Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 166 with Peter Jensen

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 Peter Jensen of Rocket Fuel.

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The blog highlights new talent in the gay space, gay porn news, mainstream gossip, and a just for fun section. The members area has lots of content you won't find in the free area. The site only takes 25 hours a week to maintain. The monthly costs are minimal, so the site is very profitable. There's an email list of over 29,000 and the site has over 165,000 social media followers. It has great potential for growth if it's purchased by a larger company or a small one where the owner will put in a little more time.

There are over 600 member posts, including videos and images. The traffic is all organic, direct and social media. No ads have been purchased. Users come primarily from the U S A, the UK and Australia, only $450,000. Now time for this week's interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Peter Jensen of rocketfuel. Peter, thanks for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk.

Speaker 2 (3m 18s): Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (3m 20s): It's a pleasure. Now Peter is a well known Silicon Valley executive with over 30 years of experience in tech. Having served in senior positions at Oracle and Symantec rocketfuel is his sixth startup. He sold his other startups to companies ranging from IBM to CloudFare and Cisco. rocketfuel helps brands attract new customers and increase revenue by accepting ACH bank transfers and over 160 cryptocurrencies as a form of payment and payouts.

They also speed up and reduce costs by making cross-border B two B payments. They use AI-based risk analysis, which assures fast, secure, and seamless transactions. Their settlement guarantee removes volatility risk and provides next business day funding. So Peter, besides what I just discussed, what does rocketfuel actually do?

Speaker 2 (4m 15s): Well, I think you summed it up pretty well. We are a typical tech startup here in Silicon Valley. We're just using new technologies like modern blockchain and cryptocurrencies to facilitate payments for our merchants in many different industries. So a shopper can go to a website and instead of using his or her normal credit card, they can pay with Bitcoin or any other currency and content creators, for example, in the adult industry, can receive payments in crypto instead of instead of the usual bank transfer.

Speaker 1 (4m 55s): This is really important these days because obviously the adult industry is under attack and the credit card industry keeps pulling in the reigns as far as credit card processing. How can rocketfuel help with that?

Speaker 2 (5m 11s): Yes, it's really the reason why we have so much traction is obviously that we are solving some of the day-to-day problems that merchants all over in all sorts of industries, specifically the adult industry have. There is more, I would say there's a more more risk with the adult sites in terms of being shut down by the credit card companies and so on. And so if you, if you use new payment rails that have nothing to do with the existing payment rails through banks and through credit cards, you don't have all of those issues, I would say.

So for example, in the adult industry, you just have more declines and more chargebacks on their credit cards. You also have a lot higher costs. Yes, I hear people paying a lot more than I do down in my local grocery store, and so that in addition to the risk of being shut down or at least being asked all sorts of question, it just, it, it's just a much better and simpler way you can compare it to the old taxi industry. Right. You had an old industry that used to do it the same way they had done forever with the radios and the dispatcher and all that, and the taxi didn't show up, and that's just how people were used to do it.

And then Lyft and Uber came along and it's just a more efficient process as well as yeah, more user friendly. And that's what we are doing. We're simply just using technology to facilitate the same process as people are used to.

Speaker 1 (6m 44s): Okay. Makes sense. Now, how can rocketfuel help brands and content creators?

Speaker 2 (6m 51s): Yeah, so the, the on the brand side, as we talked about, there are more and more people around the world who own cryptocurrencies and they want to spend those currencies, especially the younger generations. You know, you ask the younger generation to use a a fixed phone and install it. No one's doing that. Everyone's on their mobile phone. And the same thing happens with every time there's new technology. So you do not ever want to turn a customer away just because you don't accept the way they want to pay.

And so it, it's about increasing the revenue for them, that that is for, for the pay in. But also we see more and more of the, the brands, they're already paying out money to their content creators. And what they're telling me is, Peter, we see more and more issues wiring a hundred dollars to a certain country, it gets stuck. There are questions, and the end result for the, the brand is, is increased support costs and also unhappy content creators.

And then combine that with more and more content creators that own cryptocurrencies. They're saying, Hey, look, if you owe me, I don't know, $200 instead of sending it through the banks and it takes a week, why don't you just send it to me in in cryptocurrencies and I have it within three minutes. It's just much more efficient. It's much safer. It is much faster, and it is for sure much cheaper.

