Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 156 with Claude Lai of X10 Revenue

Speaker 1 (0s): This is Bruce Friedman of Adult Site Broker, and welcome to Adult Site Broker Talk, where each week we interview one of the movers and shakers of the adult industry, and we give you a tip on buying and selling websites. This week we'll be speaking with Claude Lai of X10 Revenue. At Adult Site Broker we've doubled our affiliate payouts on ASB Cash.

Now, when your refer sellers or buyers to us, you'll receive 20% of our broker commission on any and all sales that result from that referral for life. You can either place a link to us on your site or refer buyers and sellers through an email introduction. ASB Cash is the first affiliate program for an adult website brokerage. Check out ASBcash.com for more details and to sign up.

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Now you can get information on B2B events on our website, as well as special discounts reserved for our clients. Go to adult site broker.com for more details. Now let's feature our property of the week. That's for sale at Adult Site Broker. We're proud to offer for sale a Growing Sex Doll site started in 2016. It's grown to over 2 million in annual revenue. The owner is focused and invested heavily into SEO for the site, making sure to consistently rank at the top in the search engines for the main industry keywords.

As a result, most of the traffic and sales are organic coming from people who have searched for sex stalls on Google. Other strong sales channels are the 25,000 plus person email list and an affiliate program. The owner has developed relationships with the best manufacturers. The products are drop shipped directly from the manufacturer to the customer. The store has hundreds of five star reviews on the website and on third party sites. The store currently has no employees.

Aside from the owner who works 10 to 15 hours a week on the business, SEO is handled by an agency. This is a business that can be grown by a company with experience in the novelties field. Only 2.72 million. Now time for this week's interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker talk is Claude from X 10. Claude, thanks for being back with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk.

Speaker 2 (2m 43s): Hi. You're welcome. Chris. How's it going?

Speaker 1 (2m 46s): It's going, man. How about you?

Speaker 2 (2m 47s): I'm good. I'm good.

Speaker 1 (2m 48s): You've been busy. We'll talk about that. Not the two ever are not now. Claude has spent over 20 years building websites for the adult and mainstream industries. He started working with some

Speaker 3 (2m 59s): Of of the pioneers of the adult web back in the early two thousands, building custom c m s platforms for some of the first adult websites ever launched. He developed new ways to automate photo and video content and caching systems, as well as introducing the first recorded and live video streaming platforms. Claude has developed and deployed thousands of adult content membership sites, video on demand, live cam, and many other types of adult and mainstream sites. Claude has also worked in the mainstream and adult space with virtual reality implementation, smart TV and mobile app development.

Claude's hunger to find new solutions and innovate new ideas has always driven his passion for new technologies. He's run a very successful business for more than 20 years and has helped thousands of clients to reach their goals of launching their adult or mainstream sites with a focus on scalability, monetization, and usability. The company is based in LA and Amsterdam, X 10 revenue at x 10. revenue.com is almost three years old. It's a culmination of 20 plus years of adult experience and a combined 100 plus years by their team of programmers, designers, and marketers.

X 10 revenue licenses exclusively the X 10 platform, x 10 platform.com, a three in one content management live cam and fan platform. It's an enterprise level platform with over 21 years in real world development and use. X 10 is a multi-site solution running from one admin to deploy thousands of membership cam video and video on demand and hybrid adult business models, all from one content pool.

X 10 revenue also offers s e o marketing services and automation services to promote any adult site, no matter what technology they're using to manage their sites. Take a breath there. Okay, so that's a lot. So Claude, how can we adjust to the new world of interactivity beyond the membership model?

Speaker 2 (5m 8s): So I, I think I've said this many times before, and whenever I talk to my clients who come to me with a business model that they've been doing for a very long time, and it's been working for them, and they seem to be losing membership or losing recurring membership over time, and their year to year numbers are really kind of a loyal fan base that has come with them for 15 to 20 years. They see all the other platforms out there, and they can, and a lot of the customers that have come to me have, in most cases, unique content and they represent five or seven or eight or 10 different websites.

And each of those websites is either a particular model or a niche that they really have owned for a long time. They come to me with, I've been doing what I've been doing, what I've been doing, what I've been doing for so long, and how can I grow and take advantage of what these other platforms are giving us. And a lot of them use them by the way. They still wanna own their brand. A lot of that is they don't want to give that either the 20% or so to the platforms, or they just wanna own and control the entire process as they've been doing in the membership world.

So it's taking what they're doing membership wise and then adding in there a model subscription model, which is the first thing they want to do, which is allowing people to, to subscribe to an individual model as opposed to a major site. And one of the things that as the adult industry has, has changed in so many ways over the years, joining a megasite is really not what we do these days in any, in any form, whether it's adult or non adult. We want to feel like we're joining a someone's individual playroom, so to speak, and subscribe to that and have very unique, a unique experience.

