Hey VideoBoxers,

As some of you may have noticed, we launched a major update to VideoBox today. Most of the changes are on the back end, but here’s a list of new things you’ll see at www.videobox.com that we think you’ll love. It’s not a complete list, mind you — you may find some other gems as you click around. There will be more to come, and we know there may be some items in need of polish; more on that after the list.

• Category and Tag Filters: when you’re logged in, they’re on the left side of the results pages, and by popular demand, you can choose categories to exclude from your results set for DVDs and scenes!

• Profile Pages: if you click a fellow user’s name or avatar on a comment, or in the tooltip for a clip, you’ll be taken to their profile page where you’ll see their stats and a list of all the comments they’ve made. From there you can jump to a page of all the clips they’ve created, or all the content they’ve rated, grouped into DVDs, scenes and clips.

• Search: this now works the same as VB2, including a drop-down list to narrow your search, and it also has auto-complete for when you’re looking for something specific or which includes some portion of text that you already know.

• Avatar Picker: yes, you can now change your avatar from the auto-assigned one you have now to one of the 5,000 options we’ve pre-loaded! The “My Profile” link on the left nav of the “My VB3″ page takes you to your own comments and stats, and it has a link at the top to “Edit Your Profile” where you can choose a new avatar image and update your stats as well.

We know that some of this will change over time as we all use the site and as we incorporate your feedback and suggestions. We’re also aware that there may be items that didn’t translate exactly from our previous tech stack to this one: some pages might be slower than they were before, or display differently than they used to. I can assure you that we’re looking for those kinds of things, and if we know of an issue, we’re working on it. Please let us know in the comments below or on the Contact Us page if you find things that aren’t working right, or that you think could be improved. We are always grateful for your input, as it helps us serve you better.

Ultimately, we hope you enjoy this update and look forward to the changes to come. It’s a great feeling to know that we can now act more quickly and easily on bugs and new features.

Enjoy,
Bob

I’m sure most of you have already noticed, but for the few of you who don’t check the site daily, you may have missed two very exciting additions to the VB catalog: Jules Jordan and most recently, Anabolic. These deals have literally been in the works for years. Finally, after a lot of negotiation we walked away with hundreds of excellent titles from these two top tier studios. We are very excited to welcome Jules Jordan and Anabolic to the VideoBox family and I hope all of you enjoy the quality porn that’s coming your way.

We’re excited to announce that VideoBox has won the Adult Site Of The Year Award in the multi-genre category at the 2012 XBIZ Awards!

It is an honor to be nominated among such amazing sites, and an even bigger honor to have won in this category. Everyone here at VB is thrilled to win our very first XBIZ award. We would like to thank all of our members, content partners, and everyone who voted for us for making this possible.

We’re also especially thankful to XBIZ for recognizing us in such a distinguished category. We look forward to new partnerships and continued innovation in the new year.

Cheers!

Hey guys,

We just launched several improvements to VB3.

The biggest change is searching now fills in options as you type

Other changes include:

• You can remove items from your stash in the same window you add them.
• Link to “scenes from your favorite stars” off the home page.
• Link to “recently viewed scenes” off the home page.
• You can now start playing the scene at time 0 when hovering over the thumbnail on the browse page.
• The info pop up when you hover over a thumbnail includes buttons to play, download, and stash directly from the browse page.
• We added a “play entire movie” button on the DVD pages.
• Various performance enhancements.

Please let me know if you’re seeing any bugs. Thanks, and I hope you enjoy these changes.

- Josh

I’d like to share some numbers, thoughts, and next steps that have emerged since launching VB3 last week.

Numbers

Conversion Rate

VB3 has improved our conversion rate of visitors to members by over 30%, and our cancellations have held steady. This is a dramatic improvement.

Before the launch of VB3, we were shrinking. Now, we are growing again.

Site Usage

Roughly 15% of our customers continue to use VB2 (i.e., they explicitly click “back to old site”).

Thoughts

We Have a Passionate Community

I started this company in 2002, and I’ve always strived to treat customers as I wanted to be treated. My goal was to create the world’s best site, one that people were happy to join.