Speaker 1 (8m 24s): Absolutely. So what happens if Bitcoin or other crypto comes down in price during a transaction?

Speaker 2 (8m 32s): Yeah, it's, it's a good question. We get all along. First of all I, I'd like to remind everyone or educate everyone if they don't know that not all currencies are necessarily volatile. There are some of these currencies that are called stable coins and they are pegged to a, a dollar or euro or what have you. But if a shopper wants to pay with a Bitcoin or any other volatile currency, we have what we call a settlement guarantee. So if you're selling a product online or in a store and it costs, I'm just saying $50 because I'm here in the US or 50 euros or wherever you are, we have a settlement guarantee, which means that we will settle $50 minus our fee into your bank account the next day.

So that's another thing is we can settle in any currency that the brand wants, but most brands, they just want whatever the local currency is, dollars, euros, what have you. And so we guarantee them that if you're selling a $50 product, we will deposit that $50 into your bank account minus our fee that we've agreed on in advance. And that's it no matter what happens to the price of Bitcoin, for example.

Speaker 1 (9m 41s): That's interesting. How are you able to do that?

Speaker 2 (9m 43s): We do that because we are really not an exchange. You may have heard of exchanges like Coinbase and, and all of those, right? And Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (9m 53s): A lot of 'em have been in the news lately.

Speaker 2 (9m 55s): Exactly. Right. And and that's because they hold all these cryptocurrencies and they can go up and down. They get in trouble for that if it goes down. We don't do that. We are infrastructure, so you can think of us as visa for crypto. We just move funds from the shopper's wallet into the brand's bank account. We don't hold it. Therefore, as soon as we get, let's say it's $50 in Bitcoin, we immediately exchange it into whatever the brand wants to receive, and therefore we do not run any risk in terms of the exchange rate.

Speaker 1 (10m 31s): Interesting. So everything happens instantaneously and the crypto doesn't have a chance to go down during the transaction.

Speaker 2 (10m 39s): I mean, when you get really down to it, technically there is a a minute between when we display the exchange rate and when the star clicks. Okay. But that's the risk we take. I would say, and it's simple for me as a business owner, right? Half the time it'll go up and half the time it'll go down and most of the times it probably won't move, but it, it, it's a wash at the end of the day. So that's the risk we take and it, it really isn't a big risk. Now we've done thousands of transactions, and so we know that it is true that half if it moves half the time, it goes up half the time it goes down.

Speaker 1 (11m 17s): Yeah. So in in other words, it's, it all balances out in the end.

Speaker 2 (11m 22s): Yeah. And in one minute or two minutes, however long it takes for people to click pay it, it's not a big deal.

Speaker 1 (11m 28s): Okay. Yeah, that, that makes good sense. Now, we talked earlier about the cost of credit card transactions and how expensive those are. Not to mention how much bank wires can be and other payment systems. What does it cost to use rocketfuel?

Speaker 2 (11m 47s): Yeah, so you're right, it it is much cheaper. We charge between one and 2% to process payments in cryptocurrencies. So that's what the merchant pays. So let's say it is a hundred dollars transaction, we would guarantee that we settle $98 into your bank account the next day. In addition to that, obviously you save all the, the money with, for the staff that handles chargebacks and declines and all of that. So there's the reduced cost as well. So a lot of our brands, they, they like it, they like it because the, the most important thing is that they can give their customers the choice of paying with whatever they prefer.

And some of them want to do that, but on the backend, they actually save money from it.

Speaker 1 (12m 30s): Sure. They absolutely do. You know, in our industry we've had, and I don't know if you know to the extent that it's happened, but we've actually had some people have issues with staying in business who were in the financial side, and a lot of people got burned. E passport is kind of a famous one that kind of went away and a lot of people got stuck. What is the assurance that you guys are stable and will be around to pay people?

Speaker 2 (13m 5s): Oh, as a, as a company you mean?

Speaker 1 (13m 8s): Yeah. Is it because you're paying people instantaneously that it's safer?

Speaker 2 (13m 13s): Well, it is safer, right? Because we settle every single day. So in in, in theory, if I wanted to steal the money, I could, I could take one days of revenue. We are publicly traded company here in the us so that sets the bar a little bit higher. We have the SS e c looking at at us all the time, and we, I mean, we work hard to do everything by the book and comply with all rules and regulations. And I've built, as you talked a little bit, be before.

