finite bank similarly that light is not there all day you know the sun waits for no man so you know everything is uh everything is uh time sensitive so uh yeah yeah absolutely so as a director you’re in charge how do you deal with a performer who all of a sudden kind of checks out my job is kind of like a chef right I tried to source the best ingredients I can put it together in some sort of a recipe that I’m not just making it up is someone came up with a plan whether it was me or a client and I try to execute it and then sometimes you cook something and it comes out good and sometimes you cook something it comes out bad why the ingredients you know they say what makes the best pizza oh it’s something to do with the water right okay you know it’s the same sort of an idea it’s uh these aren’t widgets in a widget factory the people people and here’s the crazy part right it’s that person on that day right for example uh I shot a scene uh for girls we it was with uh Adriana Chechnick and uh Megan ring and uh we shot this scene and it was one of the first scenes that really went like viral super viral it’s this big squirt scene yoga themed squirt scene and it was super viral did you know million views or whatever it was you know and everybody was like okay how do we reproduce this scene like all right cool it’s reproduce it right so I went and got the same two girls and I’m like you guys have the same outfits one of them had it one of them didn’t right put them in the same house with like the same pot really like total sequel Hollywood bullshit right and uh it was great everyone loved it but it didn’t go viral you know what I mean so it’s it’s that person on that day you know the same thing I have I’ve seen from my site that are these huge scenes that you never would have thought would have been the ones that everybody like is in love with and uh I have a million other scenes with these same performers but it’s never you know sometimes it’s also cool but it never grasped that magic of the first one I don’t know why yeah so the point of that story is that you can’t make something go viral you know sometimes you just capture lightning in a bottle and uh you know sometimes you don’t and that you know segues back into my point about being a chef sometimes you have the right ingredients sometimes it all comes together sometimes it doesn’t there’s nothing you can do to force it if it doesn’t yeah yeah of course what I mean when you first started social media wasn’t really on the map so how has that changed things well that’s what changed everything right when I first started importing my space has just become a thing and yeah the girls had a my space in fact uh people used to pay me um at that time I was like a photographer and I would do like photos on set you know and uh people used to pay me to like make like a custom my space pages like the models and some of the other people in the industry and I would put music and graphics because it was also a graphics designer and uh yeah so uh yeah I used to do that um and then obviously once uh it started out kind of people talking to each other and trying to promote their careers and okay that’s great and then it became a thing where people would network to social media primed the performers in the sense of like they they it was a way for them to directly uh communicate with their fans right and it was also a way uh to establish like a pecking order you know back in the day who’s gonna say who’s better Jenna Jamison or the or whoever you know what I mean like it’s it’s very subjective right now all of a sudden it’s not subjective some girls are getting you know millions of followers some girls aren’t right so you know certain girls were super empowered sherry being one of them um so suit and girls are super empowered and then for like a while during the time I was doing girls way there was like a symbiotic relationship between the talent and the production studio those were the where the talent was amassing these huge social media followers but they had no way to like directly monetize them so what they were doing was just promoting the company’s work to their followers and then the company started promoting the models and everybody was happy and that was the way the money was flowing right and it all went uh like that and uh that was kind of like the golden age if you will where like the companies are making good money the what they were paying the models really good the models were promoting there was no sense of like well we’re all going to go into business against you and then everything went until the pandemic and then all of a sudden I’m sure like for the rest of the country everything hit a brick wall right like the whole industry just had a brick wall and then all of a sudden it became about the haves and the have nots right for example the company owners were living their best life everybody got told they couldn’t leave the house and they got a big fat check and where did they take it they took it to browsers they took it to girls way they took it to whoever you know and those people were making the best sales of their lives you know similarly the models on only fans you know they were sitting there in their house talking to their fans and they were making a killing but what about the production crews for the company is what were they all doing they were sitting at home trying to figure out how they were gonna like eat you know what I mean like the makeup artists the camera people the lighting people the assistants the whoever all those people all of a sudden their just income was cut off with no like end in sight and then yeah it became about the haves and the have nots and then like coming out of the pandemic the girls realized that like the companies aren’t like there for them you know and that they can like go directly to their fans so that’s exactly what they did and they started selling directly their fans and they started making I mean if you’re a performer and you’re getting I don’t know $1,500 for your day’s work that’s pretty good that’s more than most people some girls 12 some