Low barriers to entry – that’s the main factor driving the proliferation of gonzo companies out there today. It doesn’t take millions of dollars to start up one of these companies. Plus, the fact that the industry is largely concentrated in porn valley means you have the whole infrastructure right there, with the skilled supporting workforce (i.e. camera operators, still photographers, editors, computer geeks, makeup artists,sales and marketing people, etc.) and the network of agents and agencies to supply talent. And, of course, the size of the industry now means that there’s lots of work for girls that are interested, which means there are always lots of girls interested.
Acquisitions, where one company buys another, are one type of consolidation that you see in a lot of industries. It doesn’t surprise me that this doesn’t happen very often in the porn business because I don’t think most of these companies have much enduring value.
What I fail to understand is why more gonzo companies aren’t going out of business. That’s a type of consolidation that, given the increased competition, I would expect to see more of. It just seems like the pie is getting sliced awfully thin these days. I doubt many people are getting rich.
…RLD and PXP stuff sometime falls off a cliff in price. I’ve gotten their DVDs brand new at times for under $5.00 on AdultDVDMarketPlace.com. It isn’t hard for me to believe that some distributors make bad bets and get stuck with too much product that they have to move dirt cheap.
Tricia Devereaux posts:
Evil Angel we even have the Buttman Magazine line. Different sales team for domestic, same sales team for cable and foreign. DVD Production is shared between the 2 companies. Shipping depts. are separate but do work together in concept.
Same central website – www.evilangel.com.We didn’t consolidate that company into us and absorb it, it was us expanding and doing something different. Until then, we had never taken on a non-established director as a contract director. (Actually, I take that back, we did once… and that didn’t work out, so we didn’t do it again at Evil Angel.) We had Tristan Taormino, but that was for 2 individual projects, not a directing contract. There were the comic book movies, but again, those were individual projects, not a contract director.
Anyway, there were a few people we wanted to give a try, like Jazz Duro and HJ (Nevaquit), but we just couldn’t risk the Evil Angel reputation or charge Evil Angel prices. So we started the Buttman Magazine line (which also of course has a tendency to be ass-centric) and it’s proven to be a great training ground for these new guys. And the extra bonus is that we get to sell it a couple of dollars cheaper to the end consumer since it’s not as established as our main roster of directors.
So that’s a LONG explanation of why a company might start a sister company. We were pretty obvious with ours, but there are other companies who started a more anonymous offbranch company that is harder-edged than their first or maybe ethnic-centered, or maybe feature-oriented, or stuff like that.
