He wasn’t always so legendary, you know? People used to call him Kilt Boy, but that’s another story. Today, he’s Legendary Lars, the marketing mastermind behind Streamray and AdultFriendFinder. Lars Mapstead is much more than that, though. He was in e-commerce before anyone knew what e-commerce meant, he passed on Girls.com for Cyberzine.com, he’s been sued by AOL and the Recording Industry Association of America, and he spent the first few years of his life living in a bus. It’s all part of what made Lars, well, legendary.
Tell me about growing up a hippy.
Until I was a toddler, my parents drove around in a Volkswagen bus. We lived in Mexico for a while and then in California. We moved to Big Sur and lived in a small shack my parents built. It had a wood-burning stove, kerosene lamps, and an outhouse. The shack that we were living in became the goat barn when we moved to the big house, which didn’t have any electricity or a bathroom for a while.
How did you get started on the Web?
I worked for a company that sold motherboards, and management told me they wanted to sell motherboards on the Internet. I said, "The Inter-what?" I learned HTML and built a site; that’s how I got started. I was using a Netcom dial-up account, a 14.4 modem, and a Mosaic browser. There were no domains at the time. We just used a Netcom FTP account.
What happened to the pay-to-surf model?
It fell off the map. That’s a function of the dot-com blowup. The whole business model around CashSurfers was selling CPM ads. We had 1.6 million registered users within a year using the toolbar that spun the ads, and we were doing 80 million ad rotations a day. Had we gone another year, we probably would have been doing around $5 million to $10 million a month in ad revenue. The dot-com unfortunately blew up, and we instantly went from making more than $1 million a month to making nothing.
How badly did the dot-com bust affect you?
I still had all my adult businesses going, and I was making ridiculously easy money. It was like I won the lottery every day—so when dot-coms foundered, I wasn’t crushed.
Your first adult site was Cyberzine in 1995. Why Cyberzine?
[Laughs] I talked myself into Cyberzine—just fan-fucking-tastic. Domain names had just become available, and I was trying to figure out what to register. I liked the idea of a magazine and wanted to build one on the Internet. I thought, "It’s cyberspace, so this will be a cyber magazine...Cyberzine, yeah!"
How did the site develop?
I had realized the more traffic you had on your site, the more it was worth. After looking at AOL’s success with chat, I decided to build a chat room. For the first year, I had the No. 1 chat room on the Internet. It was successful for several years and helped me get my start. Cyberzine also did a site of the day. I made a version called "Seeress of the Web," and she had her vision of the day. I did that for a year, but I got tired of searching for a new site every day.
Was it exclusively adult?
It was a mish-mash of things to get traffic. When you put up a chat room, people inevitably talk about sex. So, I created different rooms with different themes. The banner ad company with which I had been monetizing Cyberzine showed a list of top moneymakers for the company. The top was a guy whose site had pictures of bikini models, so I got a bunch of pictures of bikini models and knocked off his site. People on YNOT told me if I put up nude pictures, I’d make a lot more money. So, I bought my first content and slapped up some nude pictures.
In 2001, you were sued by AOL for spamming. That couldn’t have been pretty.
CEN got sued for spam and—because I was an affiliate—I also got sued, but I never sent any emails. I had only sold emails, which back then was a pretty common practice. They realized I hadn’t done anything other than sell email addresses to someone. I paid more in legal fees getting out of the lawsuit than I made in all the time I sent traffic and emails to CEN.
Do you find it hard balancing your family life with working in this industry?
I’m very fortunate that my wife is extremely supportive of me. It has become more difficult as time goes by and my children get older. I’m proud of what I do, but at the same time, I don’t want it to affect my family.
How did you get involved with Cams.com?
