I was reading an old 2017 thread on AdultDVDTalk.com and it had some famous porn producers that commented in it like Mike Quasar who runs the DVD company Zero Tolerance (IAFD shows 1,048 director credits) and also has a comment in it from Pierre Woodman (IAFD shows he's been in 600+ scenes). The thread is about someone asking how one particular 2D porn website has been able to do so well over others. I highly recommend giving it a read to see what they all say as I think a lot of what is discussed are the same things that likely will impact VR Porn studios and companies, now and in the future...
https://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/the-economics-of-legal-porno-and-porn-in-general/1
The main key points are:
The Most Important Thing: Listening to Common Customer Feedback
A lot of major studios blame their downfall on piracy, yet some consumers are responding that it's really because they don't listen to their customer base. One person called out Pierre for not having good trailers and Pierre said he didn't have time for good trailers. And they tried to explain why this was important so you can see what you're getting before you sign up, but he didn't listen or care. Lots of examples in the thread. There are many people that are signing up over pirating to support the studio's work to help keep them in business, so they can keep creating more content that they greatly appreciate.
Realize You Are Playing A Zero Sum Game
A lot of the large tube site owners have production studios. They dilute their competitors by posting their stuff for free, but then link to ads to sign up on their own sites. They drive massive traffic to their sites with their tube sites. This is what a lot of the studios are battling. Mix in pirating and as one producer says, it's a race to zero. I think VR has an edge right now to get ahead of a lot of this some. Also as I watch a ton of VR scenes, I often think, it would be so easy to top their entire catalogue by making a few adjustments you could take most of their market share and subscribers by simply filling in all the gaps on the things they are missing or doing wrong. I think over time more studios/companies will come in that will raise the bar significantly and it will be like night and day in quality. This is basically what Jules Jordan did with DVD porn. A good example is I posted a LethalHardcoreVR appreciation thread on Reddit where it got 16.4k+ views which is insane since this is VR porn user targeted traffic: https://www.reddit.com/r/oculusnsfw/comments/u5s5me/lethalhardcorevr_appreciation_thread
I also mentioned it here on the SLR forum, and on POVR forums how much I liked them and why. I messaged LethalHardcoreVR about the post so they could check it out and maybe respond if they want, and they didn't. That was pretty disappointing as people were saying the same thing everywhere. Yet right now they are all we seem to really have for most of our VR cheerleader/girlscout/schoolgirl/themed type scenes. They have dedicated lines and content for it and are shooting mostly all of it. Until one day when they aren't, and then what happens. So it's like a zero sum game or a race to having your market share being diluted more and more with better competition, etc. One of the biggest complaints I read everywhere is they don't listen to customer feedback and make the improvements.
Fan Interaction and Finding Massive Collective Shared Interests/Data = Winning
The thread was from 2017 (5 years ago) so it's very old. All the studios and pornstars on their site typically have a dedicated thread where they tell everyone to post in their specific thread and not create a new one. Someone posted this response to Mike Quasar who blamed it on piracy....
"let me explain better
Mason thread more than 200 pages
Jules Jordan More than 200 pages
Jay Sin more than 200 pages
Mike adriano 460 pages
mike quasar 10 pages since 2009.
how can you explain this gap?"
VR User Interface/Software Experience Is Very Important
I recently cancelled my POVR membership because I just got tired of the viewing experience there. I'm tired of clicking on each individual video, clicking play, exiting out, going back to the video page and clicking the back button, then going to the next video. It's like this on pretty much every VR site I'm on. Every site has users asking for good DeoVR integration and they all ignore the feedback. I feel like I spend more time just trying to find a decent video to watch that I haven't seen before, downloaded, that has what I like in it, etc. I add certain videos to my favorites over there or to a playlist to figure out what I've already downloaded but it doesn't display it on the main catalogue view so I have to click on it, then click on the drop down to see if it's on a downloaded already playlist. It's just really frustrating. I notice they also have a filter option in the top right but it doesn't let me filter out what I've already seen, downloaded, don't like, etc. It's nothing like the upcoming SLR hide feature and DeoVR integration that is coming.
This seems so basic, but all studio sites really need to add is the ability to hide all your favorites at a bare minimum. That way the site gets more videos flagged up as a favorite as well. Then all a user has to do is favorite any video they downloaded already. If they wanted to be extra clever they could add a skip button and you could mark that and hide all your skipped videos with a toggle button. Problem solved. But nobody wants to do that and I think it's because once you go through their entire catalogue and hide what you downloaded and skipped, you might be left with 4 monthly updates or very little good content, and you'll likely cancel.
So then the bigger issue surfaces that they need to increase their release schedule, bring on more crew to shoot more scenes for them, and have more creative lines. If they have the funds and revenue through signups to do that, it's a nobrainer as this is why a lot of people cancel. They then wait for the catalogue to build back up again with more scenes they haven't seen/downloaded where it's worth renewing, and then go renew again. Just my honest feedback and thoughts.