And when we're talking about interactivity, we're talking specifically about the subscription gets you what, and the subscription is really just the entry door. It's the entry door to exclusive content. But that's no different than, let's say a membership site that they would have. Now it's just maybe packaged in a different way. It feels more like a social media blog feed than it would, let's say a photo video gallery. And those are really the big differences. When they come to me and say, we see our numbers.

We, we, we see how things are are going and what can we do that can offer our customers interactivity. We don't want people to just log in. In most cases, these are still membership content driven by the administrator. The administrator uploads content, let's say once a week or twice a week or so. The users are very used to this. They know that there are Tuesdays and Fridays updates, for example. And there are maybe a live cam once a week or something like that. And those are very typical models. The engagement level of those users is very low because they know I'll show up, I'll buy a membership and I'll either subscribe for a trial and get what I want and then download everything I need and then come back after a month.

Or I'll know when those things. If I am a subscriber and I stay subscribing, I'll just log in on those days when I know this new content and I'll download, download what I want, comment on it, and I'm out. The interactivity is not there. And so having daily updates that feel like a social media blog is really what's, what's driving the driving force now, and also the custom content requests, then paid messaging or unpaid messaging, which is actually more popular. The idea of unpaid messaging is yes, let the user pay for a subscription, but they get access to not real time, of course, but they get access to messaging, web messaging with a a model.

And the idea of that is that they feel like they're connected to someone. And then that model is able to either bulk message or individually message to that user about their requests and needs. And there's a real connection there to a fan base. And that's really where that kind of begins and starts.

Speaker 3 (9m 7s): So are some of your clients offering a fan type of membership as an alternative to buying a membership on the site?

Speaker 2 (9m 21s): So the ones that have had the most success are the ones that have left alone their membership base platform. And they have gone live with their current C M s and have left that alone because a lot of the blow back that has happened in the past is if clients who have users who are recurring for 20 years don't like anything to change, whether it's links or URLs or favorites or comments or just nothing needs to change, don't change anything on me unless you absolutely have to because it's a business decision or because a CMS is no longer working anymore.

But I a hundred percent say that it's really works in tandem where if you're a new site, then yes, you would be using our system for everything, which is membership, individual site, or all sites, the affiliate backend, the video on demand, live streaming messaging, all of that would be bundled into one system

Speaker 3 (10m 18s): And the fan platform.

Speaker 2 (10m 19s): Correct. But what we found to be the most successful has been make it an augmented connection, direct connection to your Nats if you're using Nats or MPA free. If some people, believe me or not, some people still use, have MPA free that they purchased long time ago, still running on their servers and they, you know, connect an affiliate system to that. Keep your membership platform as it is, but add this as an augmented function or section of your website that then matches your look and feel, but doesn't, users are so used to seeing and don't want to see something different so much, which is, let's call it black, mostly on the background, an enter exit page, a big graphic, a tour with, you know, traditional join gallery photo updates, pages very graphically heavy.

And in membership when you log in, very similar, you know, looks more like a, like Netflix does, you know, where it's just like video boxes and you know, everything is, is that's the traditional model that's still inactive and those are the things that shouldn't change, right? But what we found that to be really successful is to add a, a function or section in their membership area and non-membership area, which feels like a social media section of their site. And that is a feed that just goes on, and it could be black or white, doesn't necessarily have to be white, but it could mimic a lot of their look and feel of their own site.

But it is clean. And so the idea is that it is super responsive, super clean, and it has, you know, why are some of the big platforms very popular? Whereas because they don't offer too many options, you know, it's, I can become a fan or not. And once I'm a fan, and once I become a fan, there's content that I can see or not if it's free or not free behind the firewall, but beyond that, there are options to purchase content. There are options to, to request a custom item of content or even as I said, to message the model or to request a live cam either individually or on a scheduled basis or in a group chat.

Those are the things that, you know, the tip menu, which is really can be very, very customized to that end model's requirements and what they, what they want. And those things can be turned off and on. We're going live right now with another, another website that it has no membership, right? So it, they've decided that their primary form of income is going to be only photo video content sales, and what they mostly make their money on, which is one-on-one live camming, I guess you'd call it, but they don't call it that, they call it, you know, photo and video sexting or something like that.

They're trying to reinvent the same thing, but basically it's giving that more of a, a Skype or a WhatsApp kind of feeling to the website, which just upgrades the same feeling. Makes

Speaker 3 (13m 7s): Sense.

Speaker 2 (13m 8s): As I've said, those are the things that I've seen to be most popular, most beneficial is to really have two segments. Now, this is kind of new, it's last year or so, but what we've seen happen is that that membership plateaus and that non-membership will call it the fans section overtakes income-wise way overtakes income-wise, because you have people who are instant recurring buyers, I'll, I'll pay $5 for a video, I'll pay $10 for this, I'll pay that, I'll pay this, I'll pay that, Rob, I'll tip, you know, tipping is important. And those, those are the things as opposed to, well, you know, you've got a 29 95 membership and then maybe if you have 30 websites, you might pay 200 a month for something.

