Turning 6 might not be the biggest deal for us humans, but in the blink-and-you-miss-it world of adult Internet sites, celebrating a sixth birthday is a big deal. So you can forgive the folks over at CuriousCash.com if they seem to be a little, well, excited about their recent anniversary.
“I’m absolutely thrilled that CuriousCash is celebrating six years!” exclaims the site’s founder, Tim Hamilton. “Photographing these breathtakingly good-looking young athletes and sportsmen, to me, is a way of capturing the true spirit, exuberance, youth, and natural beauty of Australia.”
Hamilton’s not kidding, either. Whether under its original incarnation as BoyModelsAustralia.com or with its first affiliate program, BoyBucks.net, CuriousCash (which officially turned 6 on Aug. 28) has been showcasing some of Australia’s finest since 1999, when Hamilton – a trained commercial pilot coming off a soured attempt at starting his own airline – had an epiphany while out fishing with a mate. “I simply looked around me at the surfers coming off the beach from riding the waves and thought, ‘If I could get these guys to model for me, it would be fun,’” Hamilton recalls. “I knew the Internet was the wave of the future, and I knew that the subject matter – the simple exuberance of the male youth of this wonderful land that is Australia – had wide appeal in the marketplace. My love of the aviation industry having been soured and my bank balance having been equally soured, I needed to find a different path. Adult, as it turned out, became that path.”
Armed with only a camera and a scanner (and doing most of the work from his bedroom), Hamilton began taking pictures of men who responded to his ads in the local gay papers, transporting the film more than 60 miles to a friend who worked in a photo processing shop so it could be developed after hours. “Let me tell you, it was touch and go many times in those tough early days!” Hamilton says. “It was beg, borrow, and steal – figuratively speaking, of course – to get my idea off the ground and onto the Web. I was not and am still not any sort of technical guy, so I had to rely on friends to help me get my early model shoots online. I laugh now as I look back at those times.”
Things got easier when Hamilton stumbled across “WebmasterDan,” a (gasp!) straight guy who came onboard to help him out with the technical side of things.
The team was later fleshed out when “CuriousToyBoy” and “CuriousJesse” (obviously, not their real names) joined up as well, making for one big and happy pansexual family. ToyBoy and Hamilton eventually decided to team up on another endeavor, an affiliate program they called GayMoneyMachine.com, in turn prompting Hamilton to take his own creation to the next level.
“There was much long and hard thinking and planning on my part,” he says of his decision to rename and relaunch BoyBucks as CuriousCash in April of 2004. “When I went to the team with the idea, they were right behind me, and there has been no looking back.”
The newly minted program took off rather quickly, growing from one that included 15 sites to one that now features upwards of 30. Recently, Hamilton and his team of “Angels” (as he likes to refer to his staff) launched Version 2 of the CuriousCash program, which is now powered by MPA3 and, Hamilton says, “give[s] us the platform to again go to the next level as a program and provider of the highest quality content to the surfer.”
Of CuriousCash’s all-exclusive content, Hamilton is quite proud. “Without a doubt, it is our content that makes us unique,” he says. “All of our efforts are underpinned by the rarely questioned fact that the quality of the boys, and the quantity that I am able to recruit and produce our content from, is as good – if not better – than anything out there today.
“Our surfers know what to expect when they join our sites, and we do not disappoint them,” Hamilton continues, adding that he pays “spotter fees” to models to encourage them to help recruit fresh new talent, which is frequently culled from a pool of local athletes. As he jokes, “I have a constant stream of surfers, bodybuilders, lifesavers, footballers, [and more] beating a path to my door wanting to get their pants off!” As Hamilton points out, however, being extra-picky about which guys to feature is what has propelled CuriousCash to such highs. “I interview [a new model] every single week and do at least one new shoot each week, but I actually say no to more boys than I actually shoot. Quality is the key word here; I will not shoot the ordinary. It goes against my own business model of only filming the best I can find.”
Hamilton says that “fresh, natural good looks and exuberance” are the qualities he looks for in his models. “What makes our content so special is the raw material,” he enthuses. “Our boys are quite simply the hottest young athletes and sportsmen Australia has to offer. I continually amaze myself at the boys we are able to recruit and shoot.”
Of course, Hamilton knows that surfer retention is only part of what makes the CuriousCash program so successful, which is where his ears (“my most important tools,” he insists) come into it. “We listen to our surfers and we listen to our webmasters,” he says. “We generally make changes and add new features according to what feedback we get from those two sources. Our business model does dictate an ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach, but we are constantly fine-tuning and refreshing our existing offerings to stay on top of the game.” That means not cow-towing to industry trends, he adds: “One thing we do not do is knee jerk to perceived industry changes or ‘the next big thing.’ We stick with what we are proven to be good at and get better providing it—for both our surfers and affiliates. It’s not rocket science, just common sense.”
Hmmm, only 6 years old and already governing themselves by standards of common sense? Something tells us that these guys are going to be around for quite a long time to come.
