If you’re trying to reach a specific destination with Steve Lightspeed it can be a tough task, particularly if you’re in the neighborhood of anyone else from the online Adult industry. That’s because the man who founded the wildly popular Lightspeed Cash and the softcore, single-girl sites it houses, knows everyone. And everyone knows him – although even if you didn’t, you’d be able to recognize him by the Seattle Mariners-inspired Lightspeed baseball jersey he’s always sporting and the slight smirk that he wears upon his face.
This is something Lightspeed refers to as the rock star phenomenon and although he doesn’t overtly embrace it, it’s apparent that he enjoys it. It’s not that men cheer his name and women throw their panties at him, but Steve Lightspeed doesn’t have to move. He can walk into a convention, such as he did at January’s Internext, choose a place to stand, instantly be recognized and start chatting with three different people at once. Take a walk through a hallway with him at a similar event and you’ll end up starting and stopping like city traffic during rush hour as he greets acquaintances and friends.
So what’s the reason behind the phenomenon?
Well, to begin with, there’s Tawnee Stone, the Lightspeed Girl and Internet superstar who has become the single-girl site model for success since she exploded onto the scene in 2001. Despite four years time and the apparent short attention span of porn surfers, she still owns the company’s number one site.
Next, there’s Lightspeed Cash itself – a network of sites built on barely-legal teen models like Stone who typically only do, get this – softcore.
Finally, there’s the brand. From the seemingly singular mission of Lightspeed Cash to dominate the single-girl, softcore market to the jerseys, to Lightspeed’s weekend bungee jumping stunts to the rock star himself.
However, if you ask Lightspeed, who once he leaves the concert stage becomes husband and father of two Steve Jones, the Lightspeed phenomenon is a result of being honest in a business where people aren’t always so.
“I love that we have fans and we have so many friends. It’s really been great, but I don’t think ‘the rock star treatment’ is deserved,” Lightspeed says. “I think we’ve really tried to do the right thing. We’ve stayed honest, we’ve never fucked anybody over, we’ve never shaved from our affiliates, we’ve never cheated our members, we’ve never cheated our content providers, and we’ve never screwed our models over. I think it’s a shame that being honest sets you apart in this industry to the point where you attain some sort of celebrity status.”
Regardless of his current status, Steve Jones was once a computer programmer with a porn interest. He began his genesis and rise to prominence in 1991, when he logged onto Prodigy for the first time. Since his own name was taken, Jones took the advice of a friend and chose a unique user name.
“I had just put the computer together and I had a Lightspeed video card. I’m kind of looking around and saying ‘lamp post – no, TV – that ain’t it, Lightspeed – there’s a cool word,’” he says.
Soon Steve Lightspeed became a known persona through being active on news groups, chat boards, visiting Websites and networking. In 1999, he parlayed that into his own softcore cheerleader site, Lightspeed University.
“We had traffic and sign-ups on our first day, which for someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing – I thought that was a pretty good trick,” he says.
More legal teen softcore sites would follow, but Lightspeed hit absolute pay dirt when he found girl-next-door-type Tawnee Stone four years ago. While Stone’s innocent look is probably most responsible for the site’s success, the fact is that everyone who releases a single-girl site is aiming to be the next Stone.
“That site did sort of define a new generation,” Lightspeed says. “There are a lot of people trying to knock the Tawnee model off the top, but she’s still a phenomenon. I can’t explain it myself. Her site has done extremely well and is still our number one site in its forth year. She has a legion of fans and she’s still just a regular girl.”
Stone’s site started a run of single-girl sites for Lightspeed that includes Lacey White, Brandy Didder, Tiffany Paris, Kinzie Kenner, Tori Stone , Taylor Little, and Jordan Capri.
Along the way, the company has tried a few other ventures – a gay site, shemale site, toon site and co-branded movie sites, but Lightspeed seems to realize that his bread and butter is finding cute college girls and putting them on the Web.