There are still those models, by the way, that still exists, you know, beyond just the downloading of the content, where is the, the interactivity And a lot of that content in the fans model, as you know, Bruce, it's, it's not gonna be highly refined. Right? And the clients that have come to me, I have four of them at the moment, they're all used to the highly refined business model, which is, you know, for lack of better term, it's a magazine an an adult magazine online. It's the penthouse or the Playboy magazine that a lot of this stuff is soft by the way.

And it's just very, very well produced and very high quality, and it's very, and it's new and it's custom made for each membership site. But again, like I said, those things only have so much traction as opposed to the fans and, and, and using it as an augmented addon to your own website.

Speaker 3 (14m 36s): Let me ask you something else. You mentioned something about you don't really wanna mess with the membership site because people are used to it, they've been members for 20 years. But don't you think people should update their site from time to time and give it a new look?

Speaker 2 (14m 53s): It's a good question, and I think it comes down to who are you as a business? Is your content compelling enough to warrant that update? And does that update make sense to that end user? And so I've had experiences where clients have gone live where they're still using flash video, for example, and they're allowing their users to download that flash video and then trying to instruct them on how to use it. Yeah, I believe it or not, it still exists today. They're saying I have 10,000 videos and photos

Speaker 3 (15m 24s): Other than them,

Speaker 2 (15m 26s): Other than them. We have been very successful in porting over a older look into the new cms. Yes, we've done that multiple times. Again, I say that with a caviar of, let's put it this way, whatever way you choose, whether it's an add-on to your own and you wanna keep your members as they are in an old c m cms or you wanna port over everything over to our cms, there is a plus or minus. And the plus or minus to that is if you know your clientele to be very fickle and very vocal in the way that they see anything change, then you stay away from it.

If your users are, are really coming to you because the content is compelling, they seem more amicable to change than I would say change, but we are selling it. Remember the X Dex 10 is a box that we sell Bruce, right? So the box comes with themes, and those themes these days are made to be a friendly, you know, page Nation is no longer something we use anymore. Amazon doesn't use it, page one doesn't make a new page, and page three doesn't make a new page. It's all within the same page, and it's all searchable, indexable filtered instantly to drill down just like Amazon does on the right hand, on the left hand side of the, of the page.

So those are the things that we've created because we know that people have more of a shopping experience and other platforms and fans, platforms, for example, they use the same methodology. They don't have multiple pages. Everything is done within a, in the same page. Refreshing. So that's an example of what you're saying by you new and old, because old is, well, you know, you click on page two and you get page two and you can click on, and then if you bookmark page two, which is the craziest thing, page two will change next week because new content will be added.

It's really kind of rethinking how users interface with the website that they're using, right? Because it's a better user experience means a user will stay longer. And that's ultimately, you know, what it's all about. And it's, it's about giving them the ability to go in and say, because you're, you are, remember we from two days, two times a week, we're talking once a day or twice a day, or four times a day of content being added, which can be scheduled or

Speaker 3 (17m 36s): Rotated, of course,

Speaker 2 (17m 37s): Whatever offshore scheduled ahead of time. Absolutely. Yes. Right? Oh no, the clients that I've dealt with would never rotate content in their lives, in their lives. And the, and the craziest part about that, as we talked about ai, I've tried to convince them that, look, you aren't repurposing. This is a completely different version of what you've given them and you've got 10 years of archives. I I I guarantee you people don't, you know, if you were to, to just re-polish that stuff and re resend it out, call it classic if you want, call it whatever, don't try to tell the client that you're giving them what they want.

But this is a great way to, to repu purpose content.

Speaker 3 (18m 13s): It is. And we'll talk about that in a second. But what I meant by rotate is new content that's looking like it's added on the homepage, which is done a lot in CMSs. So let's talk about that. Now you have got a new thing going where you're taking old content and repurposing it. Why don't you talk with ai? Why don't you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2 (18m 35s): Yeah, so I have a video background. So for me, I've always been interested in video and I still do a lot of mainstream video production. Actually, on, on the side, one of the things that have come up recently has been the evolution of ai. And one of the things that AI has done very well has been to repurpose the video and photo content. So it's not just video content, it's photo content as well where we can take, say, for example, a standard definition video and upgrade it all the way to 4K and still not lose the quality where it, it looks new and, you know, 60 frames per second.

It does require a lot of tweaking and it does take a lot of computer power. An hour, let's say one hour video could take a, a day or two, maybe a 20 minute video could take about four to six hours. And this is using a really, I mean, I'm not a, not a mega super computer, but you know, like a, a, a really good home computer that's, you know, like a gaming computer or something like that.