girls a thousand you know what I mean maybe if you’re talking about a superstar 2500 but like the average is about 1500 so you know if you’re making 1500 let’s use a thousand for a round number because I don’t feel like complex math so say you’re say you work every single day of the month every damn day that’s $30,000 right that’s the most most most you can right now these girls were tripling that quadrupling that you know I mean I heard Riley Reed was making over a million a month or you know who knows the real truth right but like these girls are crushing it and they’re and they’re leaving their old tax bracket if you will in the dust so that changed everything you know and now we’re all living in the aftermath of that yeah absolutely the only fans age how has the transition from working for a big company to starting an independent side of your own well I would say the biggest transition is the scale I was doing things that are really like industrial scale like we were shooting 15 days a month two scenes a day that’s 30 scenes a month that’s 60 girls a month you know I was putting over 100 grand a month on the streets and you know production fees so various people so obviously I was running this like industrial scale operation and I had you know this huge team in Canada that I was working with and this other woman who was my liaison here it’s it was it was cool and then suddenly in between those two I did a second project I did a project called girlgirl.com I did it with Jules Jordan yeah and that was kind of like you know we had a good like I don’t know a little bit less than a year and we were just starting to get somewhere and then we hit the pandemic and everything went poof you know and yeah well a lot of like small sites didn’t come back from the pandemic and and then when the performers kind of had the only fans income coming you know that money came from somewhere right because it’s the same people spending the money so where that came from largely is like the smaller companies so a lot of companies either consolidated or like went out of business at that time and that money was redirected to the girls through only fans so a lot of the sites that didn’t already have like a huge like credit card base a subscriber base you know just folded up and this was one of them but I had learned kind of like how to make an indie site from kind of like working with these guys and watching these guys and you know they were really cool the the guy in the web department was really cool about talking to me and you know I just uh when I was working with Gamma it was just there was no way that I could match the what all of these people they had this giant office building with multiple floors in this office building like I could never match what all these people are doing and then I saw it done on like a smaller scale and I realized you know there’s levels to it you know at a certain level I could do it you know and so that’s what I did you know I obviously didn’t have like the hundreds of thousands of dollars to uh to start a site like that and wait for the audience to kind of like catch up and hear about it you know there’s a lot of uh there’s a lot of investment in that so you know I shot it at myself and you know I I on a real shoestring budget and I partnered with the performers and gave them copies of the content and you know they know me and they enjoy shooting with me and they like the photos that I take of them and you know so a lot of girls were happy to participate and I worked with those girls and uh you know five years later we’re starting to get somewhere and I’m sure based on those relationships you get a lot of referrals from the girls who work with you that’s the number one source where I get new models because you know it was either the girls that I already knew that I already worked with but as time goes on five years is a long time as time goes on and those girls retire and you know so uh it’s been a lot of word of mouth like a girl will want you know to bring her girlfriend in to work uh together on the site and you know she has a good experience and you know I match her with other girls who are looking for partners and I almost have this kind of like lesbian dating service going on where like girls will like hit me up and be like oh you know I’ll be in town from like the seventh to the fifteenth can I uh you know can I can I do some shoots can you find me a partner and then you know some other girl will hit me up and be like oh I’m going to be there from the 17th to the whatever and I’ll be like hey how about you know and I kind of have this little matchmaker service and then from there once we find uh two people I usually like to do three in case we lose someone along the way so I always set it up as a three-way and then uh if you see a two-way it’s because someone canceled usually not always but usually that’s smart yeah it’s tricks of the trade my man like uh even in this like ultra ultra compressed uh shoestring format there’s still an assistant involved there’s still you know people’s time is still involved back at the height of it especially like you’re talking about some of those big feature movies we had a really big cruise you know we had crews of like almost 10 people which is a lot you know that not including cast even and uh you know there’s a lot of people to feed a lot of people who need to work a lot of voices that needed to be heard and things got chaotic and and in that type of a situation things take longer than if you just are going through a sequence of tasks so yeah it’s it’s a lot more chaotic working on a big movie like this but the point is the biggest problem you could have is a cancellation especially on some of those big movies where you’re doing this like a movie over like several days that’s that was my biggest nightmare that someone would show up for like the first two days and then not show up for the third day or the fourth day right and you’re like uh what do i do in that situation fortunately i don’t believe it ever happened or not in like a way that wasn’t like a smaller part but yeah you’re