In many ways, it remains the boomtown of Asia, a place steeped in incomparable wealth and an object lesson in the beauty of free-market economics. And then, there are the clichés born of wanderlust, those tales of courtesans descended from the legendary Suzie Wong, consorting in days of old in opium dens rife with the excitement of escapism. Hong Kong promises, and delivers, some of the most enchanting images of the exotic East.
Now, even while its modern-day façade endures and the picturesque high-rise skyline floats above the waters of Victoria Harbor, some winds of change are blowing eerily. For the very words “Hong Kong” (“Xianggang” in Chinese, which means “fragrant harbor”) assumed new meaning in 1997, when Great Britain officially surrendered in a famous “handover” the last of its great colonies back to mainland China. (The “Chinese takeaway,” as some pundits gleefully spoofed it.) That ominous meaning was made obvious on April 26, 2004, when the Chinese government decreed that Hong Kong would not be allowed free elections in 2007.
The oft-cited “one country, two systems” adage thus prevailed, with Article 45 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law insisting upon “gradual and orderly progress,” with the pace of progress to be defined by China’s ashen-faced, no-nonsense legislators. Still, despite the gloomy outlook, some have chosen to stand firm. A motley crew of British expatriates, all involved in adult online businesses, have chosen not to abandon the city they call home.
Why leave, they all concur, since we now live in the age of the virtual office and there are things that even governments can’t touch? As Sean Clarke, business-savvy Webmaster and Internet entrepreneur, succinctly puts it: “The fact that I am in Hong Kong is almost irrelevant. It’s the technology that I am using that’s interesting.”
Technology, he implies, is the best weapon of freedom-loving libertarians in a land slowly edging towards authoritarian rule. A clean-cut, clean-shaven English lad of 36, Clarke works as a Webmaster for a financial institution, but spends his off-hours planning to be a Web mogul – usually while nursing a beer or three in the bar-and-bistro expatriate district of Lan Kwai Fong.
His adult portal, Flog-On (www.flog-on.com), launched in January 2002, has been featured in several publications (including this one, back when Clarke preferred to be known only as “Pervy” – see AVN Online January 2003, p. 180), and its success has inspired Clarke to forge ahead with new online adventures. He’s currently in the process of launching a new site that will build on the same idea as Flog-On, aggregating information for one-stop shopping, but with a new twist: it’s a TGP (thumbnail gallery post) portal, with programming partially developed by himself.
Clarke was introducing his new business plan to AVN Online on March 11, 2004, the day the chill factor suddenly upped a notch. The city’s leading newspaper, the South China Morning Post, reported that morning that a nude news show, Fire/Ice News, had been “pulled off the air” by the Internet television network NOW Broadband. Reputedly named after a sex act involving hot liquid and ice cubes, the tantalizing news bulletin featured a pretty news anchor, Chan Long, 18, reading out the news while slowly undressing until she was completely naked.
Intended as Hong Kong’s own spin on a striptease gimmick, originating in Russia and later popularized in Canada (on www.nakednews.com), the show’s cancellation took place after only four broadcasts. Even more ironically, sexy news siren Long was featured in the concurrent March 2004 Hong Kong edition of Penthouse, in a girl/girl pictorial with another model. The magazine, however, chose this as its very last issue, closing shop after 18 years on the Hong Kong newsstands.
“If penetration and ejaculation shots are illegal, then I have a legal problem,” Sean Clarke notes. “They can prosecute me, possibly. It is also illegal to shoot hardcore pornography in Hong Kong.” However, in his case, who’s shooting anything? The beauty of Clarke’s business model is that he doesn’t create any original content; his revenue stream is based on trading in traffic. Clarke is currently setting up a massive TGP portal that will initially feature 30 niche sites, crosslinked, with the moniker “findporn”; through www.findporn-trannys.com, for instance, he trades with other transsexual sites, and he does similar trades with his other domain names (like www.findporn-teens.com and www.findporn-cumshots.com).
Flog-On links to other TGP sites like the transsexual site Shemale Galleries(www.shemale-galleries.com), also created and maintained by an Englishman living in Hong Kong (who keeps a deliberately low profile and declined to be interviewed for this story). Clarke entered the adult entertainment business as the CTO for Whoopers, a Dutch company based in Hong Kong that manufactured sex toys in China but exported them to Europe. He built its online store and created Flog-On after leaving the company, initially intending it to be a blog that transcended the usual text-only interface by aggregating sites so that it essentially became a portal. But all this while, the TGP idea beckoned.