Speaker 3 (19m 31s): Something with a lot of power

Speaker 2 (19m 33s): Yes. New near, you know, it still take, it, still take a good four, two to four hours of processing time because it really takes up a lot of processing to go from four 80 to 4k. And of course you can go from four 80 p, you can also do seven 20 p and 10 80 p of course, and you can do any other version between those to 4k. And if you tweak it enough and you know how to, you know, make it look good and overprocess it, it actually kind of brings up a whole, whole new world of content that has never been repurposed again.

And if we're looking at the years from 2000 to now and 23 years have gone by, yes, we had mini DV and vita cam, and I don't know what people have filmed in, but you know, most people have probably filmed in mini DV back in the day, or you know, maybe if they've got money, they had money, they probably did bta cam BTA chem s p, which is mostly standard death if those things were repurposed and if they're filmed. Well, and let's face it, I mean the style hairstyles haven't changed like they did in the seventies and eighties. I mean, you know, the last 20 years, I think yes, can, people can definitely see, oh yes, I, if they recognize the girl or they know the girl or the guy, they'll basically know, yes, that's definitely different, that's old content, but there's just a latitude that we didn't have.

I can't take something from 1974 and pull it off as something that was filmed yesterday. And I don't even think that's the purpose of it. It's just about giving it a new vamp in quality. And clients that have come to us who have really embraced this, have been per, who have lease galleries where they're selling content and it gives 'em the ability to sell it now in a different version for a higher price than they ever did. And that's just a different, we now have a 4K version of the same content, and as you said, Bruce, the the rotating of content gives it validity because now you can rotate it again where it's now high resolution and looks sharp.

And photos too, as I said, you know, so you could take a, if I remember my photo resolutions, you know, maybe a two K photo, right? And you could quadruple it, quadruple it. You could probably make it a, let's say 4,000 pixels, 6,000 pixels, 8,000 pixels, oh, and colorize it, you know, you could even colorize it, not that in adult that that matters. I'm, I'm, again, my brain is thinking it non-adult, but I've been working with a, a museum here in Texas who has 19 0 8, 19 18 98 photos. They look amazing when they get reprocessed through ai, completely different, you know, colorized and cleaned Yeah.

Or grain gone and all those, you know, little hairs gone and all that stuff. It's, it's amazing what can be done. That's something that's really cool and that's what I've been embracing in lately into our, our X 10 encoder.

Speaker 3 (22m 10s): Nice. So beyond just choosing a cms, what has the best approach to move forward with a new website?

Speaker 2 (22m 17s): So if we just take away the technical side away from it, let's say that's CMS side has been resolved, let's talk about like what really is a good business decision to make, to move forward into, you know, future proof? You're a business, right? And this has been based on my observation of clients that I've seen Plateau and clients that I've seen can't keep enough money in the bank, and they all have something in common, which is they have a brand of sorts. It, it doesn't mean that they're, you know, really, really popular, but they have a loyal fan base, they have a loyal brand, they might have one sites that might have 30 sites.

One of the things, Bruce, that one of the most common things I've seen are people who are successful are they work all the time, right? I don't necessarily say that that's really the key to life. I've onboarded like four clients in the past six months or so, and all of those four that were really successful did, had one thing in common. And that was they were willing to learn new technology and new ways to learn their business without my help. So they learned how to change their own d n s, they learned how to make changes on a server or, or on their own software if they were, again, if we're talking about CMSs, some of them I poured it over, still used their old cms, which is 20 years old.

So I have some clients who decided to use my system for fan base and they want to use their old CMS for everything else. But the commonality that I found was that they all have this, I'm not afraid to learn something. I wanna learn every single aspect of how to do this. And what I've done successfully working with Mojo Host and all their brilliant help has been I install things like direct admin and C panel because I like to have clients have the ability to go in and make their own, at least these certain kinds of clients.

So identify certain client of clients that know well, yeah, I, I want this control and I'm not gonna just screw up my whole business, right? I'm meticulous enough where I can go in and know how to edit a database or know how to change something or add a domain or change my ssl. Those are all the things that are so important, I think to moving forward.

Speaker 3 (24m 32s): I've got access to all that, but my def doesn't, I don't do it.

Speaker 2 (24m 36s): I, but I'm sure Bruce, you're the kind of guy that if he wasn't around, right, and you needed something had to be done, you could go to YouTube and say, how do I reboot my server? Right?

Speaker 3 (24m 46s): I'd be in trouble. But anyway,

Speaker 2 (24m 48s): Well, like I said, those are the kinds of clients that I have found more, very, more difficult to port over to the new way of doing things unless you're willing to really pay a lot of money for dev, and those are fine. We have support packages. I've always said we have 1000, 2000, 3000, 5,000 a month support packages, and the 5,000 this month support package gets you like a 30 hour development inclusive with a someone on Skype that will basically be your full-time person, you know, so you can scale those things.

