Sure. There might be some moguls in Porn Valley who match some features of the sleazy, 1970's porn-czar stereotype. And it's a highly ... er ... colorful image, to say the least: a blubbery, middle-aged gent donning a greasy comb-over, enormous dark sunglasses, and undersized silk shirts splattered with garish tropical designs. As he slouches reptile-like behind a massive maple-wood desk (the surface buried beneath mountains of porn magazines and DVDs), he incessantly chomps on soggy-ended cigars and screams orders into a speakerphone, whilst giggling, naked young women prance willy-nilly though his office. And when he isn't pinching the bountiful bottoms of these same tittering nymphs, he's unsubtly scratching his crotch and/or releasing inhumanly long, deep belches.
Please.
Definitely a romanticized image, leaning heavily, in fact, toward the downright cartoonish. For what those same romantics sometimes forget is that porn is a big business - and its players have to treat it as such if they're going to survive.
Enter Ben Jelloun.
As the new CEO of Metro Content, LLC, Jelloun hardly fits the flea-bitten caricature of the sleazy porn kingpin. On the surface-level alone, his handsome looks and chic clothes make the London-born-and-raised 45-year-old appear more like a European fashion designer than a 21st century hardcore porn entrepreneur. And when you speak with the polite, professional, polished (but far from pretentious) Jelloun, you soon realize that the only thing really hardcore about this guy is his approach to business.
"I'm here at the office before everyone else comes in, and I'm here after everyone leaves," Jelloun stated - in a frank rather than boastful manner - as he sits behind his highly ordered desk in his modest office at the Metro headquarters in Chatsworth. "And if your employees see that you care about your business, then they'll care about it, too. And they're all really great people to work with, by the way."
Immediately upon taking over Metro in early October of last year, Jelloun didn't waste a minute. Major objectives included instantly expanding the company's Internet department, setting up a nearby movie production/live webcam studio, getting the wheels rolling on a VOD site using Metro's massive video library, as well as (get this) planning a whole online dating system with real girls rather than ones with profiles. We like it!
Yet Jelloun isn't just a no-nonsense businessman. He's also a man with a life outside of XXX - namely, a family which he deeply respects and to which he pays due attention.
"Well, I was brought up where there was a very conservative, strong hold between us in the family," Jelloun recalled of his British roots. "So I'm very much a family-related guy. I've been happily married for 12 years and have two beautiful kids: one daughter and one son ... ages 9 and 8. So the only things I have in my life are work and family. And when I put my work aside, I'm spending time with my kids. I go swimming and horse riding with them every Saturday, we play soccer together every Sunday .... During the weekdays when I finish work here at the office, I go home and sit down and have a proper dinner with my family. I watch TV with my kids, go through their homework - education is a very important step - and when they say ‘goodnight,' I'm back to my laptop.
"And, yes, I do keep my work well away from my kids. I'm never browsing my website in front of them. If they're sitting near me while I'm on my computer, it means that I'm looking at statistics, just numbers. And if my kids ask what I do, I tell them that I'm a businessman. After all, this is an office and it's all just a commodity. That's how I look at it."
Yet while some porn moguls - who frequently deal with some of the most beautiful women in the world - might lose focus and get caught up in the whole XXX lifestyle, Jelloun is unaffected by it all. Why? Soccer is the answer. Yes, soccer.
And as he recalls his outrageous days as a professional soccer player in Britain, Jelloun shakes his head and smiles - a smile mixed with fondness, regret, and wisdom.
"Well, the biggest weakness when I was playing football, which you call soccer here in America, is that I liked nightlife and girls, just like everybody else. I was a young guy with money in his pocket, and the nightlife really affected my soccer playing. In plain English, my soccer career was fucked up because of the nightlife; so I dropped out after about three years. But afterwards I managed to work with banks and then the stock market, so that was definitely a good thing. And today when someone says to me, ‘This porn business doesn't seem to affect your relationship with your family ... why are you so stable?' I tell them that the stability is a result of the nightlife I experienced when I was younger and playing soccer. Now when I go home after work, I don't feel that I've missed out on anything."
After his stint as a professional athlete, Jelloun - with economics and business degree in hand - took to the stock market like a fish to water, ultimately working in that field for 18 successful years.