It's not my, my first company here and, and I've built my entire career on doing things the right way, and I don't intend to change that. We have a C F O who's a lawyer here in the us. Both he and I will end up in jail if we do something bad. So that's the best guarantee we can, we can give.

Speaker 1 (14m 2s): That's a good guarantee. Well,

Speaker 2 (14m 4s): I, I also say one more thing. We, we do have some of the very large players in the, in industry and they have of course done a lot of due diligence with us and yeah.

Speaker 1 (14m 18s): Okay. Fantastic. Now, how prevalent is it that people are paying with crypto now?

Speaker 2 (14m 25s): It's, it's getting more and more prevalent in the beginning. If you take 5, 6, 7 years back, people bought cryptocurrencies as an investment object, an asset that they hope would go up in price. And that's fine. That's one, you could say use case, but more and more are just figuring out that it's, it's a super efficient way to move money, especially across borders or between people. It's cheap, it's fast and all that.

So you have more and more people who are just saying, Hey, I just, I just, I have all these bitcoins or stable coins, I just want to pay because it's faster, it's cheaper. I, we have some of our brands that actually offer a discount to the shopper. Say, if you wanna pay with crypto, we're gonna give you a discount of of 5%. Why? 'cause it's cheaper for them to process. It goes faster. They don't have the chargebacks and all that. So there are all sorts of, and it it's just a function of people getting more familiar with the technology.

Like anything else. I mean, you remember maybe in the early days with the internet, not everyone used it. I even remember my mom, she's like, oh, I don't need this stuff. And now she uses it all the

Speaker 1 (15m 35s): Time. My mom too, she didn't want to go near a computer.

Speaker 2 (15m 38s): Yeah. And no, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna use the a t M machine. I'm gonna go into the bank with, yeah, all that's gone. But it does take time, I would say. And then there are some segments in the market. Younger population is, is always more, they're faster at adopting new technology. And the adult industry in general has always been very good at adopting and taking advantage of, of new technologies.

Speaker 1 (16m 4s): Yeah, absolutely. You talked about being a public company and having an attorney for A C F O, what's going on? And you, you probably would have your finger to the pulse of this, what's going on with the United States government and cryptocurrencies. I know they require that you report if you use cryptocurrencies, but that's kind of hard to really trace. So I mean, what do you see happening in the near future on that kind of thing?

Speaker 2 (16m 37s): Yeah, I think what we are seeing in all around the world is governments, they can see that the technology is moving faster than they can regulate. And, and that happened, I don't know if you remember in the early days with Uber and Lyft, there were no rules and they could just go in and pick up passengers at the airport, which clearly was not fair to the taxi drivers who had to pay a fee and all that. And over time they got the regulation in place. And now I think it works in a reasonable way.

And that's what the, the governments are doing, the US is behind on, on this area. I saw the other day that the European Union passed a quite a comprehensive set of rules and regulations to, to regulate cryptocurrency. And that's what we want in the industry. We just want to know the rules. I think everybody wants to know the rules and the governments just don't want it to be used for illegal purposes. Neither do I. So the vast majority of people, they just want to be able to do transactions between each other in a more efficient way.

But you can see I mentioned Europe. I mean, both China and India, they have announced their own central bank digital coin, their own digital version of their fiat currency. So many others are ahead. But I think maybe what I'm seeing, there are two things that are happening in the us. Number one, they want to get it right because the US dollar is the leading currency in the world for many things. So you don't want to screw that up. The other thing is, I do believe there are some forces in the established industry that can see, just like the yellow caps, could see that this is gonna change my business model and I may not make as much money, if any in the future.

I have a nice little cash cow here and oh man, if people can send money outside my banking rail, then it's gonna cost me some money. And so I do believe that there are some special interests that are holding back progress here in the us It was no different than when the taxi companies said, Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. It'll, it'll happen eventually. And it is happening today. But yeah, I mean, it is true that if you are a private person in the US and you buy and sell crypto, you have to report it to, to the i r s.

Every country's different, right? We support the entire world, 200 countries. And there are different rules in every single country. But you're right, it's hard to, to implement and enforce, and we don't have to report anything to anyone. But what we do have to do is that if, of course if we get hit with a subpoena, we have to, just like the telephone companies, they have to respond. If, if there is a judge that says what happened here and there, we've never had that happen, but it could happen.