The takeaway for me has been finding that middle ground between, well, I want to save money, but I also wanna grow my business. And I think those two things are really not compatible. So you can go freeways, right? You can say, I wanna downsize everything I have, I wanna get a smaller server, and I want to get a, you know, cheaper CMS and all this other stuff and everything is cost-based and I wanna do everything by, I wanna do it all myself. And that's o that's acceptable. There's no issue with that. Or there's the other side of the coin which says, okay, well I want all of this new stuff.

I want to have scalability and I want to have all these new functionalities and different billing options and all this other stuff that's crypto and, and, and whatever else. But I'm gonna have to hire someone to do that.

Speaker 3 (26m 5s): Hey, you know what I'm, I constantly tell people in my consulting business that if you wanna be successful, unless you already know how to do everything yourself or are willing to learn that you better be ready to invest some money. There's, there's no in between. Correct.

Speaker 2 (26m 22s): And be loyal to the people who are loyal to you.

Speaker 3 (26m 26s): Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (26m 27s): This is another thing that's very important and, and understand also that I, I've had to bring back a client that was very used to having a full-time server admin person and very used to having things, you know, none now, now, now, now, now. Like, I need, I need some SSO installed or something. And I, but luckily he's the kind of guy that learned, I showed him how and he knew how, and now he feels great about that. But that was another client who said, I can't afford the x thousands of dollars a month that I'm spending on a hell of developer who's on a retainer.

I have a server administrator on a retainer. I have 20 servers around, I have, you know, massive infrastructure where again, Bruce, remember what I said it, but with a losing plateauing business where all his business, 80% of his business is platform based, right? Clip sites, fan sites. So he looks at it and goes, well, do I just get rid of all of this or do I downsize it? Do I streamline it somehow? Do I update it? You know, well,

Speaker 3 (27m 30s): You need to make a decision, you know, I mean, if you're not making enough money to support your infrastructure, then you've got some decisions to make. And sometimes I have people come to me to sell who they get in that situation, they're doing fairly well, but they're just spending too much money. So, look, you got a plan, you gotta budget. So what are your best selling solutions if someone owns their own content?

Speaker 2 (27m 57s): You're talking about a new client, or are you talking about someone that's already have a website available?

Speaker 3 (28m 3s): Either way, let's assume it's somebody new. Let's say they've got content, but they wanna start a website.

Speaker 2 (28m 9s): The best way to make, to make money on the adult business, even today, I always say, is to have really good traction in s e o and in social media and, and have a 1, 2, 5, 10 models or so that can go out and push for you or you partner with that can go out and create that content with you or have that content with you. So I think that partnerships are really important, right? So I had sent you a client that was having that very issue that you had said, Bruce, which was sitting there on a plateau of lots of content around for seven years and was trying to wonder how do I go to the next level?

And so I, it's the partnership and it's the partnership between the technical person or the person who can make the content, create the content, upload the content, and then the marketing person, almost never, I've seen it be the same person very, you know, difficult to run your own ship. But I think those partnerships become important, which perfect partnerships that I've seen have been a model manual woman popular does what they do, which is they fi they get, they get on camera, they film, they get out there, they go on social media, and those people say, okay, well I ha I wanna make a site, or I have a site or, and I need a site or something else, and I partner with someone that can then run that whole entire system.

And those are the ones that take off really quickly. And those are the ones that do really well because they own, they, they basically are just migrating over their entire brand to a new cms. And, and that's what I've seen be extremely successful. And you can only, you only need one model really, to run an entire business, as you said, Bruce, you know, you have to know what your infrastructure is and having 30 sites and 50 sites and a hundred sites. So that client that, that I'd sent to you actually has found, I don't know if you've kept up with him, but he found a and marketing person, you know, it, it, hopefully it's gonna work out for them, you know, because it's the, like you said, it's the marriage that has to be found.

And I think those are the things that make, you know, just coming in and I have so many clients to just come on board and they, they say, okay, well, how do I make money? You know? And it's, people think that, you know, it's 20 years ago where you just turn the, the light switch on and adult makes money and that doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 (30m 20s): I was talking to somebody about that yesterday. As a matter of fact, times have changed. I mean, you come into the adult space, you can't assume that anything you put online is that's porn is gonna be successful, right?

Speaker 2 (30m 35s): No, we cannot,

Speaker 3 (30m 36s): We remember the good old days. If someone is choosing a C M S, why should they choose X 10?