really putting yourself out there you still have a policy where i’d only pay people for like big features on the final day of production to try to encourage them that’s i mean not that i wouldn’t have paid them uh if they had uh canceled but uh i was hoping to inspire them not to indeed but because yeah i was it would have been so uh damaging you know you but that’s how you end up with movies that make no sense you know you ever seen a movie and it made no sense like why would they make that movie well sometimes uh circumstances conspire to to to make you make movies that ultimately make no sense exactly so alan why lesbian porn why not some other nation because my mama didn’t raise no dummy right what’s the number one thing that holds up porn sets is guys who can’t get their dick hard i shoot boy girl i love guys i love uh you know shooting with uh male performers but uh there’s no such equivalent in lesbian porn uh yeah they might chit chat and gossip the whole day away but there’s no way that like when push comes to shove that like these two girls can’t perform whereas sometimes it’s just not happening you know and that’s that so i i didn’t want to expose myself to that kind of liability uh and i’d kind of come from like a photography glamour kind of background and it was kind of uh kind of fit well with like the lesbian genre so yeah that is uh that’s why i chose uh lesbians interesting now you have shot a lot of things a lot of studio work with guys how is it when someone just they just can’t perform they can’t get it up that’s why there’s a small cadre of guys that you see over and over and over again in porno movies and it’s because they have earned people’s trust because that’s really what it boils down to that uh if you trust this guy to come and not fuck up your day and he’s got a track record of not fucking people’s day i don’t care if he’s ugly awkward what i mean like well i mean run run jeremy right not it not exactly a beauty king well in 2025 now that’s not the best example well i understand that but i mean he’s a great example of a guy who wasn’t good looking at all ever yeah well a lot of guys aren’t good looking who are porn stars you know it’s more and especially the male performers but even the female performers uh it’s it’s a lot closer to being an athlete than an actress you know what i mean like the the relevant part uh is the sex part and it’s very like full you know same thing with the way you capture it you capture sex a lot closer to capture a sporting event than than how you would capture like a dialogue movie scene so you know it’s it’s a very split industry likes you know that’s that’s why there’s the whole gonzo movement where they don’t even do any acting or anything because they are very much two different things i mean even when you’re on set making a movie there’s the acting part and there’s the sex part and there are two different things you know and they’re done at two different times so um yeah it’s very important it’s very important that they’re uh uh fit it’s very important that they can perform it’s very important that you don’t get caught eight hours into a day or having shot a bunch of acting and then when it comes time to do the sex and you’ve already you know everybody’s already there working you know you have to pay them you’ve already used x amount of location makeup’s already been done and now if this guy can’t perform you’re on the hook with thousands yeah i would imagine a reasonable amount of your business comes from women that would not be true i don’t i don’t believe that to be true i believe there are some people who are women who are fans of lesbian porn and i believe that there are also some people who claim to be women and i don’t mean that in a trans sense i mean that just as like maybe they’re men but online they like to be like women and then there’s uh the vast majority which are just dudes that’s that’s the ironic thing i feel about lesbian porn is that it’s mostly consumed by men and why would they rather see a lesbian movie than a heterosexual movie that they would in theory be able to relate to more closely and uh i believe the answer is because they don’t want to see some other dudes they don’t want to see another dude getting laid exactly yeah yeah well they don’t want to see his naked body like they don’t they have an aversion to it you know they want to see the girls yeah they want to see girls and then one thing if you watch my uh porn movies they’re very like heteronormative it’s almost like a girl is playing like yeah the creepy guy role and another girl is playing like the demure woman role and even though they’re both girls um a lot of the situations that happen uh are very heteronormative interesting interesting whoa using psychology yeah well it is it there’s a lot of psychology to porn very good you obviously are describe your partnership with the models for shes adoos me it’s rather straightforward we get together and we make a movie a scene and i pay for the expenses of the scene in terms of editing film crew location if they need a makeup artist though ironically a lot of the girls are really good at doing their own makeup especially the more experienced ones but uh so yeah we get together we make this movie just as if we had made it for browsers or for some company or whoever but we own it at the end right so i have it edited and i give it to the models with no watermarks and i give the models a 30 day head start to release the content like for me i need to be at least 90 days out it would be better more i believe i’m in the neighborhood of five or six months out right now but i need to be a minimum of 90 days out right so they’re not going to want to wait 90 days for me to edit the movie and release it so i it takes me about 30 days after production to edit it i give it to the models and then i don’t release it for at least another 30 days after that but sometimes much longer okay very good do you think that impacts your sales at all the fact that they can see the movie elsewhere that’s a good question i know i asked it um i don’t think so and here’s why