Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 194 with Gibson Allman of Pornstar Metrics

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 Gibson Allman of Porn Star Metrics. Would you like an easy way to make a lot of money? Send sellers or buyers to us at Adult Site Broker through our affiliate program, ASB Cash. When you refer business to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on all sales that result from that referral for life. You can make $100,000 or more on only one sale for some of our listings. Check out ASB Cash dot com for more details and to sign up. At Adult Site Broker, we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications from around the world. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry and online free speech by hate groups, the religious right and politicians. You’ll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. We’ve also added an events section to our website at adultsidebroker.com. Now you can get information on B2B events on our site as well as special discounts reserved for our clients. Go to adultsidebroker.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 introduce a successful and growing only fans agency. They’ve been in business less than a year and a half, but they’ve experienced tremendous growth. The company was founded by two brothers. In the last year, they’ve done over $5 million in gross profit. They have over 130 full-time Filipino employees with affordable salaries. The strategy of the company is to acquire large volumes of creators, put them through their automated onboarding process, and then they decide which creators are worth keeping. Out of over 2,000 in the last year, they’ve pared down to the 300+ creators they have now. They focus on 30-50 high revenue producing creators. The top one is generating $120,000 in monthly revenue. There are many high potential creators who currently do between $5,000 to $75,000 a month. These creators can be scaled through detailed focus and know-how, not to mention additional marketing. The founders have created scalable systems and automations through sustainable processes. The whole company is very well-structured. The founders currently only work about an hour a day due to their systems. There’s a great potential to further develop the revenue from each creator, thus multiplying the revenue and profits of the company. The main marketing is TikTok, with some Instagram sprinkled in, which leaves amazing opportunities using other media and buying ads. Only $13.5 million. Now time for this week’s interview. I guess today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Gibson Alman of Pornstar Metrics. Gibson, thanks for being with us today on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thanks Bruce. Appreciate being here. Thanks. It’s my pleasure. Gibson is a seasoned expert from the mainstream data analytics tech sector. He founded Pornstar Metrics to explore untapped data monetization potential, that’s a mouthful, in the adult entertainment industry. That’s even a bigger mouthful. The company’s inaugural project, Mariah, that’s spelled M-A-R-A-I-Y-A with a small A-I in there, get it, is an innovative chat bot designed to deepen connections between fans and content creators. Launched in 2023, Mariah is continually evolving to incorporate feedback while expanding her knowledge and conversational abilities. You can experience the latest in fan and creator interaction by visiting pornstarmetrics.com to see for yourself. Gibson, could you share a bit about your background in technology and what motivated you to establish Pornstar Metrics? Sure, Bruce. Thank you. An excellent introduction. I really appreciate that. Like I said, I really appreciate you reaching out and wanting to talk to me about this. I’ve been working in technology for many, many years, decades. I’ve always observed that the most interesting and innovative applications of data within industries, not just the adult industry, but mainstream industries, banking, etc., tend to be very data-intense industries, because the amount of data begs for looking for different applications. It’s the recommendation of the product to buy, the outfit to buy next, that sort of thing. I’ve always have known that the adult industry has just grown year over year. Despite the societal shaming of the entire industry, the reality of it is that the hypocritical nature of human nature is that people are actually looking at this all the time. It’s a super data-intensive industry. From that perspective, it’s always been in the back of my mind, because obviously I’m a man, I’m adult, I look at it too, and I like it. I’m thinking, "This could be interesting to explore." Anyway, but it really came to a head pretty recently, only because I was looking to try to do something like create a company, do something very interesting and innovative. The launch of these chatbots that are in the press all the time, I’m not going to promote them. I won’t use their name unless it slips out by accident. It’s always in the news, and it’s this very innovative approach of creating essentially a very intelligent, what’s called an agent or chatbot experience, where you can actually ask questions about almost any subject, and it will engage with you as almost like a human would, and help you write a paper, help you write a thesis or a blog post, or even now generate images, for example. The image piece of this in the adult industry has been around for a while, and there’s companies that do that, but this is a little bit different. This is about language. This is about text information. Images of course are a huge part of it as is video, but the core of this thing that I was looking at, based upon my experience, was that also because it’s data of a different variety. The third point I would make here is that data historically has always been about numbers, right? It’s always about adding up numbers of columns and calculating different things based upon that, but this other information is different. It’s text. It requires interpretation, which is called natural language processing, and there’s a lot of research, and there’s lots of different approaches to doing that, but what this generative AI stuff has done is it’s really expanding the lens to an enormous amount of additional information and applying these large, complicated models essentially to the data to effectively create the backbone. More things like those chatbots. People get these things co-mingled. These things are called large language models. They’re made by the large social media network that people historically have been a member of. They’re made by a system-dependent company that’s been in the news recently, and they’re constantly evolving, and they’re the backbone for all these things. They’re all sorts of good things, and there’s bad things associated with these from accuracy and the like. