Now here's something you don't see every day: Toothless street dwellers locked in battle, the downtrodden engaged in random acts of stupidity, all for about a hundred bucks. The "bum" as we know him, now part of the entertainment hierarchy, a source of specialized content for the sick and twisted, the morbidly curious, and even the just plain bored, to delight in.
Say what you will, David Koenig loves this stuff. And well he should. The latest offering from the founder/owner/creative muse of Holio.net (www.holio.net), Bum Fights (www.holio.net/bumfights) is destined to become another key component in the wildly successful content provider business he launched six years ago.
On this sweltering day in July, Koenig is working in his modishly decorated office in the building where Cybererotica is located (more on that later). On his computer screen is the Bum Fights homepage, all dressed up and ready for its Web debut. "It's amazing," he says. "It's some of the wackiest shit you ever saw."
Koenig has struck a deal with the producers to acquire the online rights to stream the content - already a big hit on the home video market - exclusively via Holio.net.
Bum Fights is product number 70 for Koenig, who initially developed free sites - with his two partners - that sent traffic to Playgal. "We gave content to people for free," Koenig recalls. "We were the first people to do this, and they sent us their traffic and then we got the banner spot."
He adds, "This was before any other company existed as a content provider, and we thought, 'Maybe these people would like to pay for the content and not have the banners,' so that's when the first product, Cyberfold, came out."
Six years and 1,200 clients later, Koenig's content behemoth remains a dominant player in the affiliate game. "I've built an autonomous company," he says "and I have great people working for me... Holio.net has the ability to run itself, it's a company that has been doing what it does for so long, and it does the same thing everything single month, that it doesn't need to be managed.
"It's the largest content provider anywhere."
Part of the reason for the streamlined efficiency is because Koenig and a team of ten make sure to keep the original idea and business model intact. "All of these other companies went into four different directions: pay sites, mainstream content, all this stuff... and we could have done the same thing, but what we did was focus on our market and that's why we have so many clients. One of the things we do well is consistently produce content every month."
Koenig notes the 1.9 terabytes of content on the site, which have been put up over the last six years. "The first day of content is still up on the servers," he says. "We never take anything down, so everything is organized completely."
Because of his confidence in Holio.net, Koenig is now comfortable directing his creative energies elsewhere, to another power player in industry. As of March 2002, Koenig has held the title of COO at Cybererotica (www.cybererotica.com), a role born out of a lunch meeting with company president Ron "Fantasyman" Levi, who was looking for the same kind of automation Koenig developed at Holio.net. "We came up with an agreement for me to take over operations, and that's where I work everyday," says Koenig. "And, of course, I deal with Holio whenever it needs me, but it rarely needs me."
Koenig's relationship with Cybererotica began years ago, when the company became a Holio.net client. Koenig sees his position with the company as something of a blank canvas, an opportunity to lend his deft skills to another facet of the industry where he's thrived. "It had a potential for me to get into something I haven't done before," he says. "I haven't done any site manufacturing, it's not my business. Content is my business... and I saw it as an opportunity to learn, so now here I am, and boy am I learning."
Part of that learning curve comes from Koenig's direct line to Levi. "This guy [Levi] has ideas all the time and working with him is awesome," says Koenig. "Before I got here, he had ideas but they'd get lost, and he needed someone here, like me, who could facilitate them."
Koenig's faith in the Internet's potential has not been dissuaded one iota through the market's many leaps and dips.
Or, in the case of Bum Fights, a bob and weave.
