Homegrown Video kicked off 2005 on a high note by winning AVN’s award for Best Amateur Video Series for the second year in a row. No surprise. Homegrown is synonymous with the best in amateur video.
Founded in San Diego in 1982 and taken over 10 years later by brothers Farrell and Moffitt Timlake, it has continued to expand its Internet presence while maintaining a monthly shipping schedule of DVD and VHS releases.
Under the Timlakes, both sides of Homegrown are evolving in new and exciting directions, especially on the Internet.
A year ago Homegrown broke off its marketing relationship with Cybererotica and set up its own affiliate program, HomegrownCash.com, which includes VOD and store upsells.
“It’s the first time we’ve had control over our affiliate marketing,” Timlake said. “It’s come a long way for us, now that we track not just the membership sales but the [online] store sales. It’s kind of a unique program in that regard.”
It wasn’t easy breaking up with the Cybererotica network, Timlake said, “and we’re still involved in a pretty nasty little lawsuit situation there, but we bounced back from that split so quickly it really amazed all of us. We barely felt any pain in essentially having to go to zero members a year ago and bounce back from that.”
They already had in place a significant network for live shows, HomegrownCams.com, which features amateurs from all over the world hosting their own shows, directly from their homes.
“We started it almost two years ago,” Farrell Timlake said. “It is us working in partnership with Wild Rose Productions and Carol Cox, essentially taking the Carol Cox cam system and doing some new software and putting the Homegrown name on it.”
HomegrownContent.com, their site for Webmasters, now offers VOD product. And they’re about to launch a new distribution site, MyHomegrown.com, to help amateurs find new ways to market their home videos.
“A lot of people ask us if we can do their distribution for them,” Timlake said. “If we said yes to everybody we’d have a hundred-thousand series. It’s a way for us to give people distribution and exposure, at least towards the Internet, and sell more pieces. With Webmasters it’ll give them more exposure than if they just set up their own sites to sell their tapes. We’re exposing them to a lot more sites and traffic.”
Timlake is especially excited about his flagship site’s new spokesmodel, a petite, perky brunette named Seska, who has her own amateur site, Seska.com.
Seska writes articles for the Homegrown site, and Timlake says that every once in a while, he and she will “jump in front of the camera like the King and Queen of Homegrown. She’s such a wonderful personality, and she writes about everything, from what kind of lube works best to how to get threesomes — all the lifestyle stuff.”
A substantial amount of Timlake’s time over the past two years has been taken up by Homegrown’s participation in a well-publicized lawsuit against Acacia Technologies. The case has become something of a lightning rod issue in the Internet community.
According to Timlake, Acacia claims to own the patents to streaming and downloadable media, and they successfully sued several adult companies. Homegrown, however, took a stand when Acacia came after New Destiny Internet Group, which handles all of Homegrown’s online properties.
“When we started branching out to the Internet,” Timlake explained, “we formed a separate company, New Destiny Internet Group. Spike Goldberg is CEO. The only relation it has to Homegrown is that my brother and I are involved in it. That’s the company that Acacia came after and sued.” Goldberg, he said, has become the leader in the patent fight.
The lawsuit, he said, is “not done, but it’s definitely in a much better place than it was a year ago. Acacia is very much on the defensive right now. They actually walked away from some of the claims they were making — 94 out 100 — and the judge asked them to go for a summary judgment on the remaining claims. We essentially knocked out 90 percent of what they were claiming.”
Timlake has also ventured abroad. HomegrownVideo.com recently did a branding deal with the Dutch portal site Dreamclub to offer a dialer-based version of Homegrown Video to the Dutch audience.
“It’s an exciting relationship with a very established Dutch company,” Timlake said. “The people involved in Dreamclub are some of the biggest traffic aggregators on the net. It’s a combination of traffic from that portal as well as a means for people to see the Homegrown site by going to it through a telephone, which is much more popular in Europe.”
Homegrown continues to thrive on the cross-pollination of its Web and video components.
“The video series are still the way that we are finding traffic to our site. The advertising on our DVD and VHS series is what gives us our best traffic,” Timlake pointed out.
At Homegrown the drill is for new scenes from their network of amateur shooters to be released on video first. They are then re-purposed as Web content. People usually send in an hour of footage, which is edited down to 20 or 25 minutes for video release. Just after a scene hits the street, it will hit the Internet, where it will be available in its uncut version.
“The Internet is where we can finally show the raw footage,” Timlake said. “We use everything for the Internet — warts and all. People love that, especially with amateur. They want to see when the camera’s shooting somebody’s toe or something. They want to hear all the funny banter while it’s being shot. They’re really into that.”
Homegrown was perhaps the first company to pioneer niche marketing, since amateur video, Timlake said, niches out content by its very nature. Homegrown was able to categorize “something like 32 different niches,” which eased their transition to the Internet, where such compartmentalization thrives.
Their Cream Pie was the first continuing internal pop line. The other niches their series cover include Natural Bush, Horny Over 40, Housewives Unleashed, Handjobs Across America, Deep Throat Virgins, Cherries, California Student Bodies, and Eye Contact (one of the first all-POV lines).
High on their list of future plans is to finally do an anal series. “It’s the one niche I can’t believe we don’t have anything in,” Timlake laughed. He prefers to keep other new niches under wraps. “Moffitt says I shouldn’t say anything until the box cover’s done and ready to go. Because sometimes we put out ideas and everybody jumps on them.”
He does say that new Homegrown series won’t involve rough sex. “Everybody’s going for harder and harder type scenes, but for the real amateur stuff, it’s not about making it harder, just about making it funner. I think that what our audience is really about. So that’s the direction that we’re going.”
Timlake feels that neither of Homegrown’s two sides dominates. “Our mail order stuff has really taken off, and our sales to the market of U.S. distributors are doing well, so I think it’s about a 50-50 balance,” Timlake said. “We have a lot more projects going on, on the Net now, and it’s certainly where most of my own interest lies, but we’re still doing well on the other stuff.
“As Moffitt was saying the other day, even our VHS stuff is still selling. We’re excited about what’s happening with our VOD systems — that could really take off. But right now it’s really a balance between what we do on either side of the fence.”
Homegrown Video can be contacted at 800.619.4843 or [email protected]; its flagship Website is www.homegrownvideo.com
