The thousands of porn fans who regularly surf the many sites hosted by SmashBucks owe their happiness (not to mention many orgasms) to rock ‘n’ roll music and a few good Cuban cigars. At least that’s what the guys behind SmashBucks, Mike Hawk and partner Spikes, seem to remember from their meeting in the early ‘90s.
Hawk, an in-demand nightclub manager, recalls spending a lot of time on the Sunset Strip, catching up-and-coming rock bands. He met Spikes, who was the drummer in a band trying to launch their career on a single called “Porno Star,” and over cigars, the two bonded (Hawk liked “Porno Star,” Spikes liked cigars). They forged a friendship and, when Spikes later put together a “music video” of the song featuring stock footage of various porn films, Hawk saw an opportunity to “harness the energy” of the online file-sharing boom. They came with CandyFilms.com, purchased a domain, and the clip for “Porno Star” went live.
The video generated so much traffic that the two men decided to turn their experiment into a business. Hawk called up old friend Mike Paulson (Ginger Lynn: The Movie, The Devil and John Holmes), who still had the 1-inch masters of his films (Spikes laughingly recalls Paulson telling them, “Nobody wants to see that old shit.”), made a deal for all the content, and launched PornStarClassics.com to instant success. “[When we started it], nobody was doing the classics on the Internet,” Spikes says. “To this day, [even though] we’ve built other, more general sites, the classics site is still our best-showing and converting.”
SmashBucks followed a few years later, and is today the affiliate program for CandyFilms and PornStarClassics, as well as AllPornAccess.com, AsianXXXGames.com, SmashcomMovies.com, Porndifferent.com, and MILF sites DoMyMom.com and MommyLovesPussy.com. Offering Webmasters $25 per sign-up and 50 percent on every sale and rebill for the life of the account, as well as a host of marketing tools (hosted galleries, free content and hosting), SmashBucks has quickly turned into… well, a smash hit. This, Hawk says, is due to the duo’s ability to “take some chances on new ideas and some free thinking. Obviously, a lot of Webmasters before us have blazed an amazing trail and made a ton of money, but the industry keeps evolving, and technology marches on.”
Hawk thinks the ease of use of SmashBucks has a lot to do with its success as well. “We’ve made tools available for Webmasters to just pick stuff up, and we try to be there for them all the time to give them what they need,” he states. Vice President of Sales and Marketing Ellisa Kamula (whose background includes a recent stint at Platinum Bucks) adds, “A good affiliate program is really differentiated from the rest through the level of customer service they can provide to their Webmasters. It is in our unique way of relating to our Webmasters that we find our greatest strength.”
Having recently hired Kamala (The men can’t sing her praises enough. “She’s a perfect fit with us,” Hawk gushes) to beef up their sales presence, SmashBucks is poised for even bigger things – including four additional classics sites and a gay site. They are also undertaking a semi-secretive project that Spikes promises will be “a hybrid of an Adult site and some of the dating sites that are out there,” as well as launching a VoD channel featuring – you guessed it – the classics.
Why such love for the oldies? “The classic movies set the tone for the future of Adult entertainment,” Spikes declares. “It was a new and unique time for Adult [then]. The stars took pride in their work. There are a number of top-billed stars today, but there is only one Christy Canyon or Ginger Lynn.”
The boys might even try their hand at producing some original content of their own. “We come up with new ideas for our business on a daily basis,” Hawk says. “It’s really a matter of thinking all of those over through time. There’s a lot of stuff we want to do, but right now we consider ourselves to be a very small dot on the radar.”
Spikes is quick to speak up, adding, “Small and fortunate.”
“Small and very fortunate,” Hawk says. “We’ve gotten lucky with a couple great little turns that have worked well for us.”
