The move has both decreased the number of requests for technical assistance and increased retentions for those sites, which had lost members since the application of the service pack.
“Microsoft really shot themselves in the foot on that one,” Princess Elissa, Smashbucks’ vice president of sales and marketing, told XBiz. Smashbucks members found themselves submitting and resubmitting their passwords following login, and retention dropped. Microsoft’s DRM was removed.
Smashbucks top-performing sites are mommylovespussy.com, domymom.com and pornstarclassics.com. The company, founded in 2001, delivers a range of niches, including “classic” lines and newer markets like MILFs. In the wake of the DRM removal, sites will be returned to traditional encoding such as Windows Media and Quicktime.
The rights management was originally applied to keep customers from hoarding downloaded videos and trading them on the Internet. However, the technical glitches outwieghed the perceived benefit.
“It’s unfortunate that Microsoft created the DRM that screwed everything,” she said.
Elissa maintains that Microsoft made it easy to apply DRM to video, but customers found the experience challenge of getting around the permissions to be unpleasant. She says the company is confident the sites will perform better without the DRM’s impediment.
“(Customers) will see the direct benefits of this change,” she said. “For all of the webmasters who were averse to our program because they did not like the DRM, I am hopeful that they will all give us a try now.”