“Basically what I did was I looked at what other people were doing and I figured I could do it better,” he now says. “I thought, rather than having one domain, I’ll go register a whole load of domains and put them all together, which is good for search engines. It allows you to run individual trade scripts on each one, which means I can actually trade in the niche rather than trade generally.”
His software and scripts “track the user so that if you click on a lesbian picture and then you click on three teen pictures and then you click on 10 tranny pictures, it decides that you’re most interested in tranny stuff – so that when it decides to send you to a trade, it sends you to a tranny trade. I modified the idea for the filtering system I’m using, so that I’m filtering based on frequency of clicks. If you click more than one time on a picture, I’ll send you to a trade based on that.
“So, if you’re in a tranny site and you want to look at something else,” he explains, “you can click yourself back to looking at ‘teens’ or ‘lesbians’ or whatever. But, once you’re on the tranny site and you stay there, I know that’s what you’re into. So I can then trade you out to another tranny site. And the value of that traffic is a lot more than just general. It’s niche, it’s filtered-down, and because all of those sites are cross-linked and optimized for search, I should get a good number of hits coming from the search engines too.”
All well and good, but how does one make money from this? As many a Webmaster has been chagrined to learn, TGP traffic has a low conversion rate, hampering profitability. “The big commodity is traffic,” Clarke insists. “Without traffic, no matter how good or how cheap your site is or what you offer, you’re not going to make any money. I work on what I call a build/populate/automate/replicate model, in which I build it, populate it with content, automate it, and then replicate it 10 times or a hundred times. To maximize my revenues, I don’t want to be using sponsored content. I want to be using my own bought content and make my own galleries to promote sponsors. It’s not rocket science. It’s just a matter of getting some good trading partners, some traffic, some reasonably good content, put in the right sponsors, and just getting it out there.”
It comes down, he says, to economies of scale. “I’m paying US$150 a month for each of my servers and I’ve got 700 gigabytes of data. With that kind of bandwidth, it’s a huge amount of data for a very modest cost.” And, unlike a pay site, his revenue stream is not based on membership. “It’s all free and all done on the affiliate system. It’s a numbers game, always has been and always will be. Affiliate programs usually either work on a revenue-share system or they work on a per-sale system, which typically is about three months’ revenue. So you’ve got to be good enough that your members retain for three months – otherwise you’re running at a loss.
“The 60/40 revenue split model, that’s okay, but surprisingly few Webmasters appreciate that. Why is that? I think because they want the money now!” he believes. “Myself, I will probably adopt both. Though, if and when I do any kind of billing system, it’s probably not going to be a recurring monthly charge, but rather a usage charge. Pay $5.00 with PayPal and have access to 10,000 pictures. Once you’ve looked at 5,000 pictures, your credit runs out, and you’ll still be able to see the thumbnails or a short video clip, but not the full-sized ones.
“I think the micro-payment model is quite good,” he adds, “especially when it’s a micro-payment and it’s non-recurring. I think you’ll get the guys who just want to look and get off, rather than, say, give us your credit card and charge you US$39 per month. Micro-payment works because you get surfers to pay small amounts at a time and they will keep coming back. And you don’t have any recurring billing issues or any chargeback issues, none of that. It’s all just simplified.”
Adopting simplicity as a virtue, though in a very different way, is Brenda Scofield, 56, the intrepid owner of the 11-year-old Hong Kong BDSM shop Fetish Fashion, whose e-shop (www.fetishfashion.com.hk) opened in February 2004. Charmingly called Slave Trader, it offers the usual variety of BDSM accoutrements as well as sex toys. The Welsh-born Scofield cuts quite a recognizable figure in Hong Kong, since she was famously arrested in October 2001 when undercover police busted one of her BDSM play parties (“I was charged under an arcane British law,” Scofield recalls, “for ‘keeping a disorderly house’”). She was finally acquitted after a much-publicized trial.
“We’re not a typical sex shop,” Scofield says, still bristling at the memory. “We look for things that are a bit unusual, and we especially like colorful products. We want it to look bright and attractive.” Accordingly, she sells vibrators from Germany (“flexible silicone vibrators, in really super shapes and crazy colors”), leather goods from Australia (“because the tanning is really good”), PVC and shoes from the U.K. (“because they’re usually very well made”), and an array of sex toys from New Zealand (“dildos and butt plugs in a mix of colors, little butt plugs shaped like animals!”). Scofield’s own predilection is corsets. “They’re from a company in the U.K., in Hampshire, and they have been corsetiers since the Victorian times. It’s still run by the same family.”
“We are looking to sell within Asia,” she adds, “to people in Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and India. We’re thinking Asians are maybe a little more scared of buying things online, so maybe an Asian site might seem a little more safe.” Does she think that Asians might have different needs from Western consumers? “Yes. They like smaller dildos,” she quips, giggling.
