How Do I Register a Porn Production Company Legally?
Starting an adult entertainment company is a smart idea. For starters, you can generate revenue and create content that speaks to millions of people.
Despite what some people may think about entering porn, starting a porn production company is just like starting any other business in a more mainstream or vanilla industry. There is very, very little difference when it comes to filing and then incorporating with the appropriate authorities.
One key factor to keep in mind is that porn is a tightly regulated industry that requires reporting and coordination with law enforcement agencies.
Get Solid Legal Advice
Starting a business has never been easier. For those who happen to live in North America and much of Europe, there are services like Rocket Lawyer that bring affordable and accessible legal services to would-be entrepreneurs through mobile applications and the internet. These tele legal services and firms are game changers. Like any law practice, these firms can help you file the new business documents and incorporation with the appropriate state and local public agencies and regulators.
This is step one for those who are ready to launch their business. For others, step one is conducting a business and marketing plan to determine whether an adult entertainment business is a viable venture that can return your initial investment. But, for those who are ready to pull the trigger, the next step is to find legal services that can help you with that, rather than doing it yourself where you could risk screwing something up that would delay entry into the market, or worse, get you into legal trouble. Once you do this, you should seek out and retain legal services that deal specifically with adult entertainment clients.
Being that the largest concentration of adult entertainment consumers and businesses intersect in the United States, this country serves as a nexus and legal standard for implementing compliance and age verification policies that ensure uniform legal and ethical compliance in most parts of the world. The laws governing age and identity verification include the 2257 requirements to retain age documentation with a designated custodian of records. Custodians of record are typically used by the production companies and indie producers, themselves. Some websites tread carefully and provide 2257 compliance statements, even if they might not be the primary publisher of content.
Finding a lawyer, or team of lawyers, who can deal with these requirements is crucial. Luckily, the Adult Site Broker blog has previously written guides on 2257 compliance and a brief blog post that discusses some of the best adult entertainment industry lawyers and law firms currently active.
Choose Your Niche
Another consideration to mull over is what sort of adult entertainment company you want to run. What is your niche? What type of content do you want to produce? How will you generate funds? Will you break into e-commerce and sex toy retail? Do you see a future owning a tube site or dating site? How will you launch an affiliate marketing program to secure new traffic and revenue in the future? These questions and more will haunt you as you work to find your porn niche, competitive advantage, and specialization. Adult Site Broker is successful because our founder, Bruce, and our team determined that there was a gap in the business-to-business and total professional services segment of the adult entertainment industry. Adult Site Broker is essentially a non-real estate merger and acquisitions consultancy working with most types of adult businesses with an online presence.
For the remainder of this blog post, let’s pretend that you are starting a porn production company. There are literally hundreds of producers in this industry, making it an overcrowded marketplace. During your research and planning phases, you are going to have to identify what is lacking in the particular content niche of your proposed content. From there, you begin to expand the concept into something that is viable, scalable, and eventually profitable in the long-run. Let’s say that you choose to create a studio that focuses on the vertical of real-life hentai and the growing popularity of live action anime cosplay parodies. You begin your research and planning.
You Can Make Money
Launching your own adult entertainment business can be profitable. There are many things that you can do to ensure ROI on initial startup costs and seed investments. The following ideas are just suggestions, but they are proven components to a total product and services offering from firms and groups that we’ve studied and researched from across the entire adult entertainment industry.
Apply these concepts and ideas to the case study company we mention or to your own idea. All four of these revenue streams can complement each other and your business in some form or another.
Premium Memberships
One of the common revenue strategies for porn sites and studios with an online presence is the typical premium membership delivered through a paysite or membership site. Let’s go back to the scenario of starting your own studio doing live action hentai and anime parodies. You will be able to produce feature films that contain several scenes. You can cut those scenes into promotional clips to circulate across the internet, via tube sites, social media, and your affiliates. But, when you have someone who wants to watch the whole scene, they will be directed to the main site and will hopefully choose to purchase a recurring premium membership. As long as the membership is something that the customer wishes to keep, you will be able to count on their monthly subscription payment as a part of the total revenue generated. Costs for acquiring a user will vary depending on strategy.
PPV Content
Pay-per-view (PPV) content is another revenue strategy that is quite common. Companies that manage clip store websites serve as a sort-of PPV on-demand venue where studios and producers can sell entire videos and images for one price. Rather than having access dependent on the plan to choose membership, a one-time purchase of the content entitles the customer to it for life. Most sites allow users who buy scenes individually through a PPV model to download their content for offline viewing at a later time. For a better reference, check out clip stores like Clips4Sale.com.