When we launched VB3, we received a lot of negative feedback. I took this feedback – much of it from our most loyal customers – very personally.

There was a lot of internal debate on how to interpret all the messages we were receiving from our members. On one hand, we were getting more negative than positive feedback. On the other, the total number of people who complained was less than 1% of our members.

You Can’t Please Everyone

We have tens of thousands of members, and their tastes vary. There were also internal team dynamics and interests of content partners to consider.

What we ended up doing was spending the last few months ironing out the quirks in VB3, and making the site work more like VB2. The new site works pretty much like the old one. We considered doing a comprehensive redesign, but no one wanted to go through another 6-12 months of development time.

Next Steps

Continue to Improve VB3

Now that we’re past the painful hurdle of launching the new site, we’re going to keep improving it. In two weeks, you should see:

• Big changes to how search works.
• Fixes to the stash, such as the ability to add and remove items easily.
• Various performance improvements.

And looking beyond the next two weeks, expect to see a mobile / iPad optimized site.

Keep VB2 Around

We will continue to maintain VB2 for a while, at least until usage drops to single digit percentages.

Thanks,
Josh

Hey guys,

I just want to let you know that on Aug 31, www.videobox.com will resolve to the new VB3 site.

I know many of you have negative feelings toward VB3, but I’d like you to keep in mind:

• We plan to keep the current VideoBox around for the near future, and
• We will continue to improve VB3. Next big improvement is a significant overhaul of our search functionality.

Since the original launch of VB3, we have simplified its layout to look more like VB2. We have fixed lots of bugs (especially around the stash and performance). And we have introduced the “flow mode” feature (my personal favorite).

And we’re just getting started. I’m sorry for the bumpy road, but I hope you enjoy what lies ahead.

- Josh

Hey guys,

We’ve fixed a few bugs with VB3’s stash feature. It should be working much better now.

So please try it out and let us know if you’re still having problems.

Also, check out watching your stash in flow mode. Just go to any stash folder, and click the “Watch in Flow Mode” button. It works particularly well when you flow mode your favorite stars

Hey guys,

On July 20, we will start redirecting members to VB3 when they log in.

You’ll still be able to use the current site for the next few months. To get back to the current site, just click the “back to old site” link in the header.

Please let us know if you’re experiencing problems with VB3, or if there are features from the current site that you’d like to see in VB3.

Thanks, and happy surfing

- Josh

Edit:

I want to share some thoughts to address the negative sentiments expressed in the comments.

Man up and admit you and your team missed the mark


As much as I hate to admit it, there’s a lot of truth to this comment. But it’s not true that we “just don’t give a shit” about our users. To the contrary, I personally read every comment, and feedback is routinely circulated among the entire team. If I could rewind the clock by a year, I would have done things differently. To explain how we got here requires a little back story.

How to stand out in a sea of look-alike porn sites


The design motivation behind VB3 was to be different, to have a personality that distinguished VideoBox from all the other sites. So we created a distinct look. We started building social features, like the avatars. We added power user features, like chicklets and a preview player. We created funny parody videos with Ron Jeremy.

And then we launched, and some people really liked it. But a lot didn’t, and we realized for the most part our customers don’t want cool brand and personality. They want a simple easy-to-use site.

So then why not just throw it away?


The current VideoBox is built on an overly complex tech stack, and the code has grown over the years to be almost impossible to maintain.

VB3 was under development for about 8 months, and during this time we rewrote a lot of the code to be simpler and more flexible. We can work on it more easily, and VB3 can handle different types of content (like scenes from Kink.com that aren’t part of DVDs).

So then what is your plan?


Over the last few months, we redesigned parts of VB3 so that it’s more familiar to users of the current site. You should be able to do just about everything on VB3 that you can do on the current site, along with some new stuff (like Flow Mode and Air Play and browsing thumbnails in a liquid layout that fills up your browser).

To the extent that there are missing features, bugs, or slow performance: we can fix that.

We will likely not change the overall look and big glossy buttons any time soon. Any comprehensive redesign will take 3-6 months.

Why not just put this money into better content?