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to apply that idea within the adult space because I didn’t see it happening, and I’ll explain more about why that’s not happening, and perhaps you know as well, and you can infer why it’s not happening. That’s the opportunity that I started to identify. From there, the case started to get stronger and stronger as I started to focus more in on who actually would be this for. Who is this serving? What is the value and the like, and ultimately, what’s the purpose of it in terms of economic model? Sure. What exactly is Mariah and how does she work? Sure. That’s just like you said. The other name that incorporates the lower case A and the lower case I for artificial intelligence, and the idea is to give a name, a human name to which you’re hoping will be a human-like experience. The idea behind Mariah is that she’s going to be an intelligent chat agent like I just described, but she’s going to be specialized. She’s not going to be able to write you a paper about the founding of the United States or anything like that. Nor do you want her to. Nor do you want her to. That would be really boring. What you want to do with her is you want to ask her questions about how she’s going to be an intelligent adult. What you want to do with her is you want to ask her questions about certain adult entertainers. The reason why you want to do that and the intent of the entire chat experience here is to help the content creators, which are now the hottest and the highest growth area it appears within the adult entertainment space, which is seemingly pivoting the power within this industry, not away from large production companies, more to the individual creators, but there’s a twist to this coming down the line. They have the power now. Of course. Yeah, totally. Exactly. Whereas the power really are the companies that are actually hosting them. What’s very interesting is that, and I’ll talk more about this, but data about adult entertainers, both veterans as well as some of these newer creators, they can be all over the place on the internet. And there’s, and especially for the legacy and the entertainers that have been in the business for a long time, there’s many websites that have catalogs of different things like the awards and then the attributes of their bodies and all this sort of stuff, their hair color and their biographies. It’s all over the place. So you can go find information, but sometimes it’s not consistent. The reality of it is though, is that this sort of this marketplace, now that’s emerging, is becoming so competitive and there’s no interest constantly. So in a market that’s ultra super competitive, what’s going to help the participants in that is to spend as much time focusing on what the core of their business is, which is essentially connecting with their customer and less time in marketing and fulfilling it instead of sort of administering and effectively having to worry about how am I going to be discovered? How am I going to be found and why would people want to engage with me? So information and insight is the core base of this. So the idea behind Mariah is that she’s going to be able to answer questions as if she’s a representative of them. So the ultimate goal would be for any particular entertainer that you would want to know anything about like who they are, how old they are, where they grew up, whatever the case might be as part of that, part of this I participated in these ecosystems to actually understand exactly how these things work. And I can assure myself that it is helpful because ultimately the content creators want people to invest their time and money and the people that are that are investing their money and time in this also they want to evaluate exchange. So I’m chatting with Mariah and I say, tell me about Siri doll that to pick one very popular creator. And she’ll tell me facts about Siri doll. She should if she has an awareness of her. And the thing is that I would describe her. I would describe Mariah today as sort of a it’s not a minimum viable product or MVP, I’d say it’s like around a 1.0 version and it has as a limited amount of information and it’s basically laying down the structure for a much broader experience that would be able to engage in much more conversational capabilities. But that would be the ultimate objective to learn more about these individuals like how old are they, what are their interests in life. Okay, so is she going to give me links on where to find Siri, things like that? Well, that’s very interesting, right? That’s something to be determined. It’s possible today there are links that are part of the memory and part of the answer was for certain questions around examples, right? Show me an example of picture or a video. There’s limited information inside available in that chat experience today for that. The challenge of course with links is that they’re constantly sort of changing. And so to make that part of the core institutional model needs to be worked out for those of listening who have it used the general sort of chat experiences that I mentioned early in the questioning here. You’ll notice that when you ask for links, give me links to articles that prove they don’t have an entertainment industry is the most has the most vibrant potential for a data driven application like this. It may tell you about that. Why that makes sense, but it’s not going to give you the links. It’s going to say that you need to go find those yourself. So to your point, you’re asking is because that’s what ultimately everyone wants. So that’s the always the conundrum, I think in the entertainment space is that the customer can be very transactional in and out, you know, no pun intended. And so therefore, the question is just how much effort do you want to put into that experience? And