Affiliate Marketing
We at Adult Site Broker love affiliate marketers. Affiliate marketing, regardless of what industry it covers, is one of the fastest growing verticals in the entire digital space. Some adult entertainment industry companies exist solely on acquiring traffic and monetizing that traffic by serving as a large scale affiliate marketing nexus. For example, one company that our copywriter, Michael, works with is a firm that has built its revenues and scope by creating literally hundreds of affiliate live camming sites. They maintain a proprietary traffic criteria that has been proven to work, over twenty-fold, and they simply use that formula to traffic even more users and potential premium subscribers to the affiliated cam sites. Affiliate marketing can also be as simple as referral business revenue.
Selling Physical & Digital Products
One other approach to generating revenue is by selling physical and digital products. In the adult entertainment segment, pleasure products and sex toys are always in season. Sex toy retail sales are always in the billions globally. With the rise of the internet, smart, internet enabled vibrators and teledildonic devices are growing in popularity and scale. Companies like We-Vibe create apps and games that correspond to the haptics and vibrations emitted to their smart vibrators from the mobile phone app or the integrations these types of toys have with sites like Chaturbate and Cam4. You can easily sell these toys through wholesale, or like most who engage in adult e-commerce, by drop shipping – the automation of product fulfillment and supply chain management allowing people to focus on the various functions of consumer-facing affairs like support and marketing.
Set a Budget Aside for Business Setup
With your research and planning, defining a budget and getting your financial plan in order is crucial for success. There are a few key components to note when launching any entertainment business.
Regardless of whether you’re producing mainstream films or adult fetish content, the design of your budget needs to account for four pots of money: salaries and talent acquisition, compliance, props and business and operational costs. Hiring an in-house accountant or retaining an independent CPA is a great way to formalize what you need and to provide an official process for corporate finance and budgeting management. Ensure that there is very little waste, that people are paid accordingly with local labor and compensation laws, and that you have high-quality, yet cost-effective props like the lubricants, and that you are investing in sexual health and wellness, prophylatics and talent testing services. Also, if you have a web component, invest in effective, yet scalable IT services.
Hire the Right Models
Believe it or not, your talent acquisition procedures can emulate some of the most effective human resources and hiring procedures from vanilla and mainstream industries. You’re acquiring talent, as in humans, who will be exposing themselves on video and through images doing sensitive things.
Health is important, as is aesthetics. But, the most important thing to keep in mind is that when you are hiring models and on-camera talent, you need to provide an open and transparent culture that cares about health, wellbeing, mental ability, flexibility, and (most importantly) compliance. Hire talent in an equitable manner, too, that corresponds to equal opportunity and OSHA regulations.
Thoughts on New Talent
Your models should be experienced. If you hire debut models who have never done sexual scenes before, be sure that the on-boarding and screening processes are intensive. One of the biggest shortcomings when acquiring inexperienced, new models is the lack of a structure. Models who enter this industry make the choice to enter into a sex-based business and do things that require high levels of strategic planning from multiple dimensions. Ensure that models do things that they consent to. Do everything in your power to prevent and mitigate instances of sexual misconduct on a set. You need to have proactive staff and resources to provide talent, including mental health services and medical services at reduced or affordable rates. Pineapple Support Society, one of the many groups that Adult Site Broker supports through our philanthropy, is an industry leading mental health and telehealth provider helping adult industry talent and professionals globally. This is a solid organization to partner with. In addition, have staff that solely help manage and address matters related to talent and the models that you hire. There are many other things to keep in mind.
Make Sure Wellness and Health Records Are Spotless
The final point of discussion is to make sure your porn production company’s health and wellness records are spotless. Or, in other words, that you place a heavy emphasis on talent STD testing. In contemporary porn, a lot of the productions that take place are free of condoms and other birth control products that aren’t pharmacological interventions (spermicides, birth control pills, IUD, etc.). If your production doesn’t use condoms, there is a direct transmission of human contact between two or more models. That means, talent testing services are required. PASS, the Performer Availability Screening Service, is a non-profit group that is supported by adult industry companies and trade groups, like the Free Speech Coalition, with the focus of standardizing and promoting industry-wide testing that is accessible and reasonably priced.
STD testing can be pricey. But, the production company can set a trend by offering reduced-priced or free testing to ensure that talent is fully and entirely healthy and not risking the exposure to illness of their fellow colleagues and the public at large. This is an ethical requirement, as well as a compliance requirement. Talent you hire should be at the top of your priority list. No non-medical or wellness-related industry in the world has a greater commitment to human health and wellbeing. Testing policies must be comprehensive, direct, and supportive. Testing should be made available to your talent. Or, there should be information resources available so that talent can find these services.
Related articles: What Is Section 230 And Why Should I Care?
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We at Adult Site Broker hope you’ve enjoyed this post. Please reach out to us if you have any questions.