I asked my brothers, who partnered with me on CashSurfers, to see if they could build a video-chat product, which ended up being a lot harder than they thought it would be. An associate from Netcom connected me with a guy looking to jump-start his cam program. This guy’s video was so much more advanced than anything I’d ever seen. It was exactly what I was trying to build. I ended up buying a piece of the company and agreeing to send a certain amount of traffic to it. The company’s founder had a non-adult version he was preparing to make public, so he needed to get rid of the porn site. He offered me a ridiculous deal, so I bought it.
What is the greatest lesson you learned in those early days of Cams?
I was always fearful to hire people, because I had no experience in that. Now I had 20 people working for me and was able to finish other projects quickly. You can only do so much by yourself. If you want to get really big, you have to have people surrounding you and supporting you and your ideas.
You’ve maintained a fairly public image, while many of your contemporaries have gone behind the scenes. Why?
I get a kick out of playing the persona. I’ve recently been pulling back, mostly because I’ve realized the more out front you are, the more open to litigation you become. I’ve established my brand and am known well enough that I don’t have to be as out front anymore.
How did Legendary Lars come about?
Andy Dunn, who ran SexSwap.com, used to write a weekly newsletter about the industry. He and I became good friends, and I would feed him stories. Everyone in the business had nicknames—Fantasy Man, The General—and he nicknamed me Legendary Lars. I did have a nickname before that, but it wasn’t too legendary.
Why have you said MP3Board was one of your worst experiences in the business?
Three years of having the shadow of RIAA, Sony, Time Warner, Bertelsmann, BMG, Universal—pretty much anyone in the music industry was suing me. To have that kind of cloud over you is very debilitating. It’s hard to get excited to work when you think, "If I work really hard this month, these guys could win a judgment against me and take it all away. Why should I even bother?" At the same time, you don’t want to let your business die. It probably cost me a lot more money than just the amount I spent defending myself. I got kind of depressed.
Others were quick to settle with RIAA, but you fought back. Why?
I had this noble idea that, if I fought the good fight—because I totally believed the RIAA was wrong— people would rally around me, support me, and help me financially. My case had broad implications, but when push came to shove, no one wanted to support us. I learned that you can be noble and stand up to the big guys, but you’re probably going to be alone.
What has the merger with AdultFriendFinder produced?
It’s given us a much broader base of product solutions for our customers. It’s also a much larger operation, so we can get more projects done. We’re able to move new ideas quickly and efficiently. It also brings a lot of stability.
Are you still planning on taking the company public?
We’ve looked into it quite a bit, and it’s definitely something we’re interested in. Unfortunately, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has made it much more difficult and expensive to do. But, once you take a company public, you lose a lot of your ability to run the business as you see fit. Now you have to answer to shareholders. Right now we don’t want to give up the ability to steer the ship.
What’s up with the whole Zango thing?
There’s a business model that, in exchange for downloading software or content, grants a company the right to do contextual pop-ups. It’s similar to going to Google and searching for AdultFriendFinder. On the right, there will be a list of advertisers, and some of those advertisers are our competition. Google is selling our competition’s ads right next to our link on a search for our site. In the rawest form, that’s what Zango does, only more aggressively. But, who owns the surfer? If the surfer entered into a contractual relationship with a company to get pop-ups in exchange for software, does that company own the surfer? I personally feel Zango’s business model is not nice. It definitely is on the fringe, but when Google first came out, there were a lot of people shouting that you could buy an ad and get a top listing in place of someone else’s top listing. It’s a business model that is going to get much larger, so people will have to figure out ways to deal with it.
How do you plan to use the many domains you purchased at Internext?
We buy an insane amount of traffic. For five years, we’ve been buying traffic on certain keywords from Google for a fee every month. We realized if we just bought the domain of the keyword we were buying five years ago, we would have those domains paid off, and all of the money would be profit.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?
If you’re not seen, you’re forgotten. If you don’t go to the shows—even after you’ve made a lot of money—whoever is in people’s faces is going to get the business.
If you were ever on the cover of Forbes, what would the headline read?
"From Outhouses and Kerosene Lamps to Lattes and Cell Phones"