i believe that the model i think in this kind of a content creator space and you know i’m that’s more what i’m doing i’m making a kind of nichy site for people who are fans of my previous work and who like a certain kind of like product and you know i enjoy making it so i enjoy you know uh continuing to supply it to them but it’s a it’s a fixed kind of group of people and as people more people find out about it the group grows but it’s it’s a modest group still at this point and the girls also have their group there might be some overlap there might be some people who are fans of both me and the girls and in that case i’m you know i’m happy to see them make the money but the the point is people who are going to want to watch my movies are fans of lesbian seduction and they want to see kind of like a very specific sort of content done out with different girls and different variations right if you join for example sherry deville’s only fans you’re going to want to see sherry deville in every single piece of content and it’s going to be monotonous if they’re all lesbian seduction so she’s needed to do all different kinds of different kinds of content with herself amateur professional boy girl girl everything she can think of and and feel comfortable doing and that’s the nature of her channel is that it’s you know the same performer doing different things mine is it’s the same things with different performers and as such i have to get a constant you know stream of different girls but the point is uh them selling to their group is not necessarily mutually exclusive with me selling to that group some people might want to do both because they want to see all the other variations of the lesbian seduction and not only that i’m sure that there’s a lot of people who get exposed to my brand by watching the girls only fans and like wow i really like that movie what’s this she seduced me let me uh let me look up the rest of their movie so it’s actually not a bad thing i i think it might be a good thing and then similarly you know there’s going to be people who are fans of my site and fans of the style of content that i make who maybe didn’t know this performer that performer and then when they perform on the site all of a sudden they’re googling that girl i’m searching her on port up finding her only fans there you go you’ve got a great reputation in the industry now how important is it to treat the models right reputation is a critical thing in the industry if you think you can kind of like be rude to people just because you’re cutting them a check even if it’s with your own money you’re going to be disabused of that notion in the long run that that was very much a fixture of like old school pre-covid porn where you got a couple of these guys who were like big time directors and you know they worked for these high-profile companies and granted it wasn’t their company and it wasn’t their money but they were you know kind of like a king of their own little kingdom and they would yell at people and thought they had the leverage to kind of be a dick um and everybody had to take it because they were the ones writing the checks you know okay so what’s the importance of empowering models to become content owners i think the difference you know as we all learned during the pandemic is the difference is residual right no matter how much you get paid on your day rate it’s a thousand dollars fifteen hundred dollars twenty five hundred dollars whatever it is you’re going to get that money you’re going to spend that money you got to give a chunk of that money to uncle sam most likely you’re going to owe it to uncle sam in the future so you know the money comes and the money goes but you always have to work if you want to eat right empowering people to be content owners means that you’re going to get residual means that you’re going to keep getting paid off the money that off the work that you did in the past in the present much like the company’s review you know because that’s really what was enriching the company’s fundamentally is that they were you know it wasn’t any given scene it was the fact that they had these massive libraries and they had these massive membership bases with you know all these people’s credit cards signed up and they were making like a huge amount of money every month regardless you know so you know they could shop stop shooting all together and even for a significant amount of time and that money would still come pouring in and the models and the producers we all learned that we were not in that same position in the pandemic right so you know that’s what being a content owner gives you is now you are not only getting paid off your current work you’re also getting paid off your previous residual and you know that’s in the long run I mean girls some girls perform like Nina Hartle for you know an entire lifetime a lot of girls are in and out in a year you know and I would say the average I don’t think anybody would have really known about you to sign up to your link fans in less than three years but you know this girls who came three four years moved on started families didn’t want to perform anymore and all that money’s gone everything they made unless they invested it in something is gone you know that’s what’s going to kind of make someone regret it you know but if they are participating ongoing and if they are getting paid ongoing it’s better for them it’s better for everybody and it’s going to make them feel happier about their decision and happier about you know what they’re doing I mean I see girls who have been retired for years coming out of the woodwork because they started only fans and suddenly they’re active on Twitter and like wow you know like I never thought I’d see you here from you again and I think it’s a great thing you know it’s a great thing you know instead of being like a refugee from the industry or you’re kind of like participant or an alumnus I don’t know how to really put it but I think it’s awesome yeah yeah it’s definitely good stuff to see some old faces back how important is the chemistry between the