Content is a whole other topic deserving a longer treatment, but we’re actually spending about 2x per title as we did a few years ago. With the proliferation of free porn, content producers have been going out of business. There’s less being made these days.

The reason why we’ve been building “premium content channels” is they let us access new sources of content that are unavailable unless we charge more and share the revenue. We want to lower the price for premium channels, but that’s an ongoing negotiation with the content owners.

Why are you launching it now?


There are two main motivators for launching VB3:

• We spend a lot of time maintaining the VB2 code base. We want to get everyone on to VB3 so that we can press forward with new initiatives.
• Our licensing deals with Kink and Reality Kings are in danger of being withdrawn if we don’t launch soon.

So to recap, we took a risk with VB3 and the results fell short of expectations. We’ve taken the last few months to make the VB3 member experience better, and we will continue to do so. For engineering and licensing reasons, we want to get everyone over to VB3 as soon as possible *and then* polish the user experience so that you’re happy with it.

Thanks for reading,

- Josh

A few months ago, we released the first version of VB3. And while some liked the powerful new features of VB3, we also received negative feedback on how the new site broke familiar patterns people had grown accustomed to on the current version of VideoBox.

Well, we listened to your feedback. We’ve redesigned and simplified large sections of VB3. Please take a look, and let us know your thoughts.

Try the new VB3

Overview of the changes

• We simplified the Movie, Scene and Clip pages, making them look more like they do on the current VideoBox.
• We made the movie detail page look more like it does on the current VideoBox, and brought back 6 large preview thumbnails.
• We added a new way to browse called “Flow Mode”. Try it, you might like it

But what did you take away?

We took away some power user features in the interest of simplicity and familiarity with the current VideoBox. In particular, we removed:

• The preview player on the top left portion of the Movie, Scene and Clip pages. This player broke the convention that “clicking on a thumbnail leads to the movie playing”.
• The chicklets above each piece of content.
• We removed the elements in the footer that allowed you to customize the look of the browse page as well as access your Stash (formerly called Favorites.)
• The “Customize my VB” button. This button was never implemented, and as we dug deeper into the work required to allow customers to filter out certain types of content, we realized it was a very complex feature to build. We may bring it back in the future.

What’s next?

Some upcoming changes include

• Ability to “flow mode” your stash.
• Page to view comments and public stash of other users (as exists in current VideoBox).
• New mobile site.
• Improved Roku app.

So please try out the new version of VideoBox. Let us know what you think. And enjoy the two new channels (Kink and Reality Kings).

Thanks,

Josh

Try the new VB3

Well, back from the dead may be a bit melodramatic, but I was without internet service for most of the last 100 hours. Sporadically on and off initially, then completely out. Courtesy of a failed cable modem from TimeWarner. My first cable modem (a Toshiba unit) lasted over 8 years, but this one (RCA-Thomson) went belly-up after only 18 months. They wanted to send a technician five days from now, but fortunately I was able to impose upon a friend to take me to one of their service centers for a replacement. I already felt like a fish out of water after these few days without internet access – no way I could wait another five days. Guess which modem I was handed this time? Yup, another RCA-Thomson. But the rep told me the last one was a refurbished unit, and this one is brand new, lol. We’ll see.

For those wondering why part 3 of my last post is still awaiting scene summaries, that is the reason. I will rectify this issue shortly.

As to the heads-up, one of the very last things I managed to do before my involuntary absence from the ‘net, was to request an interview with Burning Angel headliner Draven Star. Draven was gracious enough to accept the request. It’s too early to project a posting date, because I first need to work up some intelligent questions, and then Draven (who’s a busy young lady), needs to find time to respond. But I hope to have the interview completed and ready for upload in the 5/20 – 5/31 time frame. So if you have questions for Draven, leave them as a comment to the forthcoming post, and you may very well receive an answer. Don’t post your questions here …. because I’ll steal them, lol.

Finally, my thanks to Ms. B #1, and Ms. B #2 (I won’t embarrass you with full names, but you know who you are) from the VideoBox home office, who helped me on the phone yesterday. Much appreciated.