Having survived a potentially devastating couple of years early this decade, Adult Revenue Service has bounced back with a new owner and a new lease on life.
Becky DeForest is tired of rehashing the past. "It's hard to escape the infamy [of the past]," she said when asked about ARS' sudden shut-down in 2003. "It always seems that someone has to bring up something that happened four years ago, something that I've had to talk about so much [that] it's now like beating a dead horse."
DeForest described the move as a mistake. At the time, she explained, credit-card companies were cracking down on adult merchants and chargebacks. With ARS getting over 3,000 sign-ups per day, there was a large bull's-eye on the company. "We were in danger of going onto the Terminated Merchant File list," DeForest recalled. "And if that happens, your entire rebill database is gone. There was a very real threat of being shut down. The other big issue was member values. When you're not making enough to cover your commission payouts to webmasters, then why bother?"
Then owner, and Becky's brother, Marc had also recently started a family and chose to shut ARS down. Shutting ARS down and starting it back up again weren't that simple, however. The company used an outside contractor to supply content for their sites, so in order to bring it back to life, Deforest had to invest heavily in content.
After having left ARS to start Storm Media, which now provides the pay sites for ARS, DeForest acquired ARS parent company Innovative Ideas from Marc. She spent "a million bucks" on new content, hosting, servers and domains, and worked to put the company back on the map. Today, ARS stands as an enduring company, one that offers customers an array of premium niche-based sites (such as BigBoobsGalore.com, EbonyArousal.com and AdultMovieMatrix.com) and offers affiliates top-dollar payouts.
Of the company's survival, DeForest frankly admitted, "In all honesty, I am still surprised that ARS survived, especially considering that what we feared most ultimately occurred with the death of iBill. But we did survive, and we are still standing strong on the foundation we built years ago."
Though DeForest can't take credit for starting that foundation, after having held several roles at the company, including customer service, webmaster support and, eventually, chief executive officer, she nonetheless can take pride in the fact that she has continued to operate the company under the same principles upon which it was founded.
"I think the real propellant for ARS and the success it achieved right from the start was breaking the mold of the adult affiliate program that had been standard," she said. Instead of launching a program with the word "cash" in its domain name, Marc settled on Adult Revenue Service. "I can still remember sitting with the whole company in the conference room trying to come up with a name that didn't have the word ‘cash' in it," DeForest said. If the company's acronym reminds you of a certain tax-collecting organization, the irony is not lost on DeForest. "It's funny that we chose a name that was a play on an agency of the U.S. government," she said with a laugh.
After scaling down ARS' traffic - "I learned that I do not want to operate at the sheer volume [of traffic] we were at five years ago," DeForest explained - she chose to concentrate on improving three of the company's most promising brands. She targeted EMX.com, a scene-based DVD site that soon will undergo a new design and billing model; Smut.com, a self-explanatory content site; and OnTheGoX.com, a mobile-content site that specializes in video formats that work on mobile solutions. Of OnTheGoX.com, DeForest said, "I think that the mobile market is going to continue to grow, and this site is going to be my flagship site to take advantage of that growth."
There are other improvements, as well. An overhaul of the ARS site - complete with improvements in the user interface, increased and bonus webmaster payouts, and a yearlong $75 pay-per-sign-up promotion - began in November. DeForest said she hopes the renovated program will help strengthen ARS's relationships with its affiliates. The latter effort will be solidified by the company's insistence on providing users the ultimate online experience, she said.
"My focus is on providing a very enjoyable user experience by having the right combination of content selection and site navigation," DeForest said. "The novelty of online porn has now worn off, and you are now facing consumers that are much more selective in their content needs. If you can fulfill those needs with the right price, your members will stay and you will remain relevant. This is my plan, anyway."
