An industry in free fall and what can be done
How have you seen the adult entertainment industry change?
Stuart Duncan, CEO: The adult entertainment industry has been through an extensive period of change in the past decade and transformed beyond recognition. The disruptive nature of tubes has meant that it has become increasingly difficult to obtain good quality original content to populate even a handful of outlets. This has kept the industry awake at night and resulted in many studios closing because they’ve been unable to keep apace. Put simply, the industry has been in free fall.
Why do you think that is the case?
SD: One of the main issues is the industry is more distributed than ever. There are over 150,000 adult websites worldwide. That’s a lot of producers, producing a lot of content. Unfortunately, a lot of that content continues to be pirated and/or made available for free. The model is unsustainable. Who is going to produce anything if they are not paid?
It’s not just traditional publishers that have felt the pinch either. I have friends at a company that runs multiple famous tube sites who have admitted that even their revenues have also started to tank. A lot of other friends and producers are clinging on by their fingernails. Not a lot of people have been doing well. Maybe Cams have but even that is stale now.
What can be done?
SD: Realising all this was the catalyst for me to set up ViceToken.com with Dan just over a year ago. Dan and I had a shared desire to disrupt and rebuild the monetization of free adult content through a better understanding of users and the entire Vice Industry ecosystem. Now, our goal is to bring back the power to the Vice Industries of the world and pay content makers, curators, distributors and even ordinary people to watch TV.
How did you and Dan meet?
SD: A friend in Montreal told me about a guy who was trying to put cryptocurrencies together with the adult entertainment industry and who was trying to reach me. It reminded me of the lawyer in Breaking Bad — I know a guy who knows a guy, etc. I called him while I was driving to Hershey Pennsylvania in a raging snowstorm down Highway 81. We spoke for almost an hour and by the time we had finished the call we had sketched out the whole plan.
What was the plan based on?
SD: In a word, blockchain. While you may not know it, the Vice Industry is the latest in line for blockchain disruption. However, what we are doing with the Vice Industry Token is not just disruptive, it is revolutionary. It truly will change the way all content, TV and video is watched online in the future.
What is the dream?
SD: The dream is to build a complete ecosystem for the attention economy that rewards all users through a superior viewing experience, using our Vice Industry Token. That’s really it, it’s really simple. No smoke and no mirrors.
It is a dream to put revenue back with the content producer. The key step change is the proven blockchain reality that we could finally pay for the attention of the viewer. What a gorgeous concept! Essentially, viewers get paid to watch porn. I ran out and trademarked it right away. I mean, use our blockchain to get paid for watching adult content — who wouldn’t want that? Everyone I have spoken to from the industry has agreed that this is the best way to future-proof our industry. My goal is to create one of the world’s most widely used utility tokens and change the Vice Industry forever, using our blockchain and cryptocurrency to help others monetize their websites and power themselves using VITcoins.
So how does it work?
By developing a universal Vice Industry Token using our adaptive blockchain technology, we have established a new model that ensures content producers get rewarded for creating content, curators get rewarded for identifying relevant content and viewers get rewarded for watching porn. By doing so, we are creating a community of billions. We compete with no one. We are just an engine that anyone can use to generate VIT cryptocurrency. We help magnify the ability of all participants.
How has the industry reacted to your plans?
SD: Almost immediately, some of the people involved in founding Ethereum and Steem became very interested. The latter, which is a social media platform underpinned by a blockchain that allows bloggers to get paid, seemed like a perfect fit. However, because we needed to specifically service video viewing and also because of a small amount of pushback in the Steem community against porn (the Vice Industry), we decided to create our own blockchain and airdrop back to supportive Steemians.
Who has assisted you on your journey?
SD: Ned Scott was an awesome supporter of us from the beginning. I also must give credit to Dan Larimer, who gave me his considered opinion on a call when he was at Steem (he is now at EOS), as well as a very special person and friend who helped found Ethereum. The others are my very supportive team of people involved with this project who, in their own verticals, are all going to be giants in this industry very soon. I’m also blessed to have some development collaboration with Andrey Kostin, who I truly believe is one of the smartest men on this planet. Andrey just bangs out things that work with very little fixing and I and everyone else are learning a lot from him. I’m proud to know each and every person involved with the VIT project.
What does the future hold for ViceToken.com?
SD: We have already overcome every problem we have thus far encountered. I am confident, given our progress in everything we are doing, that we will be successful in creating a token and blockchain that is so fast and that can handle so many transactions that it can be used globally by billions of users as a utility token.
What have you been doing recently?
SD: We have attended and sponsored Cryptowatch this month. We were also at a trade show called Affiliate Summit West. In addition, we attended Internext in Las Vegas to add industry players to the Vice Industry Token project. It was really our inauguration party, as we were at the Paradise Penthouse in the Hard Rock Casino on January 21, 2018.
What can interested content partners do?
We have already started working with several industry partners and their content. Many more will come. Onboarding teams need to be set up at VIT to help people integrate and tokenize.
I’ve been operating businesses successfully and profitably for over twenty years. Creating a blockchain and technology in the Vice Industry space is the easy part. Adapting our blockchain to work in a real business sense is both the hard part and the fun part. I guess what I am saying is that I’m a good general and I know how to make things work smoothly. In business its all about building value, whether you are a private business, a public business or a blockchain and cryptocurrency — and now I’ve been all three.
If you are a content generator that wants to come along for the ride and use our meta token, we’d love to help you and we’d love to hear from you. We can help you to grow your business and magnify whatever it is you want to do.