There’s a famous fast-food chain with a simple, effective slogan: Find one thing and do it right. They appealed to our desire for tasty food by pointing out the weakness in offering too many menu choices. They told us their chicken was best because chicken was their only dish. They stressed how quality decreases in relation to quantity. The more you offer, the less time you have to perfect each product. It’s a brilliant marketing campaign because it degrades other fast-food companies while elevating this particular chicken shack above the level of common take-out meals.

"There are so many factors to deliberate when considering content quantity. The type of adult website you open is the most important factor in the whole equation."

Of course they did sell other things like side dishes, desserts and their chicken came in many incarnations. There are very few businesses that can stay solvent by selling only one product item. The small brick-and-mortar merchant is always concerned about the size and variety of their stock. If they stock too much then they lose money on unsold units. If they don’t stock enough, they lose customers to other merchants who carry ample amounts.

If something new and popular comes along, they weigh the profitability with the wholesale costs and purchase only as many as they believe they will sell. By contrast the huge mega-mart carries so many products even the sales clerks are unfamiliar with the merchandise.

Just the same, the mega-mart features discount prices and selection than no mom and pop store could ever offer. The mega-mart can do this because they buy in such large quantities and have so many stores; their overhead becomes ridiculously low. How much you stock depends on how much you will sell.

When the adult webmaster asks how much content they need for their site, it’s pretty hard to get a direct answer. There’s a reason for that. The fact is there are so many factors to deliberate when considering content quantity.

The type of adult website you open is the most important factor in the whole equation. Naturally the mega-site is going to house more content than would the small specialty site. The paysite requires more products than would the free site. It doesn’t stop there. You also need to understand the desires of your market. Will they be happy with mostly static images and some hot and heavy videos? Will they want more variety and demand games, chat and newsletters? Have you garnered customers who want a hard-to-find type of content? Will you be able to find enough of that niche to make your members happy? Or will you disappoint them by giving them a little niche and a lot of nothing they want? Some adult niches aren’t big enough to find proper content.

Will your members be happy with additional content in similar niches? If you’re building a kitchen sink mega-site, the question of enough is even harder. Where do you stop? How many gigs do you need? How many can you afford? Each downloaded image, clip or story costs you transfer fees on top of storage. How fast can a member burn all your bandwidth? Does your page appeal to modem users or broadband lovers?

Factors. Factors. Factors.

If you’re opening a big deal fancy schmantzy adult paysite then you probably need gigs and gigs and gigs of content. If you’re going for the mega-mart masses then you’ll most likely fill your web with a little bit of everything along with plugins. As long as you stick with wide-appeal categories like softcore/hardcore, gay/straight, BDSM/fetish, boobs/butts or teen you’re pretty safe mixing it up with some off-site content.

Plugins will help you lower costs all around. If you want to open an adult Internet version of a department store, then be prepared to spend a lot of money. Some will tell you start out with no less than fifty gigabytes of ready content. Others would say fifty gigs is pretty weak.

Still others will tell you they do just fine with less content because they offer higher-quality, rarer adult imagery and entertainment. They’ll bring up the subject of updates and paying extra for exclusive content. They explain how they fill their pages with just enough stuff to entertain a member for a month and then give them new stuff for the next.

They’ll study page visits and file requests in order to suss out what’s working and what’s not. They only use pre-built/plugin content if it’s particularly relative to the theme. They’ll archive or flush out old/unproductive content and replace it with newer, better product regularly. They’ll look for ways to make more money from existing members by offering them tangible goods such as adult toys and packaged movies. They’ll reveal that a site with less content can work but it requires more work to run one successfully.

One gig is too much for the average free site but you never know. Some free sites are massive and some paysites are almost Zen with their content count. Size matters but not always. Variety and selection are good but if you can do one thing right perhaps that’s what you should do. No amount of content is enough if it isn’t done right.