The Show Must Go On: Paxum and Clickadu on Navigating the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and public health response to it has created a disruption the likes of which the business world has never seen – and certainly which the adult industry has never seen. The only relatively recent historical precedent for an epidemic on the global scale of COVID-19 took place in 1918 – an era when, I think it’s safe to say, the term “adult entertainment industry” wasn’t yet part of anyone’s lexicon.

While the adult industry has, in some ways, been impacted less severely by the pandemic and the shelter-in-place/stay-at-home orders issued in response to it than many other market sectors, COVID-19 and the public health response have certainly been extremely disruptive.

A widescale, if “voluntary” production hold is ongoing. As directors and producers recently interviewed by YNOT have detailed, film crew members and other behind-the-scenes players are struggling to make ends meet and eager to get back to work. Fans everywhere are doubtlessly thirsty for new content featuring their favorite stars — and not just the kind of content those stars can shoot while respecting social-distancing recommendations.

While the focus of our attention is understandably on those who produce and perform, no less crucial to the online sector of the adult entertainment industry are service providers like advertising networks and payment processors, who have faced challenges from COVID-19 at their operations, as well.

YNOT recently sat down with representatives from the Clickadu advertising network and payment services provider Paxum, to talk about how their companies have been navigating the challenges of the pandemic while continuing to provide their mission-critical services.

“The Clickadu team has been through a bunch of adjustments due to the COVID situation and I guess all the companies do,” said Demian Mash, Clickadu’s Head of Marketing.

Mash said that early on in the crisis, “the epidemic seems off somewhere and the amount of afflicted was insignificant, so the measures weren’t that striking: no handshakes and constant sanitizing. Besides, employees were able to work from home by choice.”

Later as the scope and severity of the pandemic began to become clear, the company took more extensive measures in response – as Mash put it, “when the situation became ugly, the Clickadu team decided to stay at home for good.”

“I guess, it’s not an extraordinary practice, as all the communications within the team and the clines can be realized via the net,” Mash added.

At Paxum, which has offices in a variety of locations around the world, each office is “observing and following the local guidelines and regulations for best practices during the pandemic,” Paxum’s Ruth Blair told YNOT.

“For many of our employees this means working from home with enhanced security protocols in place,” Blair added. “Our staff continues to assist clients and verify new accounts and all payments continue to be processed in the usual time frames.”

For both companies, having employees work from home wasn’t too radical a departure from the norm, since both have certain employees who already worked from home, either in full or to supplement the time they spend in-office. This doesn’t mean there was no adjusting or adapting to be done on the part of their employees though, especially as the days wore on.

“It may sound easy in the very beginning. You shouldn’t go anywhere, the dinner is just around the corner and you can work in a tank top with a food spot,” Mash joked. “After a month of stay-at-home mode, I believe that people are happy to get back to the office. Everyone has his own story and reasons here.”

What the company hasn’t observed, Mash added, is any drop-off in productivity.

“I guess, going to a home mode is expected with an efficiency loss because there are so many things to distract you,” Mash said. “But, I have to admire our team’s productivity, they are doing really well. Exactly the opposite; it looks like we work even harder.”

Blair noted that at Paxum, having a mix of home workers and in-office staff has always been the way of things and echoed Mash in saying there’d been no dip in the company’s productivity or efficiency – or in its core mission.

“During the pandemic we have not noticed any real change in productivity levels as our staff continues processing payments and handling queries promptly, with user experience the priority,” Blair said.

Going forward, both companies see themselves making further adjustments on the fly, adapting to the new reality imposed on them by the pandemic and finding innovative ways to keep things rolling, including by staying virtually connected to others in the industry at a time when in-person gatherings like trade shows and webmaster gatherings are on indefinite hiatus.

“Some industry events and tradeshows have made the move to a Virtual platform during the pandemic crisis, and we are proud to continue supporting, sponsoring and attending these shows and events,” Blair said. “AW Summit was the first to produce a virtual event which we attended and hosted a virtual booth. We also recently sponsored Virtual Lalexpo where our Colombian staff gave a presentation and Q&A session live on the first day of the event.”

Blair said the next event on the horizon for Paxum is the WMA Virtual Conference at the beginning of June.

“We are Diamond Sponsors of that event and several staff members will be in attendance and available for meetings,” Blair said.

“We can’t tell when the situation will be solved and it will be safe to travel again,” Mash told YNOT. “We do like that the conferences are now held in the ‘hub’ format so there is no need to go somewhere and still can meet each other virtually. Haven’t tried any? WMAccess will be held soon, we’ll be glad to ‘meet’ you there.”

As for live events, Mash added, “we hope to see you at TES Prague or Affiliate World Asia.”

As referenced earlier, many reports from both mainstream and adult media outlets have noted an increase in traffic to adult sites and networks; is this consistent with Paxum and Clickadu’s observations over the last several weeks? For Mash and Clickadu, the answer is a resounding yes.

“Just in a month we have boosted from 2 billion to 3 billion impressions daily and that’s incredible,” Mash told YNOT, adding that the increase is “not just about the lockdown,” because the company is “always in search of new partners.” He also said the boost in traffic “doesn’t affect the traffic efficiency much.”

“People are trying to save money as we don’t know how long the situation will last,” Mash said, suggesting that any increase in traffic and sales adult sites are seeing may wane as the economic crisis related to the pandemic deepens and worsens – which is why the increase in new partners is so important from Clickadu’s perspective.

“The good way to earn money at home is traffic monetization, so we had a huge boost of new publishers this period,” Mash said. “However, the advertisers’ signups remain the same. It doesn’t go lower, so that’s a relief.”

While Paxum has seen data that corroborates the media reports of increased activity on adult sites, Blair cautioned that a raw number of transactions doesn’t tell the whole story, so she’s hesitant to offer a definitive interpretation connecting the rise in transactions to the pandemic.

“Transaction volume has definitely increased,” Blair said, “but since we don’t have the same data as the companies using our service, we can only hypothesize that the volume increase is a result of the pandemic.”

Looking ahead, both Mash and Blair noted the great deal of uncertainty surrounding the pandemic, including questions of when an effective vaccine and/or effective antiviral drugs might emerge, affording a return to some semblance of normalcy.

Companies have little choice but to forge ahead as best they can, of course – so while the months ahead may not bring a return to normal, the “show must go on,” as the old saying goes. And for both Paxum and Clickadu, this has meant continuing to pursue new business, develop new offerings and build their businesses, just as they would have been if there was no pandemic in progress.

“We launched the Paxum Unionpay Card earlier this year for all global clients, and we will soon be issuing the Paxum Mastercard to all EU countries and Switzerland (in addition to the countries that already have the Paxum Mastercard available),” Blair noted. “Plus, after the success of our personal account interface rebuild, a new business account interface is in the final stages of development and we anticipate the first phase of testing to begin soon. We also regularly enhance services by introducing additional currencies and country options, and that will definitely continue.”

At Clickadu, there’s “always something going down” on the business development front, Mash said – emphasizing that they’re both looking to connect with new partners and to bring back in those who may have used Clickadu in the past, but didn’t get the benefit of the full suite of options and tools the company has introduced since then.

“If you never had the pleasure to work with us, we look forward to a fruitful partnership,” Mash said. “Have you already worked with us? Hey, come back. We have so much cool stuff for you.”

“Not Today, Covid-19” photo by cottonbro from Pexels. Image of Demian Mash provided by Demian Mash. Paxum office image provided by Paxum