“If a gentleman is buying,” she has observed, “he will usually get something that’s not too frightening, something a little softer too, perhaps, and a bit more fun. There are also people in Asia that I would like to reach, like cross-dressers. They’re a breed apart, honestly, and it’s really quite scary for them, to have to come into an actual brick-and-mortar shop.”
Since her infamous trial, the safe option might well be the smart path, particularly given Hong Kong’s political uncertainty. “I’ve been told by some lawyers – and I believe it to be true – that had it been pre-1997, we would never have been arrested,” she declares. “We really felt that it was to do with the ‘handover,’ and the change of not having so many expatriate lawyers around. I know that it was quite a junior lawyer who gave the okay, very foolishly, to go ahead and prosecute us.”
Along similar lines, with thinly-veiled discretion as the better part of valor, one of Scofield’s protégées recently launched a Website as a vehicle for her personal services. Mistress Victoria, 34, full-time dominatrix, is a svelte ethnic Chinese lass whose visually captivating site (www.empressvictoria.net) is hosted in Australia while she herself splits time between the United Kingdom, her primary market, and her native Hong Kong.
“I designed the whole thing myself,” she reveals, adding that her sessions go for HK$15,000 (US$4,000) per day, excluding the plane ticket and hotel which has to be paid by the client. She works frequently in the privacy of hotel rooms or professional dungeons. “My slaves did some market research and there are less than 10 Asian Dommes in the U.K. and I am the only Chinese,” she proudly proclaims. She cites some traffic stats: Half her visitors are in Asia and the other half from Europe and North America; some 60 percent of her visitors have used her services and 15 percent are regulars.
“Since I revamped the site in December 2003,” she adds, “I’ve had 14,500 viewers, not a lot; but the traffic has increased since February 2004, after I advertised in every single Domme directory. A lot of people out there only want to masturbate to my pictures, and some of them even e-mail me to ask for permission! My answer is: ‘Be my guest, if that can help you to empty your pathetic testicles.’” Verbal humiliation is part of her stock in trade, which also includes whipping, paddling, caning, bondage, hot wax, anal torture, and forms of “psychodrama, interrogation, discipline, mental torture, and mind control.” She is currently planning to produce, and sell on her site, a BDSM instructional DVD in Chinese, for the Asian market.
What would any self-respecting Chinese government bureaucrat make of this remarkable diversity of online life in Hong Kong? How are they going to stop Sean Clarke from launching his TGP mega-portal, or Brenda Scofield from selling nipple clamps to Singapore, or Victoria from whupping the bejeezus out of a submissive gent who’s booked her online?
“Within the expat community here, I meet people and I tell them what I do, but I’m always careful to stress that I don’t do it in Hong Kong,” Clarke says. “If it came down to it, I could argue that my server is in America, that I live in Hong Kong but my business is all done out of the U.S., and I don’t advertise in Hong Kong at all because my target audience isn’t here.”
Alibis aside, Internet believers like Clarke and Scofield have chosen to stay on in Hong Kong, despite so many of their fellow British friends and colleagues having already jetted back to Albion. This tenacity reflects their determination to keep business and pleasure intertwined with home and hearth, in itself a noble and laudable lifestyle choice, though surely none of it would have been possible without the Internet.
“The Internet is just so huge,” Clarke says. “You can think you know everything that’s going on in a particular part of it, but you don’t. I like to say this: I live in a bubble, in a city called Hong Kong. I’ve lived here 30 years. I’ve never learned to speak Chinese, I’ve never had a Chinese girlfriend, but I consider myself pretty well integrated because I do go out to the Chinese parts of town. Well, the Internet is very much like that. You go into it, from wherever, and you click around and you find yourself here and you find yourself there. And after awhile, people think that they know ‘it.’
“But they don’t,” he laughs. “If you were to map where they’ve gone, they’ve gone in and spidered out a little bit but, really, it’s a tiny fraction of what’s out there. Maybe I research more than most people or maybe I click around more, I don’t know; but I can tell you I am constantly surprised.”
That’s indeed a word to the wise, especially to the Politburo in Beijing, dealing in what the renowned socio-political writer Ian Buruma calls Hong Kong’s “charade of democracy,” suppressing political freedom but fighting a losing battle on the information superhighway.
Gerrie Lim is the International Correspondent for AVN Online, and was previously based in Hong Kong, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the now-defunct global Web portal Orientation. His new book, Invisible Trade, about escorts and upscale sex workers in Singapore, is published by Monsoon Books and can be obtained at www.monsoonbooks.com.sg/current.html .