Speaker 2 (30m 45s): As I've always said, I have been referred to, and this is not my words, nor is it my ego, is that when they've literally looked at both, they say, we are comparing a Ferrari to a Buick. And that is really the difference. And what that means is usability, functionality, how it works, how it's coded, how it, how scalable is it, and just briefly going into those, so, you know, our administrative area has over 287 items in it.

Sometimes we've had to deploy versions to clients who have quite literally told us, take away everything. I don't wanna see it. I wanna know that it's there, but just show me the 20 items that I need to see. Make me an admin like that because it's too extensive. We have so many functions can, you know, for example, pre-roll ads, banners, image ads on top of video, you know, things that YouTube does. For example, if you're running a tube site or a pay-per-view, a paper download, physical products, you know, digital downloads, and it goes on and on and on.

We even have couponing and eBay type options and all that stuff goes on and on into, you know, the, the fact that we as a cms, think of it like a circle in the middle, and this is a c the X 10 CMS and outside are all the tentacles that are, for example, we have a WordPress plugin where you can literally extract content into your WordPress website using your own themes and everything clicks into the, the C M S. We have an automation system with the AI that we've talked about, but also for encoding where you can automatically tag video content depending on what it sees using Google AI and, and I B M Watson, again, these are all things that we've, you know, over the years we've created, we have our own affiliate system, we have our own agent partnership option, and all those modules coexist into the one platform that all can become one repository for all your content.

So when someone comes to us and says, yes, my users are gonna be happy with me having a new membership site, sure they're not gonna cry because the URLs are changed. Okay? Then when that happens, really they get the benefit of is that all of their, let's say they have 30 sites, all those sites can run under that one C M s using that one content pool. And the only difference is, is how you tag the content for each site. And the theme that that site shows is all just cookie based based on the URL that it detects, that the URL comes from and the theme that's been connected to it.

So everything is within that one system. We don't have to, in other CMSs that we've seen, you have to have a tour for every single public HTML folder when you're installed on your server. And each of those has to have its own tour folder. And it just becomes a, a lot of work to maintain, to have to say, I have all of the, if let's say I have 30 sites, well, I make an and I have to make an update, I have to do that to all 30 locations of those tours. It's just, it's a nightmare. And so, for example, one thing we've just done now also for a client has been, the client wants almost every tour to look almost identical except for colors and the logos.

And so we actually just have the same tour, we just changed the logic in the background to make it so that the logo changes and the colors changes and is done. Again, my whole thing is, I've been watching a lot of Star Trek lately, maybe I'm part Borg. I'm, I'm all about how can I make it more efficient and how can we make it, you know, closer to perfect as possible. I'm an efficiency nut. That's always been, you know, my thing, I I've probably unemployed more webmasters in my life than anyone I've probably ever met in the adult business for sure. Because every time I come on board, everyone goes, because it's like, well, you don't really need 20, like we said, back to infrastructure, we don't need all those people.

They're very beneficial. And, and webmasters are always required, of course. But where I'm talking about back in the day where I had worked for a company where I think there were eight people in that company working full-time, it was one guy just color correcting photos and there's another guy doing the video uploads and another, you know, I mean, that's, that's just not necessary, you know, to do anything like that anymore.

Speaker 3 (34m 40s): That's true. And I remember taking a demo, it's been some time back, so I'm sure knowing you, Claude, you've added a lot. You just mentioned some things you've added lately, and it was stunning. It was amazing. I, I've gotta say that it was, it was quite, quite impressive. So in your mind, what does the future look like for the adult industry?

Speaker 2 (35m 3s): Like I think in every other industry and everything else in the world, I think there's definitely a consolidation of everything in every company. You know, we come down to five corporations running the US and that kind of thing, you know, it's already happening in adult and it's already happened for years in adult, as I've said so many times. I'm always an optimist, and I always believe that no matter how big or small, I think, you know, I, if you watch the Shark Tanks and you know, I think there was a guy with the, the guy that invented the ring, I saw that show a while ago.

They rejected his offers and ultimately now he's worth billions and, and sold to Google. I think the entrepreneurial, you know, adventure of people who say, I have something different and unique to do and I can do this, try to port this over in a regular business. I think it's extremely difficult to do in a mainstream world where you say, well, I have an idea to sell content, but no, it's like, well, what portal are you going to go? You can't, the social media and everything else that you can just go onto, why would you ever build your own?

But I still find that to be interesting in the adult space. And I think it's really on a couple of points. And one is a lot of people have just gotten this listed from either social media accounts or adult platforms, right, for whatever reason. And building a business and a brand that you spent 20 years doing and not having that control of your brand and having a usership, let's say, of, you know, 10,000 users that are all on a platform that you don't control and manage is a very scary thing to do. I'm not saying that you don't do that because the reason why those platforms are so popular is because they have the usership, that's it.