Speaker 1 (19m 21s): Yeah. I, it must be interesting to have to keep up with regulations for over 200 countries.

Speaker 2 (19m 29s): We can't. Right. Well, our main company here is in the US and then we have a wholly owned subsidiary in Europe. That is what we need. What what I'm saying is that from the shopper's perspective, the person who wants to pay with crypto, they can be everywhere in the world. And we are not required to enforce those laws. There are of course some laws in the US that we have to comply with. There are certain countries we are not allowed to do business with, and we of course implement that.

Speaker 1 (19m 56s): Yeah. What are important factors to consider when choosing a digital currency payment solution?

Speaker 2 (20m 4s): Ah, yeah. Well, I think a couple of things. Number one, you never want to turn away a customer, and that means you have to support what the customer has. And a lot of customers, they have wallets on their phones, but some, and, but they, they need to use a QR code to pay some of them, they have their, their cryptocurrencies in, in an exchange like Coinbase or Binance or somewhere. And they, the beauty of the of that is that you can pay by simply logging on and, and whether your username and password like you do with PayPal and many other apps.

So you want to be able to support both. That's one thing. So support and support all the coins out there, not just 50 coins. There are so many coins out there. You wanna be able to support whatever the customer has. That's one. Number two is speed. The transactions on, on blockchain with cryptocurrencies, they can take several minutes up to an hour to complete. And in some, some situations, and you don't want to give that experience to a a customer. It needs to close instantaneously.

So we've spent a lot of time creating some, some AI technology that basically allows 99% of all our transactions to complete within 15 seconds.

Speaker 1 (21m 23s): Wow.

Speaker 2 (21m 24s): Yeah. That is, that is, I would say very, very important. So those are two of the, of the things that I think are, are very important.

Speaker 1 (21m 33s): Yeah. That's, that gives you guys a huge advantage having so many different coins. And also that 15 second thing. That's amazing.

Speaker 2 (21m 42s): Yeah. And then maybe the last thing I'd say that not not everyone looks at is you wanna have a solid backend system. 'cause here's the thing, you, if you do thousands of payment transactions, there is gonna be a customer one day that calls in and says, I paid for this. I didn't get whatever I paid for. And it happens, and it can be for several reasons. Either he or she, she did something wrong or there was a problem, who knows, right? But the support team within the brand needs to be able to quickly log on and go through all the transactions, be able to refund money, figure out what went on and so on.

We've spent, because we have some very large payment providers that we work with, then we've spent quite a bit of time. And that's kind of be, be behind the scenes. And if you don't have that, yeah, it's great that you can accept cryptocurrency, but if you have to hire five people to manage the support calls because it's a lousy solution, then it's not so fun.

Speaker 1 (22m 38s): Absolutely. Explain exactly how a content creator can start receiving payments in crypto. Exactly. What does the creator need to provide your company?

Speaker 2 (22m 49s): Yes. If you are a content creator, and you are used to receiving the payments via the banking system, and now you'd like to receive it via crypto, you need a a wallet address. And you do that by downloading one of the wallet applications to your phone. There are many out there, so that's fairly easy. It takes two, three minutes, you create a wallet address. I would recommend going in and, and watching a couple of YouTube videos just to make sure you do it the right way and all of that.

But it's not really hard. That's number one. Number two, as they're being paid out by a brand, they will receive an email from the brand and us saying, Hey, you have a hundred dollars or whatever the amount is, click here and you can start transferring the money from the brand to your wallet. And so you need to create that wallet, and the first time you do it, we have to do K Y B and K Y C, know your customer, what's

Speaker 1 (23m 50s): K Y B?

Speaker 2 (23m 51s): Know your business and know your customer.

Speaker 1 (23m 54s): Oh, there you go. Okay. I hadn't heard K Y B before. I've No, I've heard k y C a lot of times.

Speaker 2 (23m 59s): Yeah. So, so basically we need to validate, and we talked about regulation before. We need to know who the person is at the other end and all of that. And so you just need to validate who you are and ask a few questions once you've done it once, it works every single day, and you can do it as much as you want. And you do a few clicks and it takes less than a minute. And, and you have your funds in in minutes.

Speaker 1 (24m 25s): That's awesome. What specific benefits does a live cam or any other company in the adult industry have using your platform? Why do they have to accept Bitcoin and other crypto payments in 2023?

