IMPORTANT MARKET RESEARCH FOR FREE! :: Simply Jimmy D :: Breakin' News or Breakin' Balls: It's all the same to me!

jimmyd _writes "I received an email today from a friend of mine, a guy I exchange emails with regularly. No, we've never actually met face-to-face, but I do count him as a friend. He's helped me out a few times with some computer problems I've had. For instance, he helped me reconstruct my hard drive when it tanked. And then he mailed me a brand new 60gig Fire-Wire drive to use to back up my data. By the way, he sent the drive gratis. That's right, for free... no charge.... zip, nada. Nice guy, huh? We all should have internet friends like him, huh? It gets better. Just today I received another hard drive, a 36gig fast-and-wide SCSI drive for my AVID, to replace one that broke. Again, gratis. Lucky me, huh? You betcha!

So... do I feel I owe this guy? Absolutely. What do I feel I owe him? I don't really know. Has he asked me to send him free porn? No. Has he asked if he can come on a set and watch? Nope. He hasn't asked for a damn thing and I've known him now for 3 or 4 months.

He is, I've found out, fairly interested in the porn biz. He says he really enjoys my site. And he's voiced an occassional envy for my work in this sordid industry. I tell him the grass always looks greener.. blah.. blah... blah. But he still envies me being around the girls and the sex I guess. And I'm not yet so jaded, so numb, that I can't realize how another person might feel that way.

My friend is a professional guy. He's a marketing person for a really big, high-tech corporation. That's how he gets access to things like hard drives. No, they're not stolen! If anything, they were from his competitors and used for analysis and research because the manufacturer's of the drives he's sent me are not the manufacturer he is employed by. But that's not what I'm writing about.

What I'm writing about is his answer to a simple question I asked him in a recent email. You see, this guy is also a fairly regular consumer of porn. He's the guy we all hope to reach with our product, because he has plenty of disposable income to feed a healthy porn habit. I also know that he enjoys a wide variety of porn, from wall-to-wall to features.

Ok, so here's what we have, a middle-class, middle-age, married, college educated, professional, male, porn consumer. I asked him what he thought about high-end, feature porn, the stuff that is mostly geared toward cable and PPV. Here's what he said:

"I think the high-end stuff definitely has a place! Everyone is tired of the same old shit, and we show it by not buying more."

STOP!

"Everyone is tired of the same old shit..."

So what's he saying here? That most of the XXX biz is putting out the same, lame product? Is this something we didn't already know? Of course we did. But did we know that everyone out there knows? I doubt it. We certainly don't want to admit that they know. We don't like to admit that our consumers know a fucking thing. If we did, more of us might want to know what they think.

But back to my friend who then says, "...and we show it by not buying more."

Is this guy really saying that sales might be down because our audience is growing tired of what we're selling them? Wait, How the fuck did he know sales were down? Besides, I thought sales were down because there's too much product dumped on the market. Isn't that what all the company owners say? You mean that might not be the whole, fucking truth? There might be another reason like our audience is tired of being ripped off with stuff like comps masquerading as new product, or with actual new product that either sucks beyond belief or is indistinguishable from the next guys's shit? Uh oh! We might be in bigger trouble than I thought. But wait, he goes on and it gets worse! (Of better, depending on how you look at it.)

"With all of the Matrix and Swordfish-like regular movies out there, people expect more even from 'alternative' entertainment. Flashy CG and action are what it's all about. Plus, with the advent of home software like Premiere and Final Cut Pro, people say 'I can make some pretty good looking video, why can't these guys???' Everyone I know has a DV camera now and is trying their hand at producing DVD and VCD/SVCD for their families. Even people that I wouldn't consider "technical" are trying it!"

For those of you who can't figure out what my friend is saying, let me spell it out for you. He's saying that there's plenty of low-budget movies coming from independent producers outside the main Hollywood system that have effects and action nearly as good as blockbuster, 100 million dollar movies like 'Matrix' and 'Swordfish'. He's saying that the 'flashy CG' (i.e., Computer Generated stuff), and action, is what makes this stuff really entertaining. And he's inferring that if these low-budget guys can put what looks like high-end effects in their movies--even though they can't afford to--and they also can manage to pull off some really cool action sequences, why can't we, as pornographers, do something nearly the same?

And then it gets even more pathetic for us when he says that all these people at home who now have the really neat, not too expensive gear like DV cameras and editing software on the home computer are making some pretty cool little home movies. So cool, in fact, that they look better than the stuff we, the porn professionals, are putting out! And when they put their home-spun stuff up against our pro-stuff, and their home-spun stuff looks and sounds better, they're wondering why our stuff isn't even as good as their stuff when 'they' don't even really know what 'they' are doing! Of course, little do they know that many porn-professionals don't know what they are doing either. I'm also guessing these people can't help but come to the natural conclusion that either we are ripping them off by making inferior, unprofessional product, or despite our best efforts, we're the most incompetent bunch of losers ever to hold a DVcam in our grimy, greedy hands!

Well, there you have it. Free market research. DO what you want with it. It was free after all. And you don't get much for free in the porn biz, except maybe a disease or an arrest warrant, so enjoy your free stuff, I know I am.

"


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