When Totem Entertainment first burst onto the scene in late 1998, it took the adult Internet industry somewhat by surprise. "Who are these people, and where did they come from all of a sudden?" seemed to be the question on everyone's lips. Soon, people who encountered founders Richard "Rex" Excoffier and Herv� Lucchi and sales honcho Nicholas Vieuxloup at Internext and other industry gatherings were talking about "those nice French guys with the funny accents." They've been fixtures in adult online entertainment ever since, and their flagship product continues to dominate its softcore erotica niche.
The company's first product was a stunner: a lifelike, fully rendered avatar of a scantily clad, nubile young woman gyrating suggestively in a small corner of the desktop for anyone who cared to download the small, free file. How cool is that?
VirtuaGirl became an instant hit with surfers and Webmasters alike, and Totem Entertainment took off. What initially was designed as a promotional gimmick, according to company chief exec Excoffier, rapidly became a business model that has proven immensely successful.
"The product is not too explicit, which is what makes it so successful," Excoffier says. "We try to be kind of like Playboy. They are the only other really successful softcore company."
Totem Entertainment's basic business model is a simple one that works: Give away a good product for free, and then charge users a small fee to upgrade to a bigger, better, flashier, more explicit version. More than 50 million copies of the VirtuaGirl software have been downloaded to date, according to server logs at Totem Entertainment, and a thriving communit of fan sites has sprung up internationally, among them VirtuaGirl Fansite.com and VGirls.org.
"We give the software for free, with a few girls that do not fully undress," Excoffier explains. "Then we tease the guy every day with our software on his desktop. People subscribe for $24.95 a month, recurring, and for that they get more than 130 girls who strip completely, as well as free membership to our porn Website, VIPRoom.com."
The business model not only attracts surfers who adore the "tiny dancers" on their desktops and appreciate the software's freedom from spyware and adware, but also Webmasters seeking an affiliate program with good conversion and retention rates. For that, Totem Entertainment operates TotemCash.
"Our average conversion ratio is 1:500, and thanks to us adding two to three new girls a week, our members stay an average of three months," Excoffier says. "There is no trial period, so that's all the joins that stay an average of three months.
"We've made a lot of Webmasters rich," Excoffier continues. "We pay 50 percent of the income, recurring, to our affiliate Webmasters, and we just added Epoch as a biller to make sure we make the most out of the traffic our affiliates are sending." The traffic is substantial, Excoffier notes, coming as it does from about 8,500 affiliates to whom the company also provides access to hosted galleries of exclusive VirtuaGirl content. "It's a good way for Webmasters to make some extra money, and it works great with TGP traffic," Excoffier says, noting that VirtuaGirl.com has received more than 250 million visitors since its debut.
"We've found that a product like this can convert almost any traffic," he continues. "Due to its unique nature, our strippers on desktops don't take away from other deals working well for Webmasters on their sites. VirtuaGirl will make them money on top of what they're already making. It's extra cash, and there's lots of it to be made."
In the past four years, VirtuaGirl has morphed into something much larger than Excoffier and Lucchi imagined when they launched the initial version, Excoffier says. As 15-year veterans of the video game industry, both men dreamed of owning their own company but were daunted by the typical three- to five-year concept-to-market development period. Realizing that things move much more rapidly in the adult entertainment arena, the pair combined their video game and Internet programming skills with moxie and what Excoffier describes as "a little bit of eroticism" to create a product that was part 2D video game sprite, part real-world exotic dancer, and lots of fun.
"The development period in the adult area is six months, tops, and exposure is immediate," Excoffier remarks, noting that the VirtuaGirl product is its own advertising. "We were profitable from day one."
With profitability has come expansion, not only of the product itself, but also of the company and its staff. Today, Paris-based Totem Entertainment employs 20 people. "Alexis, St�phane, Reginald, and Fred take care of the servers and the programming of the software," says Excoffier. "Emilie, Oksan, and Veronique are in charge of customer service. Antaione, Michael, Loic, Christophe, Noam, and Nicholas update the content and produce everything Website-related. G�rald is our lead artist; he has been the designer of VirtuaGirl almost since day one. We've got another St�phane managing the whole creation crew. Sales and communication-wise, we have Nicholas who goes to all the shows, Brian who writes a lot of articles, Cel�ne who assists us and deals with TotemCash's Webmasters. Then we have Khadija and Karine in charge of all the paperwork... and of course Philippe, our photographer."
Phillipe in particular is a busy guy. The company's in-house photographer, he has been responsible for shooting more than 140 VirtuaGirl models in the past four years. These days, Totem Entertainment typically shoots one new girl per week. She and two revived former VirtuaGirls are added to the VirtuaGirl gallery, for a total of three new sets.
"We shoot all of our models in our own studio," Excoffier says with pride. "We also work with an outside photographer named Eric Neveu. He is famous in France in the newspaper biz. He also works for Lui, the French equivalent of Playboy magazine. You can find his work mostly at www.lui.fr."
The product's expansion has been phenomenal. The original VirtuaGirl product was rather small and unobtrusive, bringing to life a sexy desktop babe who provided a sensual "hello" in the morning, a sexy reminder of daily appointments, and dancing and stripping whenever the user felt the need for a little entertainment. VirtuaGirl 2, the newest incarnation (launched Feb. 1), provides users with a bigger desktop dancer, and all of the models are stars with names like Nikki Nova, Aria Giovanni, Anna Marie Goddard, and Sunny Leone. Like previous versions, VirtuaGirl 2 can be "turned off" with a click of the mouse if the action gets in the way.
"The timing is just right for VirtuaGirl 2," says Excoffier. "The fact that it's bigger pleases a lot of people. The image resolution of the sexy strippers has also increased, so users get a larger, more detailed dancer on their desktops."
Although flush with success, Totem Entertainment hasn't rested on its laurels. In addition to VirtuaGirl 2, the company also now offers two other products cut from the same electronic cloth: VirtuaGay is a male version of VirtuaGirl with more than 50 models designed to appeal to the gay market, and StripSaver is a sexy video screen-saver featuring more than 80 different strippers in full-screen mode.
"We also now license clones of our products - same stuff, different name - to be used as vectors for adware," Excoffier says. "Our clients bundle their adware with our products and make money both from the adware they own and the up-sell of our product. They mostly pay their [affiliate] Webmasters a fixed price per download."
The future looks bright for Totem Media, as well. "We're now working on a non-nude version of VirtuaGirl, mostly focused on dance, to hit the mainstream market," Excoffier says. "I think that's one of the short-term turns we'll see in the adult industry: mainstream products with aggressive 'adult-kind' marketing."
