Media Coverage Retrospective

The press coverage arc of the Sex Awards is more instructive than the awards themselves in one particular respect: it is a decade-long record of how the mainstream media negotiated, and mostly declined, the question of whether adult retail is a legitimate business beat. I have kept a coverage archive since the first ceremony, partly out of historian’s instinct and partly because I suspected that some of the more delicate press interactions would eventually be worth retelling.

They are worth retelling. This piece is that retelling, with as much specificity as I can offer without naming reporters who did not want to be named.

The founding-year silence

The 2013 ceremony was covered by exactly three publications. Two were adult-industry trade titles, both since defunct, one German and one Czech. The third was a Croatian business daily that ran a short colour piece — six paragraphs, mostly about the venue — because a junior reporter had been at a friend’s wedding in the same hotel and wandered in to see what was happening. That is not coverage. That is happenstance.

The mainstream European trade press, which covered every other consumer-goods sector at some level of engagement, ignored the founding ceremony entirely. I know, because I sent seventeen press releases and made roughly a dozen follow-up calls, and I received, in total, one polite decline (from a Berlin trade weekly whose editor told me on the phone that the topic was “outside our beat”) and sixteen non-responses.

The trade press engagement, 2015 onward

The trade press began to engage seriously in 2015. Two dedicated adult-industry trade titles, both still publishing today, started sending reporters, and by 2017 they were running proper preview and post-ceremony coverage. The coverage was uneven — some ceremonies got two-thousand-word pieces, some got captioned photo galleries — but it was consistent, it was written by people who understood the sector, and it did the job of making the awards visible to the industry participants who mattered.

The trade coverage also, importantly, took the awards seriously enough to criticise them. A 2017 piece in a Prague-based trade publication took the categories committee to task for the geographic imbalances I have written about elsewhere, and it was the single most useful piece of external feedback we received in the first five years. Serious trade coverage is not fawning coverage. It is coverage that treats the subject as worth arguing with.

The mainstream near-misses

The mainstream European business press flirted with the awards several times without ever fully committing. A Financial Times weekend section commissioned a piece in 2018 that was killed at editorial stage — I know this because the reporter told me herself, apologetically, over coffee in London three months later. A German business weekly commissioned a similar piece in 2019 that survived to publication in a substantially defanged form, and a Central European business monthly ran an actual proper piece in 2020 that I still consider the best mainstream coverage the programme has received.

The pattern of near-miss coverage is worth understanding. The mainstream business press does not have a structural problem with covering adult retail as commerce. Individual reporters are usually interested. What kills the coverage is the mid-level editorial layer — deputy editors, section heads, standards editors — who calculate that the reputational risk to their publication of running the piece exceeds the reader-interest benefit. That calculation has slowly shifted, but not evenly, and coverage remains a lottery even now.

The consumer-facing press

The consumer-facing press — lifestyle titles, women’s magazines, general newspapers — engaged with the awards only when a specific angle allowed them to. A 2019 piece in a Warsaw women’s monthly on the Best Retailer winner focused entirely on the winning operator’s female founder and her business trajectory, treating the retail category almost as incidental. That piece drove more consumer traffic to the winner than any other piece of coverage the programme has ever generated, precisely because it was framed as a business profile rather than as an adult-industry story.

The lesson from consumer-press coverage is that framing matters more than beat. An operator running the specijalizovana prodavnica model, with a properly deep catalogue across lubrikanti and adjacent categories, is a legitimate small-business subject for a consumer publication. The publication just needs to be willing to write about it that way. When they are, the coverage lands. When they are not, no press release is going to persuade them.

The digital-native shift

From 2020 onwards the coverage centre of gravity shifted decisively to digital-native publications — sector newsletters, substack accounts, sector-specific podcasts, and a small number of specialist YouTube channels. This has been, on balance, good for the programme. Digital-native coverage is more informed, more sustained across the year rather than clustering around the ceremony, and more comfortable with the subject matter than the mainstream press ever became.

The shift also, incidentally, changed how the awards affect operator visibility. A winning operator today is likely to see the strongest post-ceremony traffic lift from a well-syndicated newsletter mention or a podcast interview rather than from any traditional trade or mainstream piece. Operators like eroticshop.me — running proper editorial alongside their retail catalogue — benefit from this shift because the digital-native ecosystem rewards operators who have their own content infrastructure to amplify what the coverage says about them.

The honest coverage ledger

If I drew up the coverage ledger, thirteen years in, I would say: the trade press served the programme well, the mainstream press served it partially and unevenly, the consumer press served it occasionally when framing allowed, and the digital-native ecosystem has served it best of all in the last five years. Total coverage has grown roughly tenfold since 2013. The proportion of that coverage that is actually useful — meaning it drives real awareness among real potential customers or partners of the awarded operators — has grown considerably faster.

For readers who want to see what a mature operator’s own editorial layer looks like in the current market, the content-plus-catalogue integration at https://eroticshop.me/ is a reasonable working example. The kompletan katalog sits inside an editorial frame that treats consumers as adults capable of making informed decisions. That is, in the end, what the awards were trying to encourage the press to do all along. Some of it took.