It’s all about the fresh approach. That’s what Randall Whitely and Ray Simon, the masterminds behind popular gay site RandyBlue.com and its affiliate cousin BlueLoot, learned three years ago, when they decided to get in on the burgeoning community of Web-based Adult entertainment with the launch of MaxPixels.com. Offering original content that updates every two weeks, the site quickly became one of the biggest gay content providers on the Web, eventually leading to RandyBlue, AmateurJerkoff, and BlueLoot.
Built mainly around Whitely’s highly erotic photography, the sites were made to fill a niche that their creators felt wasn’t being satisfied. “When we first started MaxPixels, [it was because] we couldn’t find a site on the Internet that we liked,” says Whitely, who, as a traveling salesman for an East Coast-based sales company, was ready to plant roots and settle down. “So we just started shooting guys that we liked.” Video production quickly followed, with RandyBlue launching less than a year later and quickly becoming Team Blue’s flagship site. “We wanted to have the best models on the Internet,” Whitely states. “We brought fresh faces along with some of today’s hottest porn stars as well, and it wasn’t going to be the same thing every week. In other words, you weren’t quite sure what you were gonna get. Which, I thought, kinda keeps people hanging on and interested. They know it’s going to be great; they just don’t know what it’s going to be.
“Everybody else is, you know, ‘We follow this format because it works and we’re going to stick to it,’” Whitely continues. “And I wanted something that made people say, ‘You know, I really like this site. I wonder what they’re going to have this week.’”
Although to look at their product, one would think that the Blue duo knew exactly what they were doing, the truth is actually a little more amusing. “It was all marketing,” Whitely laughs. “We wanted [people] to believe that Randy Blue was a professional photographer, that he’s somebody who worked in the fashion industry, print, media, and then decided to do his own Website. But the truth was I didn’t even know how to hold the camera when I started!” To live up to his own hype, Whitely went out and got “every magazine and book I could read” and taught himself the art of being snap-happy. “You can only lie to the consumer so much; then you have to back it up,” he concedes. (Having fulfilled his own prophecy, Whitley now shoots for “a lot of magazines and print ads.”)
Of course, both Whitley and Simon knew that if they were to truly succeed, they would have to reach out to Webmasters as well as customers. And that’s where BlueLoot came in. “We divide out focus evenly between the Webmaster and the Web surfer,” Whitely says. “The surfer is very important to us, and I think that’s why our retention is so amazing, because everything we do, we do with the gay consumer in mind. Meanwhile, we worked very hard to put a ton of different tools into play for the Webmaster support program.”
In addition to the usual bells and whistles associated with affiliate programs (free banners, hosted galleries, teaser movie clips, etc.), BlueLoot offers aggressive weekly program payouts, signup bonuses (as much as $20-45 per sign-up), referral rewards (15 percent on a referred Webmaster’s sale) and partnership programs (70 percent of initial sales, 50 percent of recurring) – and, boasts a high conversion rate (“On a good day,” Simon says, “60 percent; on a bad day, about 40”).
Of course, it all boils down to the content. Says Simon, “You can have the best payouts, you can have the best everything for your affiliate program, [but] if you don’t have the product to sell it, the affiliate program is kind of obsolete.”
Future plans include a Latin-themed site and another that Simon says will “be a part of a completely different affiliate program,” as well as DVD distribution of their original content. Not bad for a couple of guys who made it up as they were going along. “It’s like inheriting something that you are all of a sudden thrust into and you have to make work,” Whitely says. “I think we’re doing okay.”
