Even if you are a porn fan, chances are you have not heard of Scott Coffman. But Coffman, who is founder and president of AEBN, the web’s largest provider of On Demand adult material, created many of the delivery methods by which recent generations of consumers receive their porn, and is one of the few remaining formidable presences in the adult industry.
Coffman founded AEBN in 1999 in Charlotte, North Carolina, where its headquarters are still located. Among other things, he has presided over the intense nicheification of adult content, so consumers can drill down to ridiculous specificity of what they want to see, and championed the Pay Per Minute (PPM) viewing model.
Gram Ponante: Years ago, the catchphrase in the online adult world was “Content is king.” How true is that today?
Scott Coffman: In the early days there wasn’t enough content. We were encoding VHS tapes. Delivery methods were mainly stores in the bad part of town. Today, content still has a value to us, but the market is glutted with it. Now the real commodities are traffic and delivery.
GP: So you’re confident that the material will always be there?
Coffman: It never stops coming.
Coffman launched AEBN in the time of 56k modems. He owned a restaurant and sold adult hardgoods prior to going online. The companies that granted him VOD licenses didn’t expect too much at first, given that the material took ages to download.
Coffman: But that allowed us a few years in a vacuum. If those studios were looking at VOD like I was – I just knew that bandwidth would get higher and download speeds would increase exponentially – I would not be here today. But we were lucky to have a few years to put it all together when not too many people were paying that much attention.
AEBN’s physical footprint grew from 2,500 feet of cement warehouse space to a present-day complex covering more than 30,000 square feet. Like another North Carolina porn institution, Adam & Eve, producers line up to get on AEBN’s servers (whereas they jostle each other for spaces in Adam & Eve’s mail-order catalog).
GP: Why Charlotte?
Coffman: I admit I was not Charlotte’s #1 citizen when we started. We’re a block away from Billy Graham Blvd.! But we pay our taxes, and the access to colleges, banks, etc., is what makes the area desirable. It’s a numbers game for us.
GP: In hindsight, it seems inevitable that porn would go first from being chopped up into tiny PPM pieces to showing up for free on tube sites and the like. But AEBN’s Pornotube became a battleground when Vivid noticed that Pornotube users were uploading its content without attribution – or revenue – to Vivid. And they sued.
Coffman: I saw how Youtube was doing and thought, “Good idea. Should work for adult.” Vivid, like all other studios, was wondering what tube sites would do to their content. But what (Vivid co-founder) Steve Hirsch said was that he needed to take a stand against someone. His contention was that we should police the unlicensed content, but we have come to an agreement that companies can drive traffic back to their own sites by uploading teaser material.
GP: But if free porn is the problem, isn’t a regulated tube site like shutting the barn door after the horses get out?
Coffman: We have no problem taking Pornotube to a marketing site – it’s a good link in the chain – but this is not what’s going to stop the problem.
GP: I’m so glad you provided this opportunity. So what is going to solve the problem?
Coffman: It’s a major problem that has no silver bullet.
GP: Oh.
Coffman: Legal action only goes so far. When you get right down to it, the porn world was so crowded that consolidation might not be a bad thing.
GP: Do you think that Porn is settling down to a more realistic baseline after a period of irrational exuberance?
Coffman: It seems that way. But anyone who says he has the answer doesn’t. This will have to play out.
GP: After a decade of capitalizing on intangibles, AEBN is the parent company of the RealTouch, a genuine hardgood piece of machinery. Did you go back into that world kicking and screaming?
Coffman: No – we thought it was a great idea. Of course it works for us because the RealTouch is only integrated with AEBN content. But it’s a risk, too, even though the user is still watching AEBN material in the end. There’s just a device in between.
GP: At the AEE I overheard some female sex-positive types bemoaning the RealTouch because it replaced women. I pointed out that they were the ones advocating dildos and vibrators by arguing that those things added to a healthy relationship, and now they sounded like guys 20 years ago complaining that their girlfriends were ditching them for a piece of silicone.
Coffman: Well, the RealTouch doesn’t look like any woman I know, so I don’t see the competition.
GP: It used to be that nudity was nudity, whether it was in Playboy or National Geographic. And now there is so much out there that people’s tastes have become more sophisticated and specific. Thus porn niches that go from nudity to Asian nudity to nude Asian interracial to nude Asian interracial with hats to heavy nude pedal-pumping Asian interracial with hats, etc. You might be blase about it at this point, but what are some of the niches at AEBN that surprise you?
Coffman: Oh, amputees to trampling to fuck machines. Those things surprised me with how popular they were and are. Shemales blew my mind when we first started putting together material. They are very popular. Now there’s bareback shemales. It’s amazing how big that niche is.
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Free Speech Coalition: Mainstream Legal Titans Speak to Porn Notables in Historic Summit; Eat the niche or: 49 ways to mine a vagina; Dorking out with your dork out to the RealTouch
See also: AEBN, RealTouch
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