The branders must be crazy
Unlike pornographers who produce and sell DVDs, most online porn is fungible. There are niches, but virtually any webmaster can acquire enough content to cover every niche because each niche is almost nonexclusive by definition. That means that with very few exceptions, there are no real brands to speak of when it comes to online porn. While the lack of brands is a significant departure from the DVD side of the business, which follows a Hollywood model of branded entertainment where each producer builds a name around one or more porn star, Shuster says a web without brands is often a good thing.
"I think you're crazy if you try to use the internet to brand something," Shuster says. "Branding only works for a few really big, mature companies. Let me put it to you this way: As someone marketing products, I think branding is a fool's notion. But as someone who sells ads, I think it's a gift from heaven."
Before she started her own Club Jenna brand, Jenna Jameson was not only a contract girl for Vivid Entertainment, she was the starlet the studio sought to build its brand around.
The message to consumers was simple: Jenna Jameson = Vivid, and vice versa.
The internet changed things for adult studios, even if they were slow to learn that lesson. What Shuster and his cohorts found was that the internet detached people from traditional distribution chains because the competition was only a click away.
What that meant was that brands that operated as antonymous commercial islands suffered from isolation, compared to nameless operators that were brand agnostic and therefore able to band together.
The new message to consumers on the internet is even more basic: Any well-run adult website will either deliver exactly what you want or take you to another site that has the content you're looking for.
Adult websites are kind of like Burger King in that way. Once the user has expressed interest in a burger (or porn), they'll get it their way, right away. Of course in real space, Burger King won't run over to McDonald's for you if you desire a Big Mac, although perhaps the two should explore the idea of working together online.
The web without brands isn't just an idea that has its place in porn, Shuster says. Whether you're talking about a brick-and-mortar company or a dot-com, the idea mostly remains the same: Work with your competitors.
If you're thinking about marketing cars online, the solution is to have Ford and Lexus side by side. While Ford could lock up a dealership in a small town and buy enough local media to keep Lexus under the radar in one locale, it simply can't blot out the sun when it comes to the internet. That means that people interested in cars simply won't tolerate a disconnected internet; they'll just move on and likely never look back.
So, where Ford and Lexus compete in real space, they need to cooperate online to fuel the customer's passion for everything automotive.
Tom DeWolfe should befriend Mark Zuckerberg
For internet-based brands, Shuster's game plan is even more striking.
For those consumed with selling ads on social networks, the emphasis is on finding the best-in-breed brand – MySpace or Facebook. But the fuss made over MySpace losing market share to a site like Facebook misses the point, according Shuster, who says the two should collaborate on joint ventures to bounce users between them.
"They're different enough to be distinct, but similar enough to make a lot more money working together," Shuster says.
Shuster's point is simple, though counterintuitive. The idea is to give the customer what he wants. If he wants a social network, give him the best social network possible, but don't put up a wall at the edge of your site if you're MySpace. The way Shuster sees it, part of MySpace's goal should be to transport users anywhere they wish to go on any social network.
But Shuster says he doubts whether a hypothetical deal could ever be struck between MySpace and Facebook because old thinking continues to dominate the new medium.
Think small, strike it big
The way Shuster sees it, being big can often be a liability on the internet. With little money on the line, it's easy to experiment. Witness bloggers who have sky-rocketed to popularity in the past few years. One tried-and-true tool for bloggers is a blog-roll, which lists the blogs that blogger likes to read. While many bloggers now know the importance of a blog-roll, the initial risk of identifying and linking to competitors might have been viewed as too great had serious money been on the line.
"One of the things that made the early internet work was that we did so many things on a small scale," Shuster says. "Today's big brands are often handicapped by size. Being too big makes them reluctant to experiment. Those big companies need to recalibrate. They need to figure out the minimum conditions necessary to test a hypothesis and then go for it."
The mass media mentality is something Shuster sees as a remnant of TV and print, where gigantic campaigns were the only option. But the way Shuster sees it, success on the internet often starts with a very small seed, and it typically blossoms overnight.
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