Speaker 2 (24m 40s): Well, obviously nobody has to do anything, but like we talked about before, more and more of their customers want to pay with Bitcoin for all sorts of reasons. They have them, they don't wanna put the service on the credit card. They'd rather pay with Bitcoin for all sorts of reasons, privacy reasons, other reasons, right? So if you don't accept crypto, you are gonna turn away customers. Let's say that 10% of your customers want to pay with crypto and you don't accept it, that's 10% lost revenue.

That's not good. And then, so I think that's the most important thing in terms of accepting payment and of course all the benefits we talked about, no declines, no chargebacks, lower costs and all that, of course are nice to have in terms of paying out, again, you've gotta cater to your customers, right? The, the, the broadcasters, more and more of them will want to be paid in crypto because of the speed. And if I look at it from the, the brand's perspective, they can have a lot less support issues because it just goes through and it goes fast.

Speaker 1 (25m 46s): Yep. So if a company has an e-commerce site, how can they apply your crypto payment solution?

Speaker 2 (25m 53s): Yeah, it's, what they do is simply they contact us, they sign up, and then there's a little bit of development work involved, just like when you want to accept credit cards or anything else. And we have two ways technically to do it. You can use some of our plugins that are, have already been developed for very popular shopping cards like Magento and whatever they're called. Or if you want full control, we have an a p i application programming interface that developers can program on their website.

Speaker 1 (26m 23s): Perfect. So how can companies send crypto payments abroad similar to how they now do bank transfers?

Speaker 2 (26m 30s): Yeah, what we talked about before was when a brand wanted to send a, a transaction to a broadcaster, but we also have a product that allows companies to send bigger amounts, like millions of dollars million across orders typically. And what they do is they should really contact us and we can sign them up and make sure it's, it's done the right way. It's not really difficult, but you need to do it the right way. And so we usually talk to them about it, but we see more and more, I mean, we, I had this problem the other day.

I had to send $70,000 to someone, not me personally. The company had to send to someone in Canada, you'd think from the US or Canada. It's not that hard.

Speaker 1 (27m 10s): No, I wouldn't think that because I've been dealing with the Canadian customer lately and Canada's tough.

Speaker 2 (27m 17s): Yeah. And so what happens is he calls me up and said, Peter, where's, where's my money? I said, we sent it, we sent him the receipt that we wired the money. Well, his bank returned the money, they wouldn't accept it. And it's like,

Speaker 1 (27m 29s): So,

Speaker 2 (27m 30s): So then he's like, no, forget about that. I'm just gonna do it using stable coins or Yeah. So this is happening more and more and more where people, a, it's expensive. B it doesn't work. And if you're relying on the money at the other end, if this is $10 million, someone was planning on receiving the $10 million, and it can matter if it gets delayed by three days.

Speaker 1 (27m 51s): Yeah, it's a lot of money. If it's on Bitcoin, if bitcoin slides a little bit, that could be a ton of money.

Speaker 2 (27m 59s): You know, Bruce, what I'm talking about is the, the traditional way of doing it is to call your bank and send it in dollars or euros or what have you. Right? When we send money using crypto, we always use stable coins, which as I mentioned earlier, they are pegged to a currency like the dollar and the Euro. So one of these stable coins is always worth $1, one euro, whatever you, so it doesn't matter with the volatility, it doesn't go up and down. It's always a hundred percent stable. So for these cross-border payments, nobody really wants to take any volatility on, and therefore we're using stable coins for that.

Speaker 1 (28m 33s): Okay. How are you working with clients in the adult industry right now? Can you like give me some examples?

Speaker 2 (28m 41s): Yes. The, the way we're working on them, we go to a lot of the trade shows and we actually get a lot of referrals just from our customers who are super happy. As we all know, it's a, it's actually a tight-knit industry where once you are in and you provide good service and behave well and all of that, then this spreads. And so we are getting more and more customers that way. So that's how we, we find our customers and we just talk to them about, do you have customers who want to pay with crypto?

Yes, they do. Okay. Do you have problems with the problems we talked about before? Yes. What about payouts? Is that always working? No. Okay. Why not? Well, for all the reasons we talked about with bank transfers. And so we talk about these challenges and then they're all like, yeah, let's, let's do it. We wanna solve it. And then we help them on the technology front by simply signing them up and, and sharing the experiences that we have from some of our already existing customers. Because there's simple things you can do in terms of what is the text you provide on your website, what's the education you give to your, your customers that reduces your support calls and all of that.

