It started out as a simple case of supply and demand.
Looking for feet, he'll supply the footage.
Those tantalized by toes quickly found Neil Orkin was the man.
And while the founding father of Clips4Sale looks back at the early days as being a bit of a bother, he quickly saw the upside of what has became a revolutionary venture in the world of Internet porn.
"At first, a select number of people just wanted custom foot fetish videos," said Orkin. "It got pretty crazy and I had a lot of people hammering on me. I had to upload videos to my home server and then give them a link. After doing that for a while, I figured I might as well put them up for sale so everyone could have access to them. I was doing it by myself for about a year and saw the potential, so I started bringing in other producers."
In 2001, Orkin founded Clips4Sale, which has a current traffic rank of 1,797 according to Web information company Alexa, up from approximately 26,000 three years ago.
Orkin's site makes its money by selling video clips by the minute (roughly $1 per minute), with each clip's running time ranging from two minutes to up to an hour. Each clip a customer downloads is theirs to keep.
Currently more than 1 million clips are available.
Always looking for new ways to streamline the site, Orkin recently introduced something that he feels will eventually make downloading obsolete. The unlimited link allows customers to access a clip any time they want without taking up space on their hard drive. Producers also find the unlimited link system much more user friendly due to that fact that they don't have to worry about their clips being stolen and subsequently shared.
"Customers can't share the clips," said Orkin. "And if they try to send the link it's killed and sends anyone trying to use it right back to our site. I see this as the wave of the future for online pornography because it's so much easier for everyone involved."
That simplicity translates to customers as well. Patrons can search by category, studio or keyword through a vast number of titles ranging the relatively tame ACME Porn to the decidedly different Diaper Girls Gone Wild and thousands of topics in between. "The biggest difference between us and the stuff you can get for free is that with us customers get what they want, when they want it," said Orkin, who operates out of Tampa, Fla. "We also have thousands of topics that are hard to find just anywhere."
The ease at which Clips4Sale works quickly spread among producers, both in the professional and amateur ranks, and the site's subject matter grew rapidly with amateur contributors quickly becoming the majority.
"I don't go after the larger production studios," said Orkin. "I don't really feel the need to go after them. I feel regular people produce just as respectable content as the professionals."
The vast majority of the content is shot using a simple home video camera, a wide range of props and a bedroom or living room for a studio.
Using Clips4Sale's servers, bandwidth and architecture producers can upload their videos to the Web, price them and make them available to the public, all within a matter of minutes.
And producers don't need to be overly computer savvy or need to have Web sites of their own. All they need is a video camera, an enthusiastic subject, the software to get the finished product on the Web and an Internet connection that would allow them to upload it. Orkin handles the rest, which includes paying the producers 60 percent of every sale.And while the process is simple, the cash is anything but. According to Orkin, producers with a knack for uncommon fetishes can earn between $20,000 and $35,000 monthly, a few net nearly $50,000, while others can make as little as $100 per month. It all depends on the individual. Boyfriend/girlfriend or husband-and-wife teams can make $5,000 to $7,000 a month without ever leaving their bedroom.
"Right now, I'd say there are probably eight or nine thousand people working from home, making videos, doing as much as they want, when they want, paying their bills and making pretty good money," said Orkin. "Everybody wins. All I can say about my success is that I've been able to make good, smart decisions and things have worked out and hopefully will continue to work out."
This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com.