performers and lesbian porn on one level it’s everything but on another level if the two are good performers regardless if they like each other or not they should be able to play off each other to give what their fans are looking for you know like whether they genuinely are attracted to each other is irrelevant though it certainly helps but if they’re both high level performers and they came to put on a show they’re going to put on a show you know because keep in mind a lot of these girls aren’t genuinely lesbians they’re putting on a show for the benefit of the audience you know and not that they don’t like girls or not some of them aren’t genuine lesbians I’m just saying like they’re not all genuine lesbians you’re not always watching an authentic sexual exchange you know you’re you’re watching two performers who came to put on a show and a show that they put on and if you have two high level performers it’s always going to be a good show sure what are the rules of porn there is a myriad of rules of porn but yeah there’s rules of porn in terms of you know what you can and can’t do and those rules are made by visa visa came up with a checklist and and all the credit card companies that constantly enforce them and so there are very much rules and they’re constantly changing so you have to keep abreast of you know that’s where why everyone’s someone’s stepmom right the original idea was everybody would be like a creepy mom but that was banned by visa now en masse everyone’s a stepmom that’s just how it is oh you have to say it three times or you have to say it before any sex starts or you know and the rules are evolving and some companies are like don’t ever say it stepmom every time and then yeah it just depends on uh you know the evolution of the rules so yeah there very much are rules okay how do tube sites fit into the modern porn landscape and how does it differ from when they were first released well another good question so when they first were released the tube sites largely pirated everyone’s content kind of piggybacked on the citizens united rule and they said that they can’t be held reliable for any of what their users post and they would literally have like you know bought shops or whatever fake users uploading ripping and uploading people’s dvd content and the dvd companies in california had no answer right they didn’t know what to do about it they couldn’t stop it these weren’t even american companies there’s no one to sue there’s nothing you can do and they just got you know raw blind and eventually everyone on the business then these tube companies inherited the industry so and then everything changed right then now that they were the owners of the industry now it’s kind of like you can work but you have to work with them right so now the tubes are ironically the best place to market if you’re a small studio i mean that’s where i get a lot of my traffic from i say that’s where i get the majority of my traffic we have uh every scene lasts about 30 minutes we have like a 12 minute 15 minute tube edit we have a four minute trailer for the website and it’s you know people going to those tube sites and seeing the 15 minute version or the 12 minute version and you know wanting to see the rest is is where we get a lot of our traffic and where we get a lot of our customers so um it was a bad thing at first for the legacy porn world but then they were assimilated like the board and now we all live in the aftermath and and that’s the best place in town to showcase your wares you know yeah there was a time where the expectation was that you were supposed to put your whole scene on there when did that change i don’t know why anyone put their whole scene on there unless they were just trying to give away one so everybody wanted to see more you know i could see maybe that logic or unless i also know that at a certain point in their evolution porn hub would literally pay people to to upload content to their you know what i mean like give them like money per view so at a point you could monetize just directly through porn hub that point is passed because they lost their visa billing so now it’s just they are like an affiliate they’re like the ultimate affiliate where you know you put a trailer or a sample of your content on their site that has all this traffic and then they’ll put a banner underneath it and people who click through that banner you owe the money make sense it’s fair you know and yeah that’s how it works today but yeah for a long time they you could monetize directly through them porn hub premium uh you know the free had certain like so you know it made sense to put content like that but they lost their ability to charge people and therefore uh you know now they make money but as affiliates not direct sales to so we touched on this before talk about how only fans has changed the industry well it was two things that changed the industry one is only fans and the other thing is the iphone before you used to have to know how to use the camera know how to use lighting and you know it was difficult and then apple made a product that was just so easy and so intuitive and everybody could do it and so good right and the selfie craze across the world and you know now all of a sudden everybody had like this you know moderately good camera that keeps getting better and better and better that’s directly connected to the internet and they could do all this amateur content this is resurgence and amateur content shot with the iphone and that coincided with only fans and now not only did they have a device in their pocket that was capable of making a decent content without any like production equipment they also had a way they could monetize and then with social media being the third part of that trifecta they had a platform to to monetize too you know so those three things together only fans gave them the billing in the cms in order to you know make their own little site so to speak and more importantly bill and then the iphone gave them the ability to make the content and then the social media gave them the ability to promote it and with those