The adult entertainment industry is known for driving technological innovation and the commercialization of new technologies. Studios and distributors laid the foundations for a solid consumer base for the Internet, and many aspects of the mainstream Internet that we now take for granted, including streaming video, online credit card transactions, and even the concept of e-commerce itself.
As blockchain is swiftly becoming integrated into our digital lives, the adult industry is looking to it to develop new business models that will benefit everyone — the talent, the producers, the distributors, and the consumers.
Vice Industry and SpankChain are gaining a lot of attention for their endeavors to improve adult entertainment through blockchain-based solutions. We spoke with Vice Industry Founder and CEO Stuart Duncan about his company’s solution to the issues that are hindering economic growth in the adult industry, and how it compares to their closest competitor.
Before we get to Vice Industry, let’s talk about adult entertainment in general. As a multi-billion dollar industry, it seems to be doing fine, and viewers have free 24/7 all-you-can-eat access to porn, so what exactly needs fixing?
The free content model is broken. Most players in the adult entertainment industry are content with the existing commercial model. Porn generates 30% of all Internet traffic, which generates 62% of the industry’s revenue. Those numbers sound great, but ever-increasing competition is diluting the media landscape with lower-quality content that we’ve conditioned viewers to watch in exchange for putting up with advertising.
The problem here is that, thanks to ad blocking and multi-tasking, viewers aren’t engaging with ads. As a result, advertising revenues are sinking, and this threatens a huge portion of our revenue.
At the same time, producers of paid content are seeing a decline in consumption, while simultaneously suffering from low levels of financial compensation received for content after the ad networks and agents take their cut. So they have little to no incentive to keep producing high-quality content.
What is Vice Industry’s solution to these problems?
It starts with understanding what we’re really competing for here, and that is consumers’ attention.
The future of adult entertainment lies in recognizing that consumer attention is a valuable and scarce resource — and effectively, an entirely new economy: the Attention Economy, which financially rewards all parties: content producers, talent, distributors, curators and consumers.
So Vice Industry’s solution is to ensure that everyone gets paid, even the viewers?
Exactly. As we say, “Free was good, it’s just not good enough anymore. Get paid to watch porn.”
Tell us more about the Attention Economy.
In Vice Industry’s Attention Economy, content is produced, tagged by a blockchain-enabled platform, and curated by channel owners. Consumers view this content for free, in exchange for engaging with it in specific ways — for example, commenting, upvoting, or simply viewing a video for a set period of time. These engagements generate our cryptocurrency, the Vice Industry Token (VIT), which is then used to as payment for participation.
Using a cryptocurrency, rather than a traditional currency, facilitates making the high volume of small payments — micropayments — that our model demands. In cases where there are multiple content producers — for example, when a third party creates a mashup from two existing videos — the underlying blockchain technology will be able to identify fractional ownership and allocate cryptocurrency micropayments accordingly.
Among the other blockchain solutions in the adult industry, there’s been a lot of talk about SpankChain. How does Vice Industry stack up to them?
To put it bluntly, you can’t compare the two. Vice Industry is simple, useful, and beneficial to everyone involved: content producers, talent, distributors, curators, and viewers.
SpankChain, on the other hand, is limited to a single use: anonymous payment for webcam shows. And the viewer needs to buy their cryptocurrency in order to pay for consumption. So they’re not even offering free content!
The SpankChain model creates more problems than it solves. Its multi-token model is confusing, and requires users to purchase them from obscure sources. While anyone can certainly buy VIT, we offer viewers the opportunity to earn VIT for consuming the content they want to see, when they want to see it.
SpankChain has a small target audience and small potential user base. It’s pretty much useless if you’re just buying it for anonymity. Just ask the billions of people who have been using tube sites since 2006.
Vice Industry, on the other hand, serves a vast global target audience and billions of potential users, satisfies their specific needs, and pays them with a multi-use utility token.
Vice Industry is the first adult entertainment enterprise to tokenize the viewer relationship with content, rendering old models unsustainable. Stuart Duncan is confident that his company’s pioneering approach to the way we consume online porn will cross over into mainstream TV and video content distribution. After all, why would anyone watch anything for free when they could be paid?
To get involved in the Vice Industry Token, read the whitepaper here and join the discussion in Telegram https://t.me/viceindustrytoken