They have the trust to the user, the user knows they're gonna pay pay by credit card and they're not gonna get their credit card stolen, you know, and they already have a balance with that eal and in most instances, right, with that cam or fan site. So there's a trust there and there's, there's a brand trust and that's a very difficult thing to do and to port over. But if you can have a 30 or 40% of your business being something that you manage and control domain wise and everything else, I think there's so much still value. And I still see people every day come saying, I have an idea, I have a concept.

I, you know, this is new, this is something I wanna do. I wanna do like a v I P plan or something like that. I've had clients say, oh, you know, we're gonna charge 500 a month or something and this is what we're gonna offer and we're gonna have, we're gonna offer, you know, people can go on cruises and you know, like it's just always different concepts. And those, a lot of those platforms just won't do that for you because they'll be like, well, you know, hey, we're not gonna take a $500 month plan, but you can, you know, you talk to right banks and talk to the right solution, then that's where I come in. I've had these relationships with CC Bill and net billing and everyone else out there that for an orbital pay and everyone else that I can on apac, of course, I tell 'em, Hey, this is what they wanna do, you know, let's get them fast tracked because I know how to get them approved because their business model is sound and they seem like they know what they're doing.

Otherwise, it's just, I, I think I've had so many clients who have probably not gone through, you know, haven't continued on or, or maybe haven't, you know, we've lost pass over the weight. And a lot of that has just got to do with their, either something internal happened where there was like a business relationship that didn't work out, or it just felt too overwhelming for them to take on. That's what it really came down to. It's very easy to go to a platform and then just take a, Hey, give me, here's your percentage and let me just do what I do.

Well,

Speaker 3 (38m 31s): That's the easy way. I mean, there are creators that are making more themselves than a lot of sites. So wouldn't it just make sense instead of just throwing all that money to only fans to have their own site? And what about those people?

Speaker 2 (38m 49s): We have had that happen, and a lot of them had gotten dis listed from only fans. A lot of it was actually ID verification related, where the banks are kind of, eh, you know, they know you can't control content. The, the banks who are savvy are the ones we talk to, know that there's no way you're going to monitor all your content. It's not gonna happen. It doesn't happen in the world. No one does that. You know, there's a, there's a report button and then there are K YC stuff you can do. For example, there's a company called anato that we're in just integrated with, by the way, that does K YC externally for you, and you don't have to worry about the ID being stolen and all that stuff.

You can only use it by phone, really, it's successful. Cause your camera doesn't really focus very well on your computer. But, you know, all models use, most models use camera, you know, and use phones. So we just integrated with that, by the way. And it works great. You know, you put your camera, you put your, I your hi, you hold your ID up, you, you put your face in front of the camera and it, and it literally checks the database and makes sure that you are who you are. And those things have, have eliminated a lot of those issues that those models have had. And the banks know that, well, you might have poor people in a video with you, and those are the free people don't even look underage, but you have their IDs, and in most cases, that content could be old.

And these are the things that come into why they do move over to the non-fan system because on only fans, they can't show the very content that's the most explicit, even though they owned it. But they don't have IDs on every single person. And, and, we'll actually, I'll go by, I go one more step. They actually had the IDs, but they don't have the IDs of the person actually like putting their hand up with the only Fann logo or whatever, you know, they need. That's the issue. And so that model is already gone. They, they, they, they probably did their thing years ago, right?

And no longer in the business, you have to track 'em down to say, Hey, I need you to, you know, can you do me a favor? I wanna make more money on only fans that you get nothing out of because I paid you 10 years ago. But hey, can you give me an id? Can you hold up the word only fans in the today's date so that I can allow you to be on this website? And in most cases, they'll say no, because either they won't me in touch with them or, or I want money

Speaker 3 (40m 58s): If you can find them. Right?

Speaker 2 (40m 59s): Exactly. Because let's put it this way, that's not required that there's, there's zero requirement in that for a regular content website, right? Where there's no requirement for that. The bank does not say, well, you know, your ID is not good enough. Your, I see your model release, I see your id, that's not good enough. I want you to have the person holding up your website name, you know, with today's date. That doesn't happen. And so that's where a lot of people poured over where it's like, well, I had, there's two levels of compliance, right?

One for a platform and one for the individual websites. The way they get around it, by the way, Bruce, I think, anyway, is that there are multiple only fans accounts that are free. So they don't charge anything, but then they link to other ones which do charge because it's no charge. You know, just like Twitter has these weird rules where if it's legal and you're paying, Twitter doesn't have any, any 2 25 7 on anybody, right?

Speaker 3 (41m 54s): Twitter does not, no,

Speaker 2 (41m 55s): Does not. And they get around it because they don't charge the user. I don't understand that law completely.

Speaker 3 (42m 2s): Don't worry. It's coming.

