CYBERSPACE - Raffi Vartanian said he's always been an early adopter of technology, so it was only natural for him to embrace the Internet with gusto during the World Wide Web's infancy. In the 14 years since, he has grown a successful business, World Wide Content, into a resource for others who would like to leave their marks in cyberspace as well.
As co-founder and chief executive officer of WWC, Vartanian keeps a watchful eye on statistics and trends. He said recently he's noticed an interesting one in the gay online market: Much like straight webmasters began to do several years ago, gay webmasters have begun micro-niching their content in order to grab the attention of surfers who have grown jaded and discontented with mega-sites through which they have to sift in order to find the material that scratches their idiosyncratic itches.
Micro-niching is tailoring content to appeal to very precisely defined tastes that often fall outside the "norm" - in other words, they might be considered fetishes. In the straight market, those tastes include foot worship, pregnant women, lactation, women in pantyhose and the like. When those niche areas first appeared on the Web, they represented content bonanzas for a surprising number of surfers and financial bonanzas for the sites' owners.
Vartanian said the same phenomenon has begun to appear in the gay market, embodied in sites catering to lovers of Asian twinks, Brazilian models and men in uniform (a category that can be subdivided further into policemen, firemen and men in the military). Up-and-coming niches for the gay market, according to Vartanian's research, include men smoking, authentic Asian content produced in countries like Japan and Taiwan, and DILF, or "daddies I'd love to fuck" (a gay corollary to the popular straight niche MILF, or "mothers I'd love to fuck").
Micro-niches are "underestimated and haven't been explored" in the gay market, Vartanian said. "We currently have relationships with 260 studios and webmasters, and they're just starting to understand how important micro-niches can be."
Vartanian said WWC's gay business has picked up phenomenally with the addition of content from several niche-oriented gay studios. For example, Oriental Dream Pictures, Uniform Studios and Island Caprice Studios recently have seen a marked increase in requests for their products, distributed in streaming format through WWC's World Wide Feeds division.
"We're expanding our gay business tremendously," he noted. "We have a lot of gay titles; gay content that webmasters don't know about, so it hasn't been overexposed."
In fact, WWC has picked up so many gay clients that on June 1 the company added to its staff a new vice president to liaise with the gay market: Freddie Bercovitz, an adult industry veteran who previously spent 17 years as the sales manager for wholesale distributor Video 10. Bercovitz said he learned of WWC's expanding gay business when Video 10 began licensing its content to Vartanian's company about two years ago.
"That led me to ask World Wide Content to help me create my own membership website," Bercovitz said. "One of the reasons I looked forward to coming to work at World Wide Content was because over the last year they helped me to develop and host my own membership website, A Rim with a View."
Bercovitz said his micro-niched site, based on a series of videos he directed under the nom de porn Hands Solo, was so successful he immediately saw value in WWC's methods and advice. Now he dispenses that same advice, content and technology to other webmasters as vice president of WWC's gay division.
"I think from my experience, being both a customer of World Wide Content and also the VP of the gay division, I have a unique perspective to be of help to webmasters, gay or straight, who are looking for content, either gay or straight, to interest subscribers in their websites or keep current subscribers happy," he explained.
Bercovitz said one of WWC's strengths is the breadth of content niches the company offers.
"According to Bako, one of the very experienced salesmen here, usually, when he's contacted by a webmaster, they already think they know what they want, so they don't ask him for advice as to what's selling," Bercovitz noted. "But webmasters who are trying to exploit the gay market by creating gay sites or gay sections on their sites should familiarize themselves with all of the niches that are available. Many don't realize there are so many more niches than what is readily available. For instance, my site concentrated on the rimming niche, which technically is known as analingus. When I went to other websites, they didn't even have [rimming] available to search for. WWC provides its customers with tools to make their sites more responsive to consumers who don't always know the ‘clinical' terms."
Between them, Vartanian and Bercovitz have more than 40 years of experience in fulfilling customers' adult-content needs. That, both men said, gives them a wealth of perspective about where the adult industry is and where it might be going. For right now, micro-niching is their best advice - in addition, of course, to providing top-quality material and employing cutting-edge technology.
"The gay market is maturing," Vartanian said. "Micro-niching is the innovative edge right now, but [success is] not only about the content these days. Technology is incredibly important, and it's only going to become more important in the future."
That's why WWC plans to launch World Wide Feeds 3.0 during the third week in September. The new incarnation will allow end-users to stream near-DVD-quality movies in large-screen format (possibly as wide as 54 inches) on-demand without buffering. The technology has been in development for about a year, Vartanian said, and even as accustomed as he is to technological innovation, he's impressed with it.
"We'll have 80-plus IPTV channels; full DVD feeds, not just scenes; high-def feeds; high-resolution photo feeds, not just screen captures; channels dedicated to studios' series; and coming soon, mobile feeds, too," he revealed.
"It's about serving customers' needs so they can serve their users' needs," Bercovitz added. "That's what this business is about."
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