So we can help them with that too. And, and of course, the implementation.

Speaker 1 (29m 55s): That's nice to hear because I think most payment providers wouldn't even think of doing something like that.

Speaker 2 (30m 2s): Well, payment providers, a lot of the existing companies that do credit cards only, they don't do this yet, right. They're like the yellow cabs and, and they are, some of them are, and the other ones are seeing the light, right. And they're adding solutions like ours to it. So we work a lot with existing payment providers that process credit cards. That's why we do not offer credit card processing because those are our partners. So we love it when a payment provider helps our, our provides credit card services and we do the crypto and together we as strong solution.

Speaker 1 (30m 37s): Yeah. You know, there's, there's one particular company in our industry that I can think of that's been around a long time, and I would kind of liken them to the yellow cab of payment providers. I won't mention any names. So I think most people can figure it out. And I know that they have not accepted crypto or any other solutions that are at all outside the box. What do you think happens to a company like that?

Speaker 2 (31m 6s): Yeah, I they are, they're gonna be behind for sure, and they're losing revenue and they're losing account control in my mind. And I see some of the big guys that have, that we have partnered with, they're, they're basically saying, Hey, Peter crypto is, is still gonna be a small percentage of our overall revenue, but we want to be ready. And what they're saying is, just like we talked about before, I mean, we've, let's say they've been processing credit cards for the past 10 years for, for a merchant. They don't want to give them any reason to move, move away from them.

Because what happens is those who do have a more complete solution, crypto is no different than PayPal and Apple Pay and Google Pay. There are all these different payment solutions and payment methods and what you wanna do, in my opinion, if you are payment processors, you just wanna offer all of it to your merchants. They can choose if they want all of it or some of it, but by not having a solution like crypto, then you run the risk of your competitors saying, I have a more complete solution than you have. Correct.

Speaker 1 (32m 6s): Correct. Yeah. And I, I've seen that with other things as well over the years. And it, it continues to boggle the mind that there are actually companies that go, oh no, we just do credit cards. All you have to do is wake up and smell the coffee a little bit and see what's going on with the religious right and all of the powers in terms of the right wing politicians in the United States. You better have some other ways to accept money or you're in trouble.

Speaker 2 (32m 40s): Yeah. It's not gonna happen overnight. But you know, again, I I like either you can look at the taxi industry, you can look back at the internet industry, and because of Walmart and some of the other big retailers, they moved slowly. They gave that opportunity to Jeff Bezos and everyone was laughing at him in the beginning. They're like, eh, this is no big deal. And he's not making money. And I mean, just like they, they were also laughing at Elon Musk, right? Oh, you are losing money, this and that for the first 10 years. And this happens every single time.

There's a new technology in the beginning you have all the naysayers and all the people who find all the problems. And let's be honest, there's always problems and challenges in the beginning with new technology. It's, it's a part of the game, but we work through them over time. And so those people who, who invest early in, in new technology, they are, they usually win. I mean, I think Jeff Bezos is just happy.

Speaker 1 (33m 36s): Oof, man. I'll tell you, one of the brightest minds in the entire world as far as Elon goes, he does give us a few reasons to laugh at him. But that's another story being in Silicon Valley. He's somebody you probably know so

Speaker 2 (33m 51s): Well. He doesn't call me every day, but no, but I mean, it, there is, there's the person and then there is what he's doing and his vision and his drive, and you can't deny that he has, he has the technology and made it available to all of us. And, and no one else has been able to do it to the extent he has. And it's just an example of of someone who's like, yeah, I don't care that you're naysayers and don't believe me, I'm gonna show you.

Speaker 1 (34m 18s): Well, Tesla, PayPal, there've been some crazy things that he did. And when he first started, I mean, people would said, PayPal, come on, well look at it now. Right? Tesla electric cars, come on, nobody's gonna buy electric cars. Yeah. Crazy like a fox. So for payments in Europe and other countries, what additional requirements do non-US customers have?

