One rule of commerce is that people love to get something for nothing. Another rule is people go into business to make money. Pornication (www.pornication.com) combines these two principles, turning giveaways into moneymakers.
"Pornication is the world's largest adult streaming video company, and provides content for membership and free sites," says Scott Maslowe, Managing Partner of Pornication. "Our bailiwick is live video chat rooms. The consumer goes into the chat room, sees naked guys and girls, jokes around, talks and chats with any number of people in the chat room, as well as the models. It's live and pretty interactive. Consumers can even phone the models, and pay only the usual long distance fee."
Maslowe describes what he believes sets Pornication apart from its adult Internet competition. "They get the free product with Pornication," he says. "Whereas if you go to many of our competitors, you can buy into the group chat at a pretty reasonable price. However, our group chat is completely free to anyone who chooses to come into it. The way it traditionally worked is, you'd get the video for free. However, when you went to the chat, that was the upsell - to go into the chat. Pornication reorganized that, so we gave you everything for free.
"We also were the first and the best company providing the service absolutely free to the webmasters, plus we pay them on their upsells," Maslowe maintains.
He claims Pornication has the broadest array of rooms available - up to 13 with American men and women of various ethnicities. "The marketing methodology we pioneered was: give them the product, give it to them in a group setting, which will induce them to go into a one-on-one at $5.99 per minute," Maslowe says. A Pornication ad states webmasters receive up to 35 percent of every upsell sent from their site to Pornication, for the life of these customers. "Every month, we send out tons of commission checks," Maslowe asserts. "We're placed on over 20,000 websites. Our brand is spread across pretty much every big website you can imagine - CEN, Cybererotica, any of Maximum Cash's, Kara's, Danni's Hard Drive, Club Love - we do business with more than 10,000 webmasters, and millions of consumers."
In addition to providing content for other companies' websites, Pornication has its own site. "If you log onto Pornication.com, there is a section for webmasters and a section for consumers," Maslowe says. "We also promote partner programs - sites designed for a different purpose. They are not marketing tools for membership sites. They're self-sufficient sites, existing outside of membership sites; they are sites themselves. And when a consumer comes across them, it is an immediate upsell into the live one-on-one sex."
These sites are for consumers, Maslowe emphasizes, and they somewhat differ from other Pornication solo sites. "There's a lot of archived model pictures," Maslowe says. "They have original content of both guy and girl models you can't find anywhere else. Let the consumer choose the model out of the photos they tend to fall in love with - bam, right in there, this leads to that upsell, buying one-on-one time with that model or models. Once they've joined that site, minimum registration is $10. With this registration, they get $5.99, about a minute and a half of time. However, with that original purchase, they get five free minutes of gift time. Once they've registered, consumers have a customer identification number and password that will get them into the site over and over, so they can see the constantly updated pictures."
Pornication also recognizes women are a vast, potential audience. Maslowe estimates 20 percent of Pornication's customers are female. "We run guy rooms too, although most are geared towards gay men. Many women watch alone, although we do have tons of couples," he notes.
"We're kind of rebranding to get a more expansive turf on the Internet," says Maslowe. "Because we're not just into membership sites; we try to also be in the different banner farms across the Internet. Ultimately, it's just a question of raw numbers, and how much market share you own, that leads a consumer to click on your banner."
Pornication began in early 1998 and is based in Michigan, with studios in several states. Maslowe is one of the five founders of the firm, which now employs about 200 and is a multi-million dollar company. Maslowe studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, before moving into e-porn. "You've got to go where the money is," says the former electrician.
The still growing company offers other services. "Pornication provides a real time AVS service to verify address and age," Maslowe says. "When we check credit card information, it comes through our database, our system, our intelligence. Based on certain known quantities, it's evaluated. We have a sort of artificial intelligence running in the database, that looks at it and says ?It's from this country, with high instances of chargebacks.' Bam! It gets some points. It has some other anomaly that gives it large points. Based on what the credit card scores, it goes through or not.
"80 percent of our customers come from America, 10 percent from Britain, and declination is rare. However, certain countries, like the United Arab Emirates or Singapore, where pornography is illegal, unfortunately can't get our service," Maslowe laments.
Pornication added a new feature for webmasters in September. "The ICULIVE WebCAM technology gives the common person with an average computer system with at least a 14.4 modem the ability to use Pornication technology at home," says Maslowe.
Maslowe says that by buying a webcam costing $50-100, and connecting it to a computer, webmasters can use ICU Pornication software provided free to them to broadcast live chats from home. They can broadcast from one to multiple clients at a permanent price. "What makes it very unique � because there's lots of services offering this - is Pornication provides the tools by which you can produce a seamless integration of video technology from your members to your amateur site to the world," he explains. "In addition to the video software, we give you software that provides billing on a permanent basis, and software which provides the chat room, and it's all integrated into one easily downloaded package. We give you marketing tools to put on your site to induce people to sell into your show. The exhibitor never has to update the software, which has oil change technology for adding new features, such as sound, which should be available soon. We also give you a video guidebook," states Maslowe.
Maslowe contends that by using Pornication's complimentary software, webmasters save on the hefty expenses live amateurcam shows usually cost, or from having to go to a megasite that provides ICU technology.
As with the upsell, Pornication downloads the ICU technology free in exchange for revenue sharing with participants. Pornication gets 40 percent, and webmasters 60 percent, which Maslowe claims is higher than the industry standard. Yet again, Pornication turns freebies into goldmines.
Pornication can be reached by phone at 888.844.9810; or e-mail [email protected]