three legs of the table girls were able to make an enormous amount of money so how has it changed the rest of the industry well it led to a huge phase of consolidation right when i first got in the industry there were like a couple of major major companies but like a plethora of like smaller companies and as kind of the the the the porn hubs of the world laid waste to the the vivids and the wickets and the adamany’s well actually adamany still has like a really big website they make a lot of money selling like novelties and stuff like that but like i’m trying to think of like the big production houses of that era they just ultimately weren’t able to compete when they all got basically assimilated right and then it went even further after only fans right a lot of the mid-level companies started the smaller fish and the mid-level fish and now we’re in a place where there’s very very few independent companies the vast majority of the work is done by like mind geek gamma vixen paper street you know this you know there’s these kind of 10 or so huge entities you know that that’s that’s who’s shooting all the content you know and they’re shooting enough of it where it keeps everybody busy but if you run a follow of these 10 people you’re out and it’s not like before where you can kind of go from place to place to place because client relationships are a lot like romantic relationships some last for years and they are great until they’re not some are quick until they’re not and then some you know are everlasting you know there’s people who work at one shop until they retired you know so it runs the gamut but most relationships run their course eventually and client relationships are no different so if there’s you know a very small pool of clients to work with people are going to kind of phase out of the industry very quickly absolutely so last question how has the evolution of technology changed the industry well i think that goes back to what we were talking about with the iphone and only fans and social media and it really democratized the industry before there was a couple of people you know Steve Ornstein Steve Hirsch Larry Flint Bob Guccioni Hugh Hefner you know this is a handful of people that were you know held all the cards they said who is the star they said what you watch they said everything right you know all the performers that came and went over the years were just a cog in the wheel you know so were the photographers so were the directors so were the camera guys so were the lighting guys the catering the the makeup artists all the way down the line right but it was all in service of you know this company and ultimately this individual Hugh Hefner whoever it is right so some guys are getting fabulously rich and calling all the shots and having a ball right everybody else is kind of a cog in the world and then all of a sudden technology evolves to democratize everything now all of a sudden the meat can hurt the earth and all the anybody who wants to can start a website anybody who wants to can make a porno and you don’t have to have a expensive camera and lights and know how to use f-stops and light meters and you know film and you know all of a sudden it got easier and easier and easier and easier and to the point where it’s in your pocket and it’s touchscreen and you know what I mean the dynamic range is insane you there’s nothing you can’t see and it just became super super easy and now people are running around filming their everyday life and you know it’s happening in mainstream too you know it’s it’s changed everything and the meek have inherited the earth and we’ll see where things go from here absolutely alan i’d like to thank you for being our guest today on adult site broker talk and i hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon absolutely it was a pleasure speaking with you guys absolutely my broker tip today is part one of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later first make sure you’re converting as much of your traffic as possible traffic’s expensive whether it’s search engine traffic review site traffic or affiliate traffic you paid a lot for it so make sure that when someone lands on your site you give them every opportunity possible to either spend money or do whatever it is you want your visitors to do in the case of a pay site make sure your billing options allow as many people as possible to buy have multiple ways to pay in north america most everyone has a credit card but in other parts of the world credit cards aren’t used nearly as much in europe for instance credit card usage is low so look for billing options that will match the areas where your traffic comes from in europe a ch and debit cards are used a lot in africa and other developing nations many people pay by mobile do your homework and find out how people pay in the regions you get most of your traffic it will make you more money the worst thing you can do is get a visitor have them want to buy but since you don’t have their preferred way to pay they can’t if you’re looking for suggestions feel free to get in touch with me via my website along with this is to improve your user experience make your site attractive and easy to navigate people have more options than ever these days i can’t tell you how many sites i go to even some that are owned by large companies where the navigation isn’t obvious to the user you poke around for what seems like forever to do something that should be relatively easy keep it simple before you launch any changes to your site ask your friends to go to the site and check it out unfortunately designers and tech geeks don’t think like us you need real people to look at your site for you the same kind of people who will be visiting your site we’ll talk about the subject more next week and next week we’ll be speaking with Lisa Femia of the electronic frontier foundation and that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker talk i’d once again like to thank my guest alan x of alan x films talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker talk i’m Bruce Friedman [BLANK_AUDIO]