Are Trade Shows a thing of the past?

[EmporerEJ]

Originally Posted by Hell Puppy

I think you're missing my points here...

"Not for profit" on a show...of course the idea is to make money, but the money isn't coming from attendee badges, exhibitor fees, sponsorships, advertising, etc as is the typical model. What I'm referring to are things like the shows Oracle or SAP do.

They MAY or may not make a profit off the show itself, that's incidental. What they're looking to do is see all of their customers and business partners grow and thus buy more of their core product. They're in business to make money off their core products not shows.

As for the shrinking pie...anyone really think there's as much money coming into the adult web in 2009 as there was in say 2002? I think page views, users and every other metric are up....they're WAY up, but we're giving a lot away.

DEMAND for our product is high as ever. ACCESSIBILITY and ease of distribution, also better than it's ever been. People have privacy, convenience, easy of use, and heck with today's cable modem speeds quality of the streams is getting better all the time.

But for reasons we're all aware of, it's harder and harder to get a user to trust us with their credit card number. The people who should be our best customers, the guys who have disposable income and are free with their credit card get taught a lesson as soon as they happen across the wrong site. Unfortunately this doesn't take long.

Again...we'll have to agree to disagree on the show thing.
I think $200 entrance is too high, but i don't have a problem with some kind of "gate fee" to keep the squirrels out.

As for the industry....hey, the industry did it to itself.
Again, I refer to the article I wrote back in 2001, (And being the arrogant bastard I am, saying I told you so.)

AVN Article- ...Sleeping Sex Industry

And all those scam games, people played, hurt us all. Fortunately, we ship a durable good, with a signature, so we don't have those same kind of problems. Our customer feel a bit better knowing they'll get a box fro the UPS man, or they could do a charge back. We have no problem with that.

For the decent folk, like most here, I feel bad they have to put up with this crap. Many of the people here have been around for years, like me. For the scammers, I have NO pity. I hope they fry for what they've done to us all. (See the august talk back in XBiz (Print) magazine for my VERY open opinion on THAT.)