What is XBIZ?
XBIZ is an adult industry trade publication founded in the early 2000s, covering business news, technology, regulation and the retail side of the sector. It also runs awards and industry conferences, in the same arrangement as AVN.
Two trade papers in one industry is unusual and it works to the reader's benefit.
Where is it stronger than AVN?
Policy and legal coverage. Over the past several years the defining forces in this industry have been regulatory — age verification laws passing state by state and country by country, payment processors withdrawing from categories, platform rule changes driven by both — and XBIZ has covered those more thoroughly and followed them further than anyone else.
Its reporting on age-verification legislation in particular tracks bills through legislatures, records the compliance requirements, and follows what actually happened to traffic afterwards. That is genuinely difficult reporting and almost nobody else does it.
Where is AVN stronger?
Archive depth, by two decades, and performer and awards coverage. If you want the historical record, AVN goes back to 1983. If you want to know what a law passing this month means for a site next month, XBIZ is the better source.
Reading both is the correct answer, and neither is long.
What is the conflict?
Identical to AVN's: it reports on an industry while running that industry's awards and conferences and taking its advertising. Standard trade-press arrangement, standard caveat — solid on facts and events, softer on the companies buying sponsorships.
What did we measure?
An 884ms response on a 68KB document — quick and light, better on both counts than AVN's 1,047ms on 132KB. The document declares lang="en" and a mobile viewport, and the layout works properly.
Our scan detected no advertising network in the page source and confirmed a privacy policy and terms of service on the live site. 2257 and DMCA did not surface — and for a news publication rather than a content host, 2257 is not the applicable document.
Is it useful to a non-professional?
More than AVN, arguably, precisely because of the policy focus. If you want to know why a site started asking for your ID, why a platform dropped a category, or why a payment method stopped working, XBIZ explained it while it was happening.
Should you use it?
If you follow this industry at all, this and AVN are the two sources. XBIZ for what is happening now and what it means; AVN for the archive and the history.
