The original Chicken Little, along with Henny Penny, Foxy Loxy and yes, Cockey Lockey, first appeared in the famous cautionary tale on the dangerous consequences of jumping to conclusions. While the teaching of that fable are too often forgotten in the knee-jerk, panic filled stage the world in general, and our industry in particular, finds itself in right now, in the same breath, contributing to the hysteria, both real and imagined, is a heavy dose of ignoring reality.
If it looks, smells and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck …unless you are working in gay porn which these days, is which is refilled daily with a fresh dose of hysterical Nostradamus infused doomsday scenarios just as often as apocryphal as they are factual.
The recurring membership business model is a pear shaped one at best: programs often payout more than they take in for a membership and that cash must often dispensed before it all flows back into the sponsor’s account. That may have worked in the halcyon days of 5 years ago, but today I think you would be hard pressed to find anyone that still thinks that our beloved industry is as recession proof as we all once believed.
In these days of layoffs, foreclosures, decreasing traffic and oh yes, a major curtailing of open credit that is used to purchase our services, it comes as no shock that any company whose forte is not foreclosures or bankruptcy, is struggling with cash flow? When adult bell weathers, WegCash and Adult Profit to name two, are closing their doors, its’ prudent to wonder just how triple digits payouts on $1 trails are feasible for most programs these days, unless they are operating on a different planet from the rest of us, it should also come as no shock that those wind-fall bonus checks never arrive. Cash in and cash out are not mutually exclusive!
Since the crystal balls of gay porn are generally found ensconced in either an elastic pouch or a hot mouth in a sizzling close up, they are of no help in telling what the future holds but there are basic lesson we must avail ourselves of so we remain to being to capitalize again when economic stranglehold joins Elvis, and leaves the building. Chicken Little was wrong when he squawked his predictions of doom, but I am not too chicken to admit that the while the no, the sky isn’t falling, we will remember the summer of 2010 as one with a murky horizon.