Videosecrets/VS Media (www.videosecrets.com) has been among the largest content providers of off- and online adult entertainment since 1996. "We produce in excess of 400 hours of live production daily," says Videosecrets President Gregory Clayman. "We have over 25 rooms with live girls, live guys, actual live male-female sex, live dungeon, live transsexuals, live Asians, and an ?ebony' room. In our studio, at any given time we have up to 200 models. We serve our live video feeds to approximately 10,000 webmasters worldwide, including companies like Wicked Pictures, Cybererotica, Penthouse Magazine, Private, RJB Telcom, and Python. Ninety-nine percent of our production is done outside of the U.S. Everything we shoot, we record. Content is king and gold in our business," notes Clayman.
Videosecrets primarily does B2B transactions, with B2C a distant second. "A very, very, very small part of our business is membership business," the firm's President states. "We never claimed to be a large membership site. Our first and foremost obligation is to provide the best quality feeds in the world to our webmasters. That's always been the main focus of our company. And that's why we've always maintained quality," asserts Clayman.
He describes his role as President as being responsible for the overall management and overview of the company, and liaison between Videosecrets and its joint ventures. The thirty-ish Clayman also discusses the firm's attitude towards its contract talent. "We have models going on two or three years with us. If our models are happy, they're going to do a better show and refer other people. We give them incentives - the better they do, the more models make. Word of mouth is how it gets around. We create a positive work environment, treating everybody with the utmost respect, and paying enough money, and allowing customers to tip - whether it's the production side abroad or the corporate side in California," Clayman avers.
To paraphrase the Kinks, Videosecrets' business philosophy is "give the webmasters what they want." Clayman says, "Websites need content. Well, right now ?Webmaster X,' for example, may not want to pay for content. But Webmaster X has some traffic going to his site, and wants to capitalize on it. So, Webmaster X can take our feeds for free, he can private label and customize them, so it looks like WebmasterX'sgirls.com. Ninety-nine percent of end users not only think Webmaster X added a large studio to his website, but they don't even really care - as long as it looks and feels the same. We allow people to co-brand with us," explains Clayman.
He explains how the company profits from providing webmasters with free streaming video. "We have two different types of products," Clayman points out. "First, we have our free product. And the way we work on them is we pay the webmaster 35-40\\\\% commission on every dollar spent by the user. For example, an average transaction costs the end user $5 per minute, because it's a one-on-one. So, basically, if the user buys 20 minutes, it's about $100, and the webmaster then gets $35. And they've put up nothing - we pay the bandwidth," states Clayman.
"In addition to that," he continues, "every month now, we're having major live-by-request events. We've contracted with some major players, such as Vivid Video. On October 29, for instance, Seymore Butts Home Movies directed a live four-hour broadcast of a shoot of one of his newest features, called Internet Tushie. Users could actually see and hear Butts direct a movie, and what they saw in their video windows on their computer screens was through Seymore's camera. It's 100\\\\% interactive, live-by- request. Users could even call and make a request to Seymore if they wanted to see a special shot during the movie. All of our webmasters can take these links for free on their websites, and drive as much traffic as they want to it, and capitalize on it. What we're trying to do is bring more of the industry to the webmasters, keep making them happy, and bringing new things to the table," Clayman says.
"The second way to get these feeds is, we'll give it to you if you have a free site, with a $1 per year AVS system, to prove he or she is over 18, and then they have access to the whole Flirt4Free program," adds Clayman. "However, if you have a membership site, you've already done age verification, and we don't give these webmasters the AVS link. Then, the pay site can put your end users right into Flirt4Free."
Offering webmasters new and innovative content is an important part of maintaining Videosecrets' standards, and Clayman told AVN Online about its latest program. "The exciting new www.flirt4free.com is a program for free and membership site webmasters. We have webmasters making more money than ever in their history with Videosecrets, up to $4,000 gross a day. Flirt4free is a service providing webmasters with about 25 feeds from us, from our variety of shows - live sex, girls, guys, shemales, etcetera - for free to promote on their website. At the 25 revolving rooms, when a one-on-one isn't going on, the model chats with users for free in the flirt room, enticing someone to go one-on- one with her," Clayman explains.
Videosecrets' Vice President of Marketing Kevin Burke adds, "During the free flirt, when users can sample as many available models as they want, the model wears a bikini or lingerie in the flirt room. The talent only disrobes and performs once the one-on-one transaction is bought. At that point, the other users in the flirt room can continue to watch the free live hardcore video feed, although their video picture size becomes small. But the end user who purchases the one-on-one can blow the image up to full screen size," Burke states.
Clayman reveals another major development. "Right now, in addition to our monthly live events, we're involved in joint ventures with multiple companies, doing different things with our content. For example, JennaVision.com is a compilation of the best of Jenna Jameson's career with Wicked Pictures, which has just been released in conjunction with Wicked and Videosecrets, for webmasters to buy. Now webmasters can legally say they have Jenna on their sites, and do it the right way. In addition, we have a joint venture with Earl Miller Photography Inc. We have two picture galleries - Earl shot for Penthouse for 30 years, but we're featuring archival material Earl shot on his own for himself, of the world's most beautiful women. It has boy-girl, girl-girl, and single girl. We have another co-venture with Matrix Content, featuring our American Beauty Teen Gallery; it's a more amateur-type gallery. We also partner up with AVN magazine. The AVN Show presents not only the digitized version of the AVN Awards Show, but also the scenes that correspond with the winning awards," relates Clayman.
Although Videosecrets remains a privately held company, its successful trajectory has led it to the stock market. "Our biggest joint venture is with a company called the Private Media Group," Clayman says. "It's a publicly traded, NASDAQ company, listed as PRVT. We do what's called Private Channels for them. We have the rights to all of the Private movies, to repackage them and sell them in a product called Private Channels to webmasters worldwide."
According to its President, "Videosecrets partners up a lot because we believe a unified group is always better than any individual company. And if we can do different ventures with different companies worldwide, without creating competitive products, it will position us in a very diverse and positive way, for now and the future. We haven't run into any drawbacks co-venturing," Clayman maintains.
Videosecrets' President believes the credit card chargeback conundrum, ISP problems, and the presidential election make e-porn cooperation all the more important. "More companies are co-partnering all the time now, especially in our industry," Clayman notes. "The only people who are really going to stand up for us are people in our own industry. We need to stick together. And I think the industry has realized this in the last year. I've never seen the industry working as tightly as we are now. When one company has a problem, the only people who seem to really care are others in the industry. We have to stick up for each other, because if we fight one another, and everybody else fights with us, then we'll never get anywhere. And as an industry, we all want to move forward," proclaims Clayman.
The Videosecrets President remains bullish. "We're surpassing record months every month. 2000 was a record year. Videosecrets remains profitable and growing," Clayman declares.
