"Big" is a good word to use in describing John "Big Bear" Bartish, founder and chairman of Mature Web Publishing Inc. He's a big guy with big ideas whose big network of Websites has experienced big growth and produces big rewards.
It all began very modestly; one might almost say inauspiciously. "I was preparing for retirement," Bartish says. "I had two years to go, and I started looking at different things I could do to keep busy and generate a little extra income."
While surfing the Internet for possibilities in 1997, Bartish happened across an ad for "turnkey" Websites. The scheme sounded reasonable to someone with little clue about how to make money on the Internet, so Bartish signed up.
"It happened to be for an operation down in Florida, and the Websites happened to be adult," he says, noting that even though he'd never thought about making a living in the adult entertainment world, he wasn't shocked or offended. "The front end was a come-on for about five AVSes, including Adult Check, and once someone signed up, they got access to about 350 sites. What I didn't realize until later was that neither the domain nor the site nor most of the income belonged to me. I was responsible for arranging link trades and getting traffic, and in return I got 50 percent of the initial signups, but no recurring income and nothing from the up-sells."
Even so, Bartish says he produced what he thought was a reasonable sum with the Website. Even more important, he began to see a huge potential for profit in the adult Internet. A scant year later, he says he was doing quite well - but the journey wasn't always easy or fun. In fact, it turned out to involve quite a bit of work, and he suspected there had to be a better way to go about it. Fortunately, fairly early on he discovered value in the burgeoning community of independent adult Website operators who, like him, were enrolled in the "seat-of-the-pants" school of empire building.
Employing what he learned by reading and participating in discussions on the boards and perfecting techniques of his own, Bartish grew his operation. Today, he owns more than 25,000 individual URLs that host sites in almost every adult entertainment category, although his primary focus is on the "mature women" niche.
When his operation's direction began to gel in mid-1998, it was because of numbers. Bartish began in earnest to dig through the server statistics for the first Website he owned and operated himself, the independent free site Big Bear's Amazing Pics. The site wasn't much by today's standards, he admits: It included 18 different niche galleries with 10 images per gallery, all of which were updated weekly. The statistics opened his eyes, though, and set him on the course he continues to pursue more often than any other. "Fifty-seven percent of the Alta Vista and Excite search engine traffic hits were hitting on old ladies," Bartish says. "They were hitting on the mature women gallery, and they were buying from my sponsors."
In October 1998, GrammaCash opened its first affiliate program, and Bartish was among the first signers-on. He liked, admired, and respected the owner, he says, and she taught him quite a bit about success in the industry, so it seemed like a good bet.
It was. By November, Bartish had registered 350 domains to feed traffic to GrammaCash, and he was making good money - and things were just getting started. Through it all, he has maintained his independence and his focus on free sites. Although he's done well and feels he's learned enough to make one profitable, he says he currently has no plans to start his own sponsor program. Instead, he prefers to stick with what he calls "one-page wonders:" single-page, well-defined teasers for the "good stuff" that resides at a paying sponsor's mega-site.
After all, Bartish says, making money on the adult Web is all about marketing, not entertainment, and that's a concept too many free site operators have trouble grasping. "[Successful affiliates] create an illusion of fantasy," he says. "If we do our job right, we convince surfers that the sponsor's pay site is better than a blowjob. We don't force them to go there; we make them want to go there."
He says the best indication that a site is going to do well for him is when it meets the "Big Bear Goal:" 80 percent of its visitors click through to a sponsor, and of those, one in 200 signs up.
As an example of non-productive behavior, he cites his early years in the industry: "When I first started out, I was wasting all my time on image processing. When the light bulb finally went on, I started putting up five-pic mini-sites and some no-content sites - and that's when I started making real money. Now most of the sites I make have no content, because that's what works best for me."
Today, Bartish says the majority of his time is almost equally split between traffic management, marketing, and search-engine optimization. He doesn't pay for search engine listings. He doesn't submit to thumbnail gallery posts ("There's too much free content there," he says). He doesn't do AVS sites or pic posts, either. "None of those things work for me, although obviously they do for other people," he says. In the final analysis, he notes, it's up to each individual site operator to experiment and find out what works best for him or her. Keeping a close eye on the bottom line and server stats should be a large part of that. Bartish admits to having more filing cabinets than he cares to count full of records dating back almost to the first day he started his online endeavors. "I still find useful stuff in there," he says.
"Honey Bear, my wife, keeps the financial database," he continues. "She has a good idea of where the money comes from. I'm growing old disgracefully and I forget stuff, but between her and the files, I've got it all."
The industry has changed markedly since 1997, and Bartish says the adjustments have not always been easy. "When I first started out, you could get by with a couple of sponsors," he says. "In '98, there were five sponsors with mature women content. Today, there are more than 200 mature women pay sites."
Of those, Bartish says he currently promotes about 100. He expects a few of those to "go under" in January when the new Visa regulations instituted in October begin to cause fallout in earnest. He's seen some of that already: "What some of the [industry] veterans started predicting four years ago is coming true now," he says. "I had 7,000 bad main-page link trades between last December and March," he says. "Some vets just shut down and didn't notify anyone.
"Chargebacks have always been an issue," he continues by way of explantion. "What newbies don't realize is that sponsors were quietly paying the fines and fees before, and now they can't afford to do that anymore."
Like many other industry "old-timers," Bartish is not afraid to say he doesn't like some of what he sees in the contemporary crop of adult Websites. "There's a lot more of everything now than there used to be," he says. "There's too much free porn. I don't know why people feel compelled to give away free porn when they can sell it. Prostitutes are not stupid; men are. You take the money up front. You pay for a car before you can drive it home. Anywhere [besides the adult Web] you go, you pay up front."
Other things bother him, too - like "sponsors who can't deliver the goods. They use leased content instead of anything original, and they do nothing to retain traffic," he notes of some. On the Webmaster side, he says he sees lots of "very bad" marketing, including unreadable text and "busy" ads. "Forty percent of the American public wears eyeglasses," he notes, wondering aloud why some Webmasters insist on making their text so small as to be almost invisible. And too much "stuff" in too small a space actually does more harm than good to a Webmaster's marketing efforts. "If you can't say it in eight words, don't say it," Bartish advises. "White space sells on the Web, too."
Other sage advice for those just embarking on an adult Web career includes, "Don't do things that the [tenured] adult video industry players do not do. They've been working the industry a lot longer than we've been working the Net [so they should have a pretty good idea about how to stay out of trouble]." There's also "It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. It does require work to learn the adult entertainment biz; to learn marketing. It's a job; it's not a hobby. I've got a corporation. I've got long-range business plans. That's one of the things I learned the hard way."
Furthermore, he says he can't stress enough how important it is to get to know others in the industry and to listen to those who've gone before. "I figure it's pretty important to network with sponsors," Bartish observes. "I can't say enough good about some of the ones I work with, and I learned something from almost all of them."
These days, Bartish does not spend as much time helping newbies on the Webmaster boards as he once did, due to the onerous demands of maintaining an empire. "RB of Max Cash was right," he says with an ironic chuckle. "Who's got time to post when there's work to be done?" Though when he looks back over the years he's spent getting to where he is now he recognizes that most of his success was due to hard work and the generous help of people he now calls friends, he says he can't avoid acknowledging the serendipitous nature of it all. "Everything that's happened has been an accident," he remarks candidly. "[My involvement in the] adult [industry] was an accident."
As coincidences go, it was a happy one, he admits.
