Is this a great business, or what? It took just a few easy steps for Brian Muir to transition from shiftless teenager to Adultcash.com ringmaster. "I'm a high-school dropout," Muir laughs. All the way to the bank.
One of the most startling things about the boy entrepreneur is how he speaks of times recent to my memory as the distant past, and recounts his youthful endeavors as through the mists of an era long gone. "I actually started a long time ago," the 24-year-old recalls. "I was about 20 years old in 1997, and I started building free sites - non-adult free sites, actually - joke Websites and stuff, trying to get traffic, to sell advertising.
"Learned pretty quickly that adult was where it was at in order to get the traffic."
In this, Muir and his (older) contemporaries are in complete accord. "I started creating free sites and playing with topless and selling traffic off. After about six months of staying up literally about 20 hours a day in front of the computer, four hours of sleep, it was time to think of something else. I learned about recurring billing in member sections."
Regarding his lack of formal education, Muir notes, "The best way to learn is by trial and error, and by doing [things] yourself. You can go to school to learn techniques and technology to be implemented in your business today," but, he says, his own discoveries were the money makers. When he struck the naked bod goldmine, "It was big. I started selling the traffic and seeing the checks coming in and coming in, and my dad and his girlfriend didn't believe me - thought I was crazy for sitting in a room 20 hours a day. Finally, as most programs back then paid a month late, when the checks came in for $10-20,000.... My dad's a criminal defense attorney, went to Brown University. He was always trying to get me to go to school, get a ?good job.' And I did the opposite of what he said my whole life, and started working harder at it; I had to prove more."
Following up on his desire to find a better way, Muir eventually started creating pay sites. "I quickly built [an adult] site," he says, "and in about two months I got it up to 160,000 uniques a day. I was selling a lot of traffic. It kept me up.
"The pay site business I started on the straight side," Muir says, chronicling the change, "selling to Hardcorekingdom.com. The first click-through program that I started up was ?Quickdollars,? that used CTC, the third-party tracking program. That was very, very successful. I started that on a gay site called Boystuds. I talked to a couple of people and learned that their conversion ratio on the gay side was about one in 60, compared with the straight side, which was about one in 400, one in 500. I started buying up a lot of gay traffic and sending it through to Quickdollars."
Muir's game plan is simple and effective. "Our goal is to create as many sites in as many niches as possible, to give a Webmaster a choice as to whatever kind of site they'd like to promote," he explains. "In Adultcash, you can log in with one account, you can advertise on one of our sites with certain linking URLs, you can choose between getting paid per sale, or you can get a flat rate of per unique. The whole theory behind this is if you give the Webmasters what they want and you make them happy and you keep them, you're bound to make money and you're bound to have a successful program that's going to grow, and it's got [staying power] when other people are going under and having problems."
What makes Adultcash special, says Muir, is fresh-from-the-camera original content. "We've been doing that for close to two years now. We have a lease product, Amateurplugin.com.
"Being on the pay site Webmaster side," Muir reasons, "I wanted to create a product that was going to make other Webmasters very happy to lease and keep members staying on. We host the site so it's all on our bandwidth, and we charge a monthly fee, depending on how many members [a Webmaster] has. The Webmasters' section to lease it out is Webmasters.amateurplugin.com.
"Basically, we interview two new girls a week; the viewer gets a feel for what kind of person she is. She does a little striptease, she gets naked and does a masturbation scene, and we have the pictures and video for each girl. We update it. We have 80 or 90 girls in there.
"Another thing I wanted to do," Muir says, "was give the surfers every kind of girl they might like. We shoot all different kinds of girls, not just [traditional] pretty girl stuff; it's straight amateur."
Muir says that he gives Webmasters all the content and all the pictures that are shot for Amateurplugin.com and Seductiveamateurs.com for use on their sites as free licensed content. He does this to "keep Webmasters happy" and to advertise his site. "What we learned is, not only does this make for Webmasters who are happy enough to buy content, but they actually create banners, full-page ads - whole Web pages that sell the surfer before they even get into our site. The sign-up ratios have been outrageously [good]. We're averaging a one in 100 sign-up ratio."
For someone without the usual piece of university crest-bearing parchment, Muir has grasped the lessons of the adult Internet industry quickly. "We do a lot of stuff for new people just coming in. We've done lots of deals with people where we've traded: We've given them the product for their site because they don't have the traffic or recurring members - yet - then they'll do a couple of banners for us in a month. We look at the bandwidth reports, and even if they're only sending one or two visitors a month, if we realize it's not costing us any money, we'll give it to them. We like to get our product out there."