Speaker 2 (34m 46s): Well, the, the brands, they have to go through the same process as all the other brands. They have to sign up with us, they have to integrate, we have to do, as I said, K Y B, know your business for them in terms of the shoppers and the, the broadcasters. The rules are the same all around the world for them. They're super simple and, and, and all of that, just like when you want to pay with a credit card, it's not hard to pay with a credit card. It's, there's a little bit more work in, in accepting it. You have to be set up and all of that stuff. So we work with the, with we call the merchants, but it could be brands all over the world and they can be up and running in, in a day two from a contractual perspective.

And then there's the integration, which depending on their resources, can take a week or two.

Speaker 1 (35m 31s): Okay. Where can people find rocketfuel and how can they contact you?

Speaker 2 (35m 38s): I think the easiest way is simply to go to our website, rocketfuel Do inc. I nz, so rocketfuel dot Inc. And there you'll find our phone number, you'll find our emails and all of that. So yeah.

Speaker 1 (35m 50s): Old school.

Speaker 2 (35m 52s): Yeah. Well, I don't know a better way. I mean, I could go to LinkedIn maybe and find me if you want, but I think there's a better, I would say chance of, of sending us an email or giving us a call.

Speaker 1 (36m 5s): I was just kidding. Now your company just completed a successful XXX Biz Miami show. We record this May 23rd and it will run in a couple of months, but I, I thought I'd give that standard disclaimer. What other events do you plan to be at throughout the year?

Speaker 2 (36m 23s): Oh, we are definitely going to the XXX BSS event in, in Amsterdam later this year. We're going to some of the other events. There's one in Prague, I forgot which one it is.

Speaker 1 (36m 36s): T e s? Yes. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (36m 38s): Yeah, yeah. We're gonna be there. I think we have a presentation there as well. So people will find us at, at events all over the world, specifically for the adult industry, by the way. So we are going to a lot of the adult shows.

Speaker 1 (36m 50s): Yeah. Don't forget W M A and Cyprus, that's a powerful show too. We can talk about that off mic. How much of the future of payments and payouts for the adult industry is in crypto?

Speaker 2 (37m 3s): I think it's gonna be very big in, in the adult industry for a couple of reasons, right? You have the generic benefits that it's safer, faster, cheaper, and all of that stuff, but cheaper if you're paying, if you have a, if you're running a, a grocery store and you're paying three to 4% for credit cards or two, whatever, saving one or two is, is not so much. But if you're in the adult industry, you're paying more. So cost is, is one thing. But then I would say also from a sharper perspective, the customers, they appreciate the privacy.

So just like the internet as a technology was wildly successful early on in the adult industry. So is crypto, I can tell you 'cause I have, I have customers in many different verticals, and the way I look at it, I ask a merchant, I say, you know, how much is your revenue? Let's say it's a hundred dollars or million, what have you. The question is what percentage of the customers are paying with crypto? And we see a much higher percentage in the adult industry for some of the reasons.

I mean,

Speaker 1 (38m 5s): Yeah, people want privacy. They want to be anonymous. They, they want to be able to enjoy their porn and not have everyone know about it.

Speaker 2 (38m 16s): Yeah. And, and I wanna make sure that people understand this. Privacy doesn't mean we're doing anything illegal. It just means that, to be frank, there are a lot of people they just don't wanna pay with the credit card because they don't want that to be on their credit card statement. It's as simple as that. It makes total sense.

Speaker 1 (38m 35s): Yeah. Well, believe me when I say there's not one porn company that has the big word porn in, in the descriptor on the credit card statement. But, but let's face it, let's say someone's married and the credit card come, bill comes and what does this 39 99 on our credit card statement, honey, that's a tough thing to explain to your wife.

Speaker 2 (39m 1s): And if I can just add that on there, right? What's interesting is the reason why there are so many chargebacks in the adult industry on credit cards is that they buy something for 39.95 and someone asks a question, what's that? Well, that must be a mistake. I never made that purchase. Let's just do a chargeback. And it's, it, it's costing these adult companies, the brands millions of of dollars every year. And that's not fair because 'cause you, someone made a purchase, they consume the service, and now they don't wanna pay for it.

And all that goes away with crypto.

Speaker 1 (39m 36s): You know, it's interesting, I used to have a client long time ago that all they did were charge back collections. And I was in their office, Dayton, Ohio, and I was in their office and I was listening to one of their collectors, talk to some guy's wife and say, yes, your husband did spend $22,543 chatting with a webcam model.

