High Demand & Low Supply Ganged Up For One Big Bang!

Written by 3XWEST

In the ever-evolving landscape of streaming giants, it takes a lot to lock horns year after year with the best of the best. We are always looking out for where to put our efforts to stay competitively relevant and ahead of the curve – an innovative platform feature? Signing our next ambassador or licensed content partner? Launching a new series, or giving a facelift to an existing one? Luckily, we don’t have to pull these decisions out of thin air. Much like mainstream platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, Adult Time relies on data and market analysis to identify gaps in our current offering to our subscribers, and this then helps us engineer improvements and additions that will resonate with members and new subscribers alike. 

In essence, we aim to try to predict what fans want most, and deliver it. Even better is when we can manage to beat our rivals to the punch, by identifying something that a lot of customers are clamoring for and few companies are currently providing. In economics this is referred to as supply and demand – and any product need that pairs high buyer demand with low seller supply is like the promised land for any ambitious brand like ours to plant our flag in. Of course, if it was that simple and straightforward to find that perfect window of market conditions, then everyone could do it. The opportunities aren’t always obvious and the wins aren’t always guaranteed – but when you’re willing to take a chance that others don’t, and are  keeping your eyes peeled and your ear to the ground, you may just find yourself at the hypocenter of the next Big Bang that’s going to propel your company to the next level! Read on to find out how we used supply & demand to inspire the lift-off of our hit series, Accidental Gangbang!

Identifying Missing Elements: A Paradoxical Problem

How do you spot something that isn’t there? A bit of a contradiction, isn’t it – but the answer to that riddle is what we are always hard at work trying to suss out. We have a great variety of tools to measure what works and what doesn’t on our platform – clicks, views, ratings, favorites, usage rates, and more allow us to directly tap into how our subscribers respond to the series, episodes, pornstars, and platform improvements we put live, which in turn influences our future strategies. But unfortunately, there’s no easy tool out there to gauge the absence of something! You can’t use a ruler to measure a negative amount of inches, or a scale to weigh how much a substance is missing. Analyzing only what you’ve already done before, and not what you haven’t yet tried, can only teach you so much.

And of course, there’s also the related problem of avoiding an “echo chamber” – let’s say you try something and it works – great! What now? Well, if you only repeat the successes you know are “tried & true”, and avoid risky decisions in favor of what’s already proven to work, you start to enter a closed loop. There become fewer opportunities to introduce new untested variables into the equation. Sure, you might not have as many failures, but you also lock yourself out to potential opportunities for expansion. The floor of your results might be higher, but the ceiling gets lowered as a result. In some companies’ conference room conversations, that might be a perfectly legitimate strategy, but for us, we always want to strive for better.

So back to our riddle – how do you spot what isn’t there? How do you identify what porn customers (either existing ones, or potential new ones) might want, that you aren’t yet providing them? Well, there’s no one answer, but we have a few tricks up our sleeve that have helped us throughout the years.

• • Search Patterns – Thank goodness for search bars, right? They let you find what you’re looking for so much faster than if you had to sift through tens of thousands of videos to try and find that special sauce you’re seeking. But on our end, they’re a blessing too, because we get to see the categories and keywords that our subscribers are most on the hunt for! Most top search terms are ones we already offer plenty of content for – anal, massage, MILFs, etc. – but every so often we’ll see new search terms creep up in popularity over time. And especially when these are categories that we produce little or no content for, it shows us that we may be seeing a surge in demand that suggests we might want to increase our supply for.

• • Surveys & Polls – Asking users about their Adult Time experience can often reveal fascinating insights, even outside the scope of the questions we ask. Generally we try to leave at least one open-ended question for respondents to share any suggestions or requests they can think of… and sometimes we even run entire surveys to better understand topics where we suspect there might be growth potential. This opens the door for that customer demand I mentioned earlier to shine through – for us to identify any common or repeating sentiments among respondents that might open our eyes to a growing need or want that has started to surface.
    

