Where can you find Peter North and Lexington Steele under the same roof? A well-hung males convention? Perhaps.
Actually, the only place where people can always find them under the same roof is on the Web, where both of them share a home at Montreal-based BrainCash (www.braincash.com) – or at least their official Web sites do.
Launched in summer 2003, Adult affiliate program BrainCash is still a relatively new player in a heavily-saturated market; nonetheless, the program that has grown to feature sites like PeterNorth.com and LexSteele.com started as a seed in the mind of BrainCash founder and president Frederic Valiquette in 1998.
That’s when the Montreal native, who said he always wanted to have an Internet business but didn’t know where to start, saw fellow French Canadian and Gamma Entertainment founder and president Karl Bernard on a TV report about the Adult industry.
“The owner of Gamma Entertainment was on that show with a big smile on his face, talking about Gamma’s 60,000 members paying $39.95 per month to watch porn on the Web,” Valiquette, who then owned a recording studio and video facilities, recalls. “It didn’t take long for me to figure out that maybe the Adult industry was a good place to start making money online.”
Having the good fortune of being close friends with the owner of the now-defunct Les Girls Productions, an Adult talent agency in Montreal that provided girls for producers who shot in the city, Valiquette partnered with Les Girls to produce his own content in the autumn of 2000. In January 2001, he went to Internext looking for people who were in the market for exclusive content.
“At that time, exclusive content was not the trend in the business and nobody was really interested in it,” Valiquette says.
Undeterred, he kept networking and making contacts. At the end of 2001, he rolled out a content provider site, AdultContent.ca. That site would soon be followed by an AVS traffic test site, a reality-based Web site using content from AdultContent.ca.
“I decided to build something about a guy running his own porn site and searching for girls to have sex with him. So this is how, in the spring of 2002, BrunoB.com was born as an AVS test on Adult Bouncer,” Valiquette says.
Two months into the experiment, he again crossed paths with Gamma Entertainment’s Bernard. This time it was in the form of an email, offering to add BrunoB.com to the GammaCash affiliate program, where it became a successful addition and still resides.
Happy with his early success, Valiquette really wanted to run his own operation.
Enter Peter North.
In summer 2002, the Adult legend showed up in Montreal to do a shoot, having recently acquired the domain name PeterNorth.com.
At the time, North was working with an Orange County, California company that was designing various templates for his Web site. As fate would have it, the performer became ill during his stint in Montreal. Unable to shoot, he ran across Valiquette and his team and took note of what they were doing.
“I was paying attention; they knew I had a deal, so they didn’t try to push me or hard sell me – but I realized these guys really knew what they were doing. They had a really good pulse on new things, creative things, things that would work – they had a small team at the time, but a team that was very good in each category,” North said last August.
North decided to eat the money he’d invested and handed the keys to Valiquette’s team. In December 2002, PeterNorth.com went live. In April 2003, the company launched barely-legal amateur star site ChristineYoung.com, and shortly thereafter, the affiliate program BrainCash was born.
Since then, they have added 10 additional pay sites – PetersCumShots.com, LexSteele.com, SilverstoneVideo.com, SweetAmyLee.com, HardcoreFiesta.com, ShelbyBell.com, MelissaDoll.com, IwantLatina.com, RealSquirt.com, and BoysCasting.com.
It’s a wild mix of porn star, amateur, hardcore, niche, fetish, straight, and gay-driven content. It’s this mix that gives BrainCash their signature in the market.
“There are not many networks of sites that are diversified like the one we run. You can get anything from amateur to brand-name porn star content and we only plan to make the network better in the future,” says the 30-year-old Valiquette.
By signing up with the company’s BrainPass, surfers get access to the entire cornucopia of BrainCash sites for $24.95 per 30 days. But what do webmasters get, besides $35 per signup, 50 percent revenue sharing, or a ton of free hosted galleries?
“I think a lot of webmasters promote stuff they would buy themselves, and they like what we are doing. We are also really devoted to our affiliates and try to get involved with them as much as possible. We’re not the kind of company where you sign up and simply get links. There is always someone to talk with, if you need help or simply want to get in touch with us,” Valiquette says.
While their offerings are varied, easy to promote, and have content that interests surfers, BrainCash’s flagship is that it is home to two of the world’s biggest male porn stars. Couple that with the early success they had shooting with Les Girls and it becomes a lot easier to develop other projects.
“The fact that we were close to production and models really helped us. Producers saw that we were able to shoot and manage content on the Web and felt that we would be able to repeat what we were doing for them. It was pretty easy for us to get new studios after we made PeterNorth.com the number one male porn star site in the market. In fact, we didn’t really seek new producers, but they approached us to get their Web sites done,” Valiquette says.
In addition to managing the online operations of North’s Northstar Associates, Steele’s Mercenary Pictures, and Silverstone Entertainment, BrainCash is in the process of rolling out a site for another studio – Doghouse Digital.
As the company and its 20 employees move forward, expect more diversification. In the near future, Valiquette is planning to add an herbal supplement program called Maximum Pills, featuring a Viagra alternative endorsed by Peter North. More content sites, including the Doghouse Digital site, will follow. The company may even venture into the DVD market.
Valiquette is also pushing BrainCash to overcome what he considers their main deficiency – a lag in technology.
“Since we’re relatively new to the market, we have a lot of catching up to do technologically. Building everything required to run a major affiliate program and compete with the big guys at the same time takes a lot of energy and resources,” he says.
The company’s programmers are working on writing their own software and the current program will be replaced in January.
“We are not in a position yet to drive the market, but as soon as we catch up technologically we are really looking to bring all of our crazy ideas into play. I really hope in a few years, BrainCash will be positioned as a leader and a major player in the industry,” Valiquette says.
“We are really devoted to producing quality sites and products that will stand out in the market and appeal to customers. It’s a good part of BrainCash’s success so far, and I’m quite sure it will only be better in the future.”