Speaker 2 (42m 3s): We've gone through compliance processes with these banks and they send 31 items to check, and they're very extensive, and we've gone through them more times than once. And they're small things, you know, it's like terms, conditions have to be correct. Price for privacy has to be correct. You can't, you have, when you use the word membership recurring, you have to use the words like, you will be charged X amount u s d today, and you're, you know, it has to be rebuilt at this amount. Gotta

Speaker 3 (42m 30s): Be spelled out

Speaker 2 (42m 32s): A hundred percent. And we've done all that. And then of course, you can't, you can't charge less than $5. You can't charge more than $300 unless you're especially approved. But, but you know, Bruce, I think we're, again, we're talking about new clients, right? So all your clients have usually have merchant accounts that don't have all this because they have history, because they've been around a long time. They don't have the same compliance levels that we've seen for new clients because they don't have history. That's why I've always seen people who cut, like I said, who come to me new, Hey, we're already on every platform. You know, I've had models who come and say, yeah, I we're on every platform.

I had one model making 6 million a month, but wants to come over because she wants to manage her own domain. She's businesswoman, right? And she says, okay, well, I'm gonna bring over 40 of my friends and I'm gonna own my own place. I'm gonna own my world. And because 40 becomes 400 becomes 4,000, you know, if, if this wasn't the adult business, then those kinds of models would probably just be bought out by other companies, right? They do that anyway in the back end. I know you, that's what you do, but you know what I mean, like publicly, they would just go public and, and then flip, right?

Speaker 3 (43m 35s): Yeah. We do have, for instance, some clips for sale sites that are, that are being brokered now, or pages, I should say,

Speaker 2 (43m 42s): Own your own client. I've said this before, maybe another podcast with you, but it's always been for me, it's own your own client. The 4 million per month model example I gave you who makes all that money right now on platforms and is moving to their own platform, does not have the ability to cross-promote any of those end users in any which way.

Speaker 3 (44m 3s): I'll tell you something else, that if tomorrow only fans once again says, we're getting rid of porn, then that 4 million goes down to zero. So that's another risk that they take. And the best way to mitigate that is to own everything. And that includes their own site, which you certainly can help them with.

Speaker 2 (44m 24s): That has been my go-to thing yet. I've, I, I have two kinds of clients. They've been around for, you know, archive classic clients 20 years around who are looking to get into new business models or revamp their technology, or it's the popular platform model who Eva wants to create their individual website or multiple websites who says, I wanna own my own brand. We've gone through so many of these renditions where I pull my hair out, whatever hair I have left, where the, the model will go back and forth.

And then I, I can only convince so much. I mean, for me, if I was making anywhere near that much money as a model, I would, I would probably have 20 different ways to make money off of my websites, off my content, because I'd wanna own brands. I'd own like a tube site of my own, to be honest. Actually, this is what I would do. I would own a Tube site, I would own my own clip site, I'd my own, my own fan site, you know, my own individual site, let's call it a, you know, a profile site. And those are the things that I would do. I'd have everything locked in because I'd wanna own everything and I'd still work on the platforms.

But I will say, Bruce, that there has been some flack, I guess, from platforms, knowing if models have been working on their own systems. I have heard of that. I have seen it firsthand in some cases. And I think that's kind of made a little bit of the decision making process a little more difficult for models to say, can I have my cake and eat it all?

Speaker 3 (45m 51s): I think there's a legal case to be made that if they discriminate against them, that that could certainly be a lawsuit. I'd be curious to hear what some of our legal legals have to say about that.

Speaker 2 (46m 1s): Yes. But that's also been the pushback on our end has been the fear and and knowledge that they've gonna lose it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (46m 9s): Yeah. Well, Claude, I'd like to thank you for being our guest again today on Adult Site Broker talk, and I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon. My

Speaker 1 (46m 17s): Broker tip today is part eight of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. Last week we talked about information needed to give the buyer and being transparent with the buyer. Here's more information on what to give to a potential buyer. How well has your content been protected from piracy? And what steps have you taken to protect your content? Are you using a piracy, takedown, or monitoring service? These are important facts to know. What promotional tools do you offer to your affiliates?

The more tools you offer, the more successful your affiliates will be. What's your traffic breakdown by country? Tier one, countries like the usa, Canada, the uk, Germany, and Australia are the most preferred. Add in anything else that will add value to the sale of your property that you can think of, such as what custom scripts do you use? What content management system software is on your site? Do you use billing or affiliate software like Nats? What is your retention rate?

How you retain your members is of the utmost importance. How many joins and rebuilds do you have per day? Do you buy advertising? And if so, what kind? Can your content make more money in the D V D or V O D markets? Or have you already taken advantage of this opportunity? How much did you spend a producer buy the content that's on your site? What do you believe the content is worth? Now we'll talk about this subject more next week and next week we'll be speaking with Steve Lightspeed of deepfake.com.

And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest, Claude Lai of X10 Revenue. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.