“Everyone said, ‘What are you doing?’ Solo girls, teen solo girls – that’s what we want out of you,” Lightspeed says. “After I thought about it, the majority of our traffic is coming in looking for Tawnee, Jordan, or Taylor. Why would I send them to something different? If they wanted something different, they wouldn’t have come to me in the first place. We feel like we have a pretty good business model set up for solo girls and that’s what we’re focusing on.”
Now with 20 employees, 34 sites and a clearly established business model Lightspeed is focusing on marketing and traffic.
In addition to further developing their brand with new ventures such as mobile sites and the possibility of both a Lightspeed Girls DVD series and hotel-room pay-per-view, Lightspeed has also began focusing on new avenues of traffic.
The company brought on former Traffic Dude analyst Lisa, aka Sweetums, in July to be Lightspeed Cash’s affiliate manager. As Lightspeed himself would have you believe, she works magic, but more realistically Lisa was able to help the company pinpoint some drastically underutilized traffic streams.
“We’ve been monetizing and looking at traffic streams in different ways. Sometimes it’s just bringing in a fresh pair of eyes to a situation and bringing some fresh ideas,” she says.
Prior to her arrival, Lightspeed had relied on affiliates for the bulk of his traffic. Now, the company is implementing traffic trades, internal traffic sources, alternate streams and is doing things such as using search engines – something no one at the company had ever tried before.
Lightspeed Cash also launched version 4.0 of their own back-end software in August of 2004, the most robust version yet, which allows Lightspeed to have virtually every stat possible at his fingertips.
“We can see patterns coming at us a mile away. We can see foreign traffic and by affiliate, and we can really pin down what’s happening with our traffic,” Lightspeed says. “We’ve been able to make a lot smarter decisions based on that.”
The evolution of Lightspeed Cash has also included new pricing models that allow members to change which sites are in their package each month, something Lightspeed said has been great for retention.
But the biggest addition to the Lightspeed family has probably been Steve’s wife, Shannon, who now has an active role in the company and whom Steve credits with making up for his complete lack of organization.
“I was afraid she wouldn’t accept the industry, if she came to the conventions and saw live sex she would just freak out and now, she’s like ‘These conventions are boring, when are we going to see something good,’” Lightspeed says. “She’s been traveling with me now for a year and she’s met everyone we know. Everybody loves her – she’s Shannon Lightspeed. She really stepped up and became part of the company and part of the industry.”
Just like that, what started as a hobby for a computer programmer has morphed into something else entirely.
“It used to be just about taking pictures of girls. Now it’s about schedules, budgets and meetings. I haven’t looked at our sites in months,” Lightspeed says. “My favorite joke is I can’t get hard unless I’m looking at a spreadsheet. It feels true sometimes. I don’t feel like I’m in the porn industry. I feel like I’m in the marketing business and our product happens to be porn. Everything we do happens to be about a product we’re pushing out the door, getting eyeballs, getting people interested in what we’re doing.”
Being a full-time marketing maven has pushed Lightspeed the persona to the forefront and in a way, made it one with the Lightspeed brand. The only problem with that is, some people in the industry seem to have a problem with Lightspeed the brand. With the success he has achieved with his own unique brand of pornography, the man sometimes finds himself at the center of controversy.
“There are people who criticize us for various things and people are entitled to their opinions,” Lightspeed says. “I don’t like everything I see on the Web, but I don’t force my opinions down everyone’s throats. The Web is a good place to exercise free speech. Some people think one thing is okay and something else is not. Who are they to decide?”
Controversy aside, Lightspeed has millions of fans around the world and many backers in the industry. While you may hear a voice here and there complain about his content, there is nary a negative word spoken about the way he does business.
“In 2001 I had someone tell me that everyone expects us to shave. I said everyone’s going to be disappointed when they work with us. I refuse to believe that being dishonest is the way to run a company or do business,” Lightspeed said. “I always said the day is coming when the guys doing anything dishonest are going to be run off and it’s coming. We’ve already seen a lot of companies go by the wayside. They can’t compete in an environment where there are good, solid, honest companies providing a service that everyone wants.”
As usual, when it comes down to it, Shannon best organizes everything that is Lightspeed.
“The persona is there, but people forget that there’s quite a brilliant businessman behind that,” she says.
