Next Door Studios: The Network Era

The Origin and Growth

Next Door Studios began in the mid-2000s as a single-brand producer of the "boy next door" aesthetic — the wholesome, college-aged, conventionally attractive young man presented in the mildly transgressive context of gay sex. The brand name captured the fantasy precisely: not the professional performer or the extreme body type, but the young man from the neighbouring apartment who turns out to want exactly what you want.

The growth from single brand to network happened through acquisition, internal development, and a strategic reading of the market that identified underserved niches and built content specifically for them. The company acquired Pride Studios, which had developed an audience for more diverse content. It developed Disruptive Films as a vehicle for scenario-driven, award-aspiring productions. It launched Next Door Raw for the bareback market. Each sub-brand addressed a specific audience need; the network architecture spread production costs across the whole.

By the mid-2020s, ASGmax's portfolio includes dozens of distinct brands, and the company is routinely described as one of the largest gay adult content networks in the world.

The Sub-Brand Architecture

The sub-brand model is the network's most distinctive structural feature and the one most worth understanding for anyone interested in how the contemporary gay adult industry actually works.

A traditional studio — Falcon, BelAmi, Kristen Bjorn — has a single aesthetic identity expressed across all its productions. Talent, production values, and content type are consistent, and the audience that subscribes knows broadly what to expect. The sub-brand network model abandons this consistency in exchange for reach: by operating multiple brands with different aesthetics, different talent pools, and different content types, the network can address a much larger total audience.

Next Door Raw addresses the bareback hardcore audience. Disruptive Films addresses the audience that wants scenario-driven content with high production values. The core Next Door brand addresses the mainstream collegiate audience. Pride Studios addresses the audience for diverse-cast content. Each brand is distinct enough to function as an independent product while sharing the network's production infrastructure, talent relationships, and distribution channels.

The economics of this model are straightforward: the fixed costs of running a studio — offices, cameras, editing infrastructure, legal and compliance teams — are spread across many more productions and many more revenue streams.

Disruptive Films Within the Network

Of Next Door's sub-brands, Disruptive Films has attracted the most critical attention and the most awards recognition. Founded with an explicit mandate to elevate the production values and narrative ambition of gay pornography, Disruptive Films produces scenario-driven content with the kind of writing, directing, and performance attention that most adult studios do not invest in.

The studio's award record — multiple GayVN and XBIZ awards — reflects genuine quality rather than simply the network's scale. Disruptive Films has produced content that gay pornography critics consistently identify as among the best of recent years, and the studio has become a reference point in discussions about what the genre can aspire to be.

The Disruptive Films model — high-quality storytelling within an adult content format — is discussed separately in more detail, but its existence within the Next Door network is worth noting here: it demonstrates that the network model, despite its industrial scale, is capable of producing content with genuine artistic ambition.

The Mass Market Question

The scale of Next Door / ASGmax raises questions that are worth sitting with. An operation of this size, producing content for this many sub-brands at this volume, is inevitably optimising for the largest possible audience rather than for any specific aesthetic vision. The sub-brand architecture allows some niche positioning, but the underlying logic is mass market: make content for every segment, maximise subscriber numbers, spread costs as widely as possible.

This is not a failing — it is a business model, and it is one that has served a large gay audience by making professional gay pornography accessible, affordable, and varied. But it produces a different kind of output from the directorial vision of a Kristen Bjorn or the founder's conviction of a Chuck Holmes. The network does not have a point of view. It has a market position.

The viewer who wants curatorial intelligence — who wants content made from a particular perspective, with a particular aesthetic commitment — will find what they need in the network's sub-brands only by doing their own curation work. That is true of large content libraries generally: scale and curation are in tension, and the platforms that serve the curation need tend to be smaller and more specific.

BoysDo is built precisely for that curation need — not the largest possible library, but the most thoughtfully selected one. Next Door's network and BoysDo are not competitors. They serve different needs within the same audience's range of desires.