Until he got married, that is.
"It got to a stage where the stock market life was demanding a lot of drinking and late night business entertaining. And my wife communicated to me in a way, as women always do, that helped push me out of that career by saying, ‘Ben, you're good at computers, why don't you ...?'"
What Jelloun did was move to Amsterdam with his wife and accept a computer programming position, which steered his career in an entirely new (and dramatically unexpected) direction: porn! That is, it wasn't until his first day on the job that Jelloun realized that his new employer, Dollar Machine, was none other than an adult-oriented business.
Yet, focusing on his work, he quickly moved from programmer to key salesperson at Dollar Machine, not long thereafter joining Interclimax, a leader in the live-streaming adult market, where Jelloun concentrated on content sales via affiliates, online brand recognition, and traffic generation. It was at Interclimax that he quickly transitioned from president to CEO and stayed there for 10 glowing years, until he decided to start his own adult-content company, Zeist Technologies.
"Keep in mind," Jelloun joked, "that when my wife suggested that I change career paths, she didn't know that, instead of coming home at 3 o'clock in the morning as I did in the stock market, that now I'd have to go to shows and come back three days later. But we didn't have kids at that time. Yet the minute we did have kids, my wife was telling me, ‘Ben, don't you have any work to do?'"
Now the CEO of Metro Content, LLC, and firmly ensconced in Cali-pornia, Jelloun sees a highly productive, intensely progressive future for his company. Founded by porn pioneer Kenneth Guarino 44 (!) years ago, Metro currently has such gonzo lines as Fusxion, Toxxxic Entertainment, and Legal Pink under its umbrella, as well as the more feature-oriented Loaded Digital brand name. And aside from Metro's already-mentioned huge library of titles, encompassing decades worth of movies, the company also owns the Video Team library (including the more culturally diverse Afro-Centric Productions and Ethnicity Films). They've even added a gay line, Badlands Pictures, to their highly eclectic adult-movie roster. Yet being the consummate entrepreneur, Jelloun sees the DVD market - on which Metro has based a large portion of its modern-day business - as a symbol of antiquity, not unlike the VHS market.
"I'm not saying the DVD format will go out completely," said Jelloun. "DVDs still make money for us. But the Internet is rapidly killing that particular market. So I'm looking to the future and the best opportunities to take this business to the next level. And I like being right in the middle of the industry. We have the know-how and vision at Metro to move rapidly forward, with the live-cam broadcasts, the VOD, the online dating ... you name it."
In addition to the many projects he has in the works, Jelloun is particularly excited about the company's newer websites: MetroMoney.com (a site especially for the company's affiliates) and MetroBabes.com. He's especially amped about the latter, for it's at Jelloun's MetroBabes.com that live one-on-one chats with some of the most vivacious vixens in the industry are featured. Such sumptuous stars include Jenny Hendrix, Alexis Texas, Ashley Orion, Ariel X, Brooke Haven, Stephanie Swift, Tori Lane, Tori Black, Kristina Rose, and sundry other fan favorites. In fact, Jelloun wants to make many of these same girls exclusive to MetroBabes.com in terms of live broadcasting - all for his most valued customer: Everyman.
"There will, of course, be amateur models at our site whom consumers can spend money on," said Jelloun. "But if, for instance, you're watching a Metro DVD that stars Alexis Texas, after you finish watching the movie, you can go to MetroBabes.com and have a one-on-one conversation with her. It's no longer just about the imagination: Now you have the ability to communicate and get to know the porn starlets whom you're watching on a Metro DVD."
And what of the recession? How does Jelloun see the current economic downturn affecting his newly acquired empire?
The porn mogul remains totally unfazed, powerfully confident.
"It's always bad news to have a shakeup in the market - but it's always good news for companies like Metro, which have a solid foundation and the best people with the right imagination to put the company in the right direction during such bad economic times.
"I value what we have, I value our content, and I want to pass that value over to the consumer by giving them good, reliable porn. We're here to stay for a long, long time," Jelloun promised.
"Hey, it's a great business to be in, if you're focused. As I frequently tell people, ‘If you're selling alcohol, you don't need to be an alcoholic.'"
This article originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
