xbiz world
xbiz premiere

Articles by Q. Boyer

opinion

The Adult Biz and Physical Cosmology

At some point in your youth, someone introduced you for the first time to the idea of the constantly expanding universe. Depending on the context of your introduction, it might have included analogies involving rubber bands and/or raisin cakes, and probably at least one reference to a “Big Bang.”

Q. Boyer ·

Shades of Success: 2015 Looks Bright for Pleasure Products Sector

With a new year upon us and the crucial Valentine’s Day holiday looming on the horizon, it’s an ideal time to look at what leading companies in the adult pleasure products sector have lined up for the months ahead.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Think: Be Careful What You Wish For

Reading over the news about the U.K.’s Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 and the Communications Act of 2003 that it amended, one thought kept reverberating through my head: Thank you, 1st Amendment!

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Women Out Front: An Important Opportunity

For years, the adult entertainment industry has had an image problem – more than one, obviously, but if there’s one critique of the industry that has spanned the entirety of its history, it’s that the industry and its products are inherently misogynist.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Learning From the Mistakes of Others

Watching the Ray Rice domestic abuse scandal play out, I’m dumbstruck by how inept and counterproductive the NFL’s handling of the situation has been. From the start, the NFL has violated essentially every fundamental rule of public relations and damage control, something that’s very hard to fathom coming from an organization that has, by and large, done such a good job managing its image over the years.

Q. Boyer ·
trends

International: Foreign Pleasure Products Market Is Thriving

Across the broad universe of the adult entertainment industry, there’s a bifurcation in progress that tracks along the lines of divergent industry sectors. Businesses and revenue models that are content dependent continue to struggle, with some hoping to supplant their once mighty subscription revenues with advertising dollars and making a difficult transition to the ad-supported revenue model.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Are You a Pornographer?

At a party a few weeks back, one of my older sisters introduced me to a friend of hers in part by identifying me as “a successful Internet pornographer.” After the obligatory grimace and sigh, I quickly noted that my sister was wrong on at least two fronts in that statement; I’m neither “successful” nor a “pornographer.”

Q. Boyer ·
trends

Not Done Yet: Porn Execs Ponder DVD Market

Once the centerpiece of content-driven revenue streams, the market for adult DVDs has taken a figurative beating over recent years, driven by factors ranging from profligate digital piracy to the advent of technologies that have greatly diminished the relevance of physical media in all entertainment sectors.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Searching for a New Business Model

For several years now, people have been wondering what the “next big thing” in porn will be.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Mobile Design: Keep it Simple, Stupid

For several years now, there has been well-documented consumer migration from fixed web browsing on desktop devices to mobile web surfing using phones, tablets and other mobile devices. While some of the more aggressive predictions made five to seven years ago held that mobile surfing would overtake desktop surfing by this year (a prediction that has proven untrue), the migration still has been significant, and as more consumers adopt mobile devices as their web-browsing mechanism of choice, optimizing your mobile site and app designs is becoming ever more important.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Pleasure Products, Sophistication & Sales

It’s no secret that one of the few adult industry market segments that continues to experience strong growth in revenue is the pleasure products sector. At a time in which it seems that virtually every adult content product is readily available for free on the Internet (whether or not the producer intends for that to be the case), pleasure products are far more resilient to the forces of piracy — and more resistant to the everything-must-be-free bent of modern youth culture, as well.

Q. Boyer ·
trends

A Man’s World: Male Sex Toy Sales Continue Upward Trajectory

For many years, the very idea of a “male sex toy” was regarded by most people as something of a joke. The term brought to mind images of cheap, rubberized blowup dolls and their ludicrous puckered mouths, or clumsy penis pumps that looked more like medieval torture devices than something into which you’d ever willingly insert your member. These were products you’d buy as a gag joke to give a man at his 50th birthday party, perhaps accompanied by sarcastic greeting cards filled with jokes about impotence and hair loss.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Et Tu, Google? (Redux Version)

Almost exactly a year ago, this column took up the subject of Google Glass, and more specifically, Google’s decision to establish content and development policies that prohibited the creation of sexually explicit apps for Google’s new wearable hardware. I also noted that as a search engine, Google remained pretty darn open to porn, but wondered aloud if and when that fact might change, too.

Q. Boyer ·
trends

Sexual Enhancement Products and Shifting Consumer Attitudes

Over the history of the sexual enhancement products market, there have been two constants on which you can rely: strong sales and outrageous marketing claims. Whether the miracle promised by the manufacturers of items like penis enlargement pills was manifest or implied in its marketing claims, companies have for decades seemed to strike a balance between grabbing the public’s attention and garnering the wrong sort of attention from the FDA or FTC.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Traffic: Finding Tomorrow's Money Today

In a challenging and unsure market like the one that the online adult entertainment sector has become, companies must find opportunities for growth wherever they arise. Just as they do for mainstream businesses and entrepreneurs, emerging markets represent a potential means for adult businesses to generate growth, and a possible salve against the impact of ubiquitous free content and profligate digital piracy.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

E-Commerce and Adult Video Sales

I’ll never forget the first system through which I performed order fulfillment for adult videos that had been sold online — mostly because it was a ludicrously tedious and inefficient exercise that drove me absolutely nuts. This was long before off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions were available, and for that matter, long before most people had used the Internet at all, much less used it to make a purchase of some kind.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

The Role of E-Commerce in the Pleasure Product Sector

One of the more obvious impacts of the Internet is the way in which it globalized so many things that used to be thought of as entirely local phenomenon. In the old days, if an American wanted to buy a sex toy, and his or her community was one of the thousands across the country that didn’t have a local sex shop or adult bookstore, that person was in for some driving, or had to somehow get their hands on one of the mail-order catalogs operated by the intrepid few who had established adult businesses that were willing to cross state lines in the process of fulfilling orders.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

The Great Porn Dichotomy

It was a truly bizarre conversation, the sort that I definitely never imagined that I’d ever have back when I was studying astronomy in college. It was the fall of 1997, and I was sitting in a meeting with a fairly unlikely collection of people, two seated on either side of the table, while I took up a spot at its head.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Consumers Embracing BDSM, Fetish Products Like Never Before

By all accounts, consumer interest in BDSM has grown in recent years, a trend that some observers of the market attribute to the popularity of the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy. Whatever its inspiration, increased competition within the BDSM/fetish pleasure-product sector has spawned the development of a more diverse selection and more sophisticated and high-quality designs.

Q. Boyer ·
opinion

Serious Questions: Dating Sites and False Advertising

The popup ad promised something fairly amazing in any context: “thousands” of girls in my area, all presumably hot to trot, or at the very least, available to cyber-woo. From my perspective, there was only one small problem with the claim; it was quite obviously false, and enormously, egregiously so.

Q. Boyer ·
Show More