• • Tubes & Other Sites – Anyone who hasn’t heard of a tube site is surely living under a rock at this point! Tubes are everywhere these days, and because they are freely accessible to adults, they are a gold-mine of insights into what types of porn Average Joes and Janes are searching for and consuming. Similarly, research into what’s working well (or not so well) on other sites with similar pay structures to our own can also be a clue into market demand. These can be a bit tricky – there isn’t always a 1-to-1 correlation for successes on one platform translating directly into successes on another – and besides, a brand with a motto of “Porn Done Differently” doesn’t want to just play copycat to what others are doing! But we can at least study the content patterns we see working best in the wider market, and draw some conclusions that will then help us make more informed decisions that benefit both our subscribers and our product’s future.

• • Pilots & Limited Series – Many conventional porn sites do one thing, and one thing well. They craft and hone the ingredients for their desired content formula, and then stick with it. For those types of businesses, trying something new and untested is a recipe for disaster. Why mess with a good thing? But at Adult Time, one of the foundations – and indeed, one of the value propositions to our subscribers – is to do things differently once in a while. This gives us the luxury of testing new concepts – either based on trends we’ve seen in the industry, a new niche we want to break into, or even just an intuition or conviction in an idea that we think fills a demand that nobody else is currently meeting. No longer are we trying to measure something that isn’t there – instead, we can gauge the results of these early experiments to decide whether it’s something worth investing further into!

• • Connecting The Dots – We content specialists not only have to identify what’s working well, but also WHY it’s working. Sometimes it’s obvious, but other times it takes a bit of detective work – and even educated guessing – to reach an answer. And more puzzling still, you might end up following a trail that leads you to discovering something you weren’t even looking for. That genius idea might be one or two degrees of separation away from what you THOUGHT was your big discovery. Just like Viagra was originally meant to be a medicine for blood pressure (it’s true, look it up!) we stumble onto interesting findings by accident all the time. For instance, we noticed that cuckolding content was trending often outside of our own platform, but that it was a polarizing category for many mainstream viewers because of the emasculation sub-themes that were included. This gave us the idea to pursue “Watch You Cheat” and similar stories in other series, taking the popularity of cuckolding and recontextualizing it into a more erotic, cheating-with-permission angle.
    

These are just some of the ways that we regularly check the pulse of the porn market to better understand what viewers are searching for and excited about. And it’s always changing – time, technology, pop culture, societal factors, and more can make tastes evolve and new trends emerge. We have to constantly be taking the temperature on what’s hot and what’s not. Which brings us to what fueled the happy not-so-accident of Accidental Gangbang…

Plugging Holes: No Pun Intended (Or Was It?)

At Adult Time we recognize the importance of continuously refining our content to cater to the diverse tastes of our various audiences. With the introduction of new channels, original content, licenses, and partnerships, the platform undergoes a dynamic process of addition and subtraction, reminiscent of traditional mainstream streaming services. Series might launch, run their course, and then be paused or retired if interest declines or if other projects start to outperform them. In some ways it’s survival of the fittest, but we also very closely monitor what our active series cover in terms of sexual preferences, categories, and niches. It’s important for us that certain high-performing content types – such as anal, family roleplay, threesomes, and the like – get enough coverage in our catalog to remain prevalent.

We can’t cover everything, and so sometimes we identify holes in our portfolio… blind spots where we don’t have much, or any, content that caters to fans of that content type. Depending on how popular that type of content is, and how well it fits alongside Adult Time’s brand values and existing series, we may decide that it’s something that we want to increase within our catalog. In other words, we see that we have low supply of a high-demand content type, and we decide to “plug” the hole by greenlighting new scenes or series featuring that content category.

And this was exactly the case for Accidental Gangbang. We had plenty of threesomes or foursomes, but we didn’t produce much group content in any of our original series other than the occasional special release. But we started to notice that hey wait – other companies aren’t doing it much either these days? The reality was that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a unique gap in the adult entertainment market – a dearth of group sex content featuring 5+ performers. The factors contributing to this were multi-faceted, including logistical difficulties uniting big casts of performers while maintaining safety regulations, an industry shift towards pornstars producing smaller-scale self-shot content on fan platforms, and the prohibitive costs and coordination challenges associated with creating group content, rendering it inaccessible or unprofitable for smaller studios to produce. In fact, even as pandemic restrictions started to lift, many studios had by then scaled down on producing group sex content and decided to keep it that way.

