Marty Sarkisov is no stranger to the online Adult entertainment field. He cut his teeth in audiotext, convincing publications there was money to be made in a fairly new advertising model called “revenue sharing.” The way things worked – and they worked very, very well until the telcos pulled the plug on phone sex – was that a magazine or newspaper ran an ad plugging specific pay-per-call numbers, and the publication and the company that “owned” the numbers split the profits. It’s a way of doing business that has become very familiar to Web-based affiliate programs.
Sarkisov and the talent pool he pulled together to form VideoPass (www.videopass.com) is applying that model to a new way of distributing video content online. In August – eight months and an investment of about $1 million after they began work on the project – the VideoPass team revealed VideoPassCash.com, an affiliate program that leverages digital rights management to provide webmasters with free content and a recurring revenue stream. The company’s “one-of-a-kind" technology tools that utilize DRM not only offer additional marketing opportunities, Sarkisov says, but also allow for greater control over the content, providing peace of mind for content producers who often worry, legitimately, about piracy. “We’ve been told by leaders in the pay-per-view and video-on-demand arenas that our back end is the tightest they have seen,” Sarkisov notes proudly.
VideoPass Cash provides itsaffiliates with promotional Adult movie content from some of the largest studios and distributors in the business, and Sarkisov says the staff works constantly to expand the collection.The company’s goal is to lead the industry in an area that is largely misunderstood and unrecognized by the Adult community, he notes.
“It’s the most up-to-date and forward-thinking product on the market,” says Sarkisov, explaining that a three-way billing model that leaves the choice to consumers gives webmasters more opportunities to make money. Whether surfers prefer to pay per minute, pay per view, or buy an “all-you-can-view” monthly membership, there’s something for every Adult video stream customer, according to Sarkisov – meaning there’s also something for just about every webmaster’s clientele. “Everything we do, we do it intelligently and dynamically,” says Sarkisov. “And everything is webmaster-friendly.”
Webmaster friendliness is a recurring theme for VideoPass. As Sarkisov says, “If not for webmasters, we’re nothing.” With that thought firmly in mind, the company tries to view everything it does from a webmaster’s perspective. Programmer Albert Attias is particularly adept at that sort of mental gymnastics, his coworkers say, and it’s no wonder, with his background. Only 20-something, he’s been coding for 13 years and built an impressive resume working for companies like InterVue and Akamai before joining VideoPass. He’s the one primarily responsible for building VideoPass’s groundbreaking system from the ground up, he admits shyly after prodding from others in the company’s hierarchy. He’s completely devoted to VideoPass’ mission, having been with the company from the very beginning.
“I really think if we just keep going on this path, no one will be able to compete with us,” he says. “There’s nothing we can’t build that a webmaster wants. We hear webmasters loud and clear.”
Sarkisov echoes that sentiment: “We can program anything a webmaster wants in a matter of days,” he says, giving a verbal pat on the back to a tech department of which he is unabashedly proud. “If there’s something you think is impossible, tell us and I’ll bet we can do it. You have any crazy ideas, any undoable ideas, hit me up. I’m willing to entertain anything. We have no egos. Tell us what you want. We’re here for you; we’ll do anything to win your business.”
That’s another recurring theme for VideoPass: winning and keeping webmasters’ and consumers’ trust and loyalty. According to operations director DJ Airek, there are no hidden costs in any of VideoPass’ programs for either consumers or webmasters. Consumers choose what and how much they want to view, and they only pay for what they’ve selected. webmasters choose how they want to be paid and how to use the multitude of promotional materials available to them. VideoPass Cash offers a co-branding engine so webmasters can customize “theater” pages and VideoPass-hosted movie gallery posts (MGPs). Other affiliate benefits include banner creation tools, “self-selling” files, and other sales and marketing aids created as affiliates request them.
In addition, VideoPass Cash offers its affiliates what staffers believe to be a unique payment model: “We pay the webmaster on a lifetime-recurring basis,” DJ Airek says. “We pay 30 percent on PPV and PPM sales, and 50 percent recurring on all-access monthly memberships. If they prefer, webmasters can opt for the 100-percent-per-sale option and get the entire amount that the surfer spends on his initial purchase at the site. This is very popular in the membership site system, but hasn’t ever been touched in the VoD sector. No one pays like we do.”
DJ Airek says affiliates have a pretty long leash when it comes to promoting VideoPass, as long as they do it ethically and legally. Some may prefer to use the theater pages provided by VideoPass Cash on their Web sites; others may prefer to “seed” the peer-to-peer networks with the company’s content. Still others may opt to go the movie gallery post route. However a webmaster decides to promote VideoPass, there are no up-front costs and everything is served from VideoPass Cash’s servers, thereby saving affiliates bandwidth and storage fees.
“This is the first-ever program to use advanced DRM marketing technology to give Adult webmasters the ultimate marketing advantage by allowing them the opportunity to generate sales and still keep their traffic on their own sites,” DJ Airek says. “Advanced promotional tools developed around the most advanced technology available at the moment will ultimately keep our program fresh and enticing to webmasters seeking new ways to promote Video-on-Demand. Adult webmasters are always seeking new and exciting ways to promote sponsor programs.”
At about the same time as the company announced its presence on the Web, Jonathan Silverstein joined the group to handle sales and marketing functions for the newly minted sponsor program. That, says nine-year friend Sarkisov, was a final piece of the puzzle. Silverstein’s experience as sales and marketing director for now-defunct Internet Entertainment Group and chief executive of Cybererotica place him in an excellent position to lead VideoPass’ expansion in the Adult entertainment marketplace, Sarkisov believes.
For his part, Silverstein sees almost unlimited potential in his new love. “The time is ripe to go out there and take market share from established companies,” he says emphatically. “The time has come to offer a product that separates itself from everything else out there. We’ve got exactly that product. This is next-generation, bleeding edge, forward-thinking stuff from the ground up.”
Silverstein and Sarkisov say they see the technology behind VideoPass extending into other arenas, too. “We want to become the Yahoo! of Adult VoD,” Silverstein says. “When someone thinks of Adult entertainment, we want to be the household name they think of. But the application of this technology doesn’t stop there.”
Sarkisov reveals that the company may take the same approach to the mainstream world, providing cutting-edge VoD solutions to players on that field. “If they want to be in that business, we want them to think of us first,” he says. One way in which he sees such an arrangement blossoming is in monetizing archives of classic television shows. “Imagine ‘I Love Lucy’ or ‘Dragnet’ or ‘Star Trek’ on downloadable VoD,” he suggests. “That could create an entirely new market for content studios already have in their archives. Although there are already a handful of mainstream folks offering feature films and other visual media on a streaming basis, our intention is to find that unexploited niche in the mainstream market and capitalize on it."
That’s the VideoPass gang for you: Always “thinking outside the box,” as Sarkisov says. That’s one of the things that impresses him most about the tight-knit group that has become a sort of family since its formation in early 2004. They work hard together, often for long hours, and someone is always thinking up a new angle – but that’s just par for their particular course.
“A successful model has multiple components,” DJ Airek says. “We have the product, the team behind it, the experience and the knowledge, and the relationships and the forward looking aspect to make this a great success – and we’re determined to do it.”
Noting that response to VideoPass Cash has been “overwhelmingly positive,” he continues: “For the past year, none of us has really slept or enjoyed any kind of recreation, but it’s been worth it.” He says he sees as many personal rewards in the relationships established among VideoPass’ small staff as he does in the financial rewards he knows will follow.
“We are having such a blast doing this,” Sarkisov adds. “I don’t know if I’ve ever worked with a more fun or more loyal, dedicated crowd.”