I mean, and the guy of course tried to charge it all back. Right? And now they were having none of it, and the, the collection company won. So yeah, it's sometimes it's good to have a little bit of privacy for something like that. And crypto's the perfect thing for it.

Speaker 2 (40m 28s): Yep, it is. And there's, there's nothing illegal in it. That's my point. It's a very important point. There's nothing illegal in buying and owning and paying with crypto unless it's for legal purposes. If you're buying arms or tanks or what have you, you can't do that with whether you pay with your credit card or cash or whatever.

Speaker 1 (40m 47s): Yeah. Getting those illegal AR fifteens or whatever. You, you really don't want to, don't want to do that.

Speaker 2 (40m 53s): I know. I'll leave you with one, one example. I was in Dubai a couple of months ago and we, we were catering an event and, and the, the catering company came out and I think the a thousand dollars worth of food and, and stuff like that. And the lady little local store, she says, yeah, it's gonna be a thousand dollars. And I gave her my credit card. She says, I don't accept international credit cards. I'm like, well, how do I pay you? Well, can't you just pay in crypto? And this was this little store. And she's like, here's my wallet address, right? Just pay me in crypto.

Speaker 1 (41m 24s): Said I can. Yes. And

Speaker 2 (41m 25s): I said, of course I can I send it to her? She had it an hour later, not even an hour, a couple of minutes later. Right. And, and everyone's happy. So this works, and especially in, in countries in Latin America where they have a lot of, a lot of inflation in their currency. This is, these are the countries that adopt this really fast. Because when you get paid your salary in Argentina, for example, the first thing people do is they, they exchange it into a, a stable coin so that at least they know it, it stays in dollars, and then they can move it anywhere they want.

Speaker 1 (41m 59s): Yeah, that's interesting. You know, you go to a place like Vietnam and they deal in American dollars because their currency all over the place.

Speaker 2 (42m 7s): Yeah. And it just becomes easier that way. And you have a lot of people, as you know, in Latin America and, and I'm sure out in Asia too, that need to send money to their families. And the way they do it today with MoneyGram and all those, they charge an arm and a leg. And it's inconvenient because you have to go down to the store and what have you. And now you can just send it from my phone to your phone.

Speaker 1 (42m 28s): I love it. Well, Peter, I'd like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk, and I hope we'll get a chance to do this again soon.

Speaker 2 (42m 37s): Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 1 (42m 39s): It was a pleasure. My Broker tip today is part one of what to do to make your site more valuable for when you decide to sell it later. First, make sure you're converting as much of your traffic as possible. Traffic's expensive, whether it's search engine, traffic review, site traffic, or affiliate traffic, you paid a lot for it. So make sure that when someone lands on your site, you give them every opportunity possible to either spend money or do whatever it is you want your visitors to do. In the case of a pay site, make sure your billing options allow as many people as possible to buy, have multiple ways to pay.

In North America, most everyone has a credit card, but in other parts of the world, credit cards aren't used nearly as much. In Europe, for instance, credit card usage is low. So look for billing options that will match the areas where your traffic comes from. In Europe, ACH and debit cards are used a lot in Africa and other developing nations. Many people pay by mobile, do your homework and find out how people pay in the regions. You get most of your traffic, it will make you more money.

The worst thing you can do is get a visitor, have them want to buy. But since you don't have their preferred way to pay, they can't. If you're looking for suggestions, feel free to get in touch with me via my website. Along with this is to improve your user experience, make your site attractive and easy to navigate. People have more options than ever these days. I can't tell you how many sites I go to, even some that are owned by large companies where the navigation isn't obvious to the user. You poke around for what seems like forever to do something that should be relatively easy.

Keep it simple. Before you launch any changes to your site, ask your friends to go to the site and check it out. Unfortunately, designers and tech geeks don't think like us. You need real people to look at your site for you. The same kind of people who will be visiting your site. We'll talk about the subject more next week and next week we'll be speaking with Bobby. Be Doka, Adult Site Broker Talk has been brought to you by Webmaster Access September 12th through the 15th.

The show will be in beautiful Cyprus at the stunning grand resort on the beach. Go to the events page on our website at Adult Site Broker dot com for a 25% discount. For Adult Site, Broker Talk listeners, to register, go to webmaster access.com. And that's it for this week's Adult Site Broker Talk. I'd once again like to thank my guest, Peter Jensen. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I'm Bruce Friedman.