But us? We decided to go in the complete opposite direction. Seeing that we could now offer a product that few studios were still supplying, and that we saw there was still big demand for, set the wheels in motion for us to put our own spin on the group sex genre with our very own original series. We did as much research as we could, gathered the facts, and came up with an A+ way to turn gangbangs into gold stars.

Gangbangs Done Differently: Our Unique Approach

Even though the presence of group sex content within the adult industry had lessened, that didn’t mean we could just come out the gate with yet another orgy series and expect it to succeed. We knew that we would still have to offer something different enough to feel fresh and catch people’s attention. We sat down and mapped out what elements we wanted for OUR group sex series to stand out – what did an ADULT TIME group sex series look like and WHY was it different? What did we feel was missing from other group sex series that we could offer fans, and what might complement our other content so that customers watching our other content would feel compelled to watch this series too (and vice-versa)? We came up with a list of elements that we felt strongly would give the series its own personality, and its own unique spot both within Adult Time’s series portfolio and in the larger market of group sex porn. 

• Gangbang Sex – We could have chosen any type of group sex to produce, but we felt that a gangbang-themed series checked a few interesting boxes for us. For one, it was something we really weren’t exploring in our original series at ALL – we had had occasions where we might film an orgy such as for a feature film or special release, but gangbang content was very scarce on our platform. It also seemed like the sub-genre of group sex content that was the least present in the current market – it was much easier to find orgy and sex-party content that was self-produced by pornstars or amateur uploaders, whereas not as many people seemed to be exploring gangbang content these days. And lastly, we had had some historical success with a series called “Devil’s Gangbangs” which gave us some past experience with the genre to draw from.
  
  
• Story-Driven – Adult Time is known first and foremost as a story-focused brand. While we have of course started branching out to gonzo, docu-series, reality, and other types of content, our bread and butter remains narrative series. We felt this already gave us a competitive edge in launching a group sex product – especially a gangbang one – where almost none of the competition was doing this. For most gangbangs, stories were either non-existent or pasted on as an afterthought. So we committed to bringing our storytelling strength to this new series – it was, frankly, a no-brainer for us.
  
  
• Accidental Group Sex – This, we felt, was a huge way to make the series feel fresh and unique. Almost all the gangbang content we’d seen out and about started as group sex from the beginning. So we decided to try something very unusual – what if we started each scene with a couple that “accidentally” gets barged in on by a larger group? This had so many perceived benefits. For one, it could help bridge the gap between this new series and our other content on the platform (the vast majority of which is duo sex) by offering a taste of intimate 1-on-1 sex before the main event. For another, it made for a great narrative structure and trendy dynamic to have onlookers catch and join the couple, since we had plenty of past success doing caught and almost-caught stories. And it helped bring a lot of levity to the premise – we didn’t want this gangbang series to feel rough, exploitative, or misogynistic, so centering the series around a very cheerful and slapstick comedic bit was a great way to soften the edges.
  
  
• Signature Visual – It was important to us for the series to be instantly recognizable out in the wild, and easily mentally associated with Adult Time. And so, we knew we wanted a signature visual that would give the series a clear identity. We also knew we would want it to be a fully clothed visual, for a few reasons: to get around social media restrictions towards nudity; to use character wardrobe as a tool to communicate the story at-a-glance; and to make it feel a little unlike the other gangbang content out there. We chose a visual of the gangbanged character shrugging towards the screen – it helped sell the “Accidental” part of “Accidental Gangbang”, and made for a refreshingly charming and eye-catching image to use for promoting the content.

The pilot episodes of Accidental Gangbang – one straight, one lesbian, and one trans – quickly gained traction, becoming one of the most celebrated experiments we’ve put live on Adult Time in recent years. The success extended beyond the platform’s existing fan base, resonating with viewers outside of the Adult Time ecosystem especially on social media and tube sites. This positive response really affirmed that our method was sound – we had applied a very thorough and mindful process into deciding what new launch might best fill a hole in our portfolio, and the pay-off was instantaneous. We are eager to use this approach more and more in the years to come, to help identify MORE opportunities for additions to our catalog that will make a similarly huge impact. In other words, if we do our jobs right this won’t be the last “big bang” that Adult Time fans can look forward to in the future. If the demand is there, our supply is sure to follow!

Watch a full Accidental Gangbang scene for free here!