then when do you want to actually jump off of it and actually start to consume the content of that creator, whether it’s through a fan site or whether it’s through a direct site from one of these websites that hosts the videos, for example, that’s all to be worked out. But ultimately, it would be nice if that were to happen. But it’s also a function, I think, of the economic model that gets worked out too in terms of who participates because the data that Mariah is aware of is only as good as the data that she can access in the public internet, just like any chat experience. So somebody’s very prominent on the internet, that’s going to be in there, right? Should be for sure. Okay. I should have gone in there and tried it first, definitely. That was, that’s my bad. What was the inspiration behind developing Mariah? How did you decide what to create? The inspiration was these general chat experiences that arose. And the thought being that if you’ve ever gone into these experiences and you ask them questions about the adult industry, you get warnings, right? Because the challenge that these large organizations have that are publicly traded companies and the like is that they have terms of service and standards of operation, which preclude them from representing what they would term objectionable content, right? And so they have limited insight about these individuals, but they sometimes will have factual information. Again, a new one is that not a lot of people would care about, that maybe work in the adult entertainment industry, but it really is important, right? So there are certain facts and attributes about someone that has no sexual nature whatsoever, but they’re just facts, right? Like Bruce is a certain height and he’s a certain weight and he lives in a certain country and he does a certain job and he’s done these sorts of things, right? That has nothing to do with necessarily the actions and whether or not it’s objectionable. You know what I’m saying? It’s more that the context becomes objectionable. And so separating those things out is something that they kind of do, but they’re never going to fully do. And so the inspiration to create Mariah was to figure out how can you basically create a tailored experience, which ultimately, with the name of the chatbot is, what the interface looks like, what that entire experience from the user’s perspective looks like, is important. But ultimately, what’s really important is the data. It is the foundational foundation of this. And so what inspired me to do it here in this particular instance is the fact that there is a lot of data about the industry and entertainers, but there’s no central location for everything. I can’t go into a single place and find out when was someone born, what their filmography is, ask them about what performers they performed most with, which was they enjoyed most, what were their hobbies, what are their favorite films or scenes that they’ve been in, who was their favorite actor, you know, what’s the latest news about that individual, right? You can find that for sure. But honestly, the consumer that has no time, right? And it’s only getting more intense. So the idea is that if there’s a more convenient way of surfacing this information, that would be the idea. So I just put in while live, while I’m talking to you, Vicky Vett, who’s a very popular porn actor since someone who’s a good friend of mine. And she’s been a guest on Adult Site Broker Talk. And Mariah said Vicky Vett is from Norway. She has blue eyes, blonde hair, is 58 years old, and is five foot six inches tall. Next you might try asking about other details such as who has appeared in the most titles with Vicky Vett or are Vicky Vett’s boobs natural or enhanced? Exactly, right. So the idea behind that answer sort of reflects what I was saying in terms of the fact, it’s trying to mix some of the factual nature with some of the contextual information about the actor. And so as you delve into that experience, the idea is that you’d be able to learn as much about this individual as you want, or that you’re able to, to then go use that. So effectively connect that into that relationship to establish it. Because ultimately for Vicky Vett, I don’t know if she’s on OnlyFans or any of those other sites, I’m sure she is. But if she is, she constantly wants to attract subscribers. She wants them to pay money. She wants them to pay for the content, et cetera. And she may be very successful. But over time, there’s got to be massive attrition. So I don’t know if there’s no studies of this. But for example, in the general industry of retail, for example, customer loyalty is elusive. So customers are constantly churning and switching preferences. The same is it can be true largely probably in the adult consumption of adult content. So the idea is to help her attract and retain those individuals by allowing them to have a relationship with her. So ultimately, for example, there could be a version of Mariah that is like a Vicky Vett, a virtual Vicky Vett that says, "Hey, what do you want to know about me?" Right? Not only do you want to see like pictures of my boobs or whatever, you want to understand me more about me because ultimately you want to chat with me. You want to do the sex thing with me. Whatever the heck that is, what you’re doing. Are you planning on something like that? Well, no, I don’t think that would not be something that I would be doing necessarily now because that kind of extends into the business model of the companies that are actually doing that. I see myself more as focusing on the information and that kind of experience. But it’s very early days. And so who knows what ultimately happens. Hey, you never know if you can offer that service as a white label to some of these performers. That’s not the current model, but that’s definitely something that’s going to see you. And frankly, if I don’t do it, what’s going to happen is that only fans will because ultimately for them, they want to keep them because there’s competition in their space. There’s constantly new websites coming up to say, "Hey, be a creator on my platform, my terms are bad, etc." And so while only fans might have a large market share and a lot of mindshare today, that’s great. But six months a year from now, things could be very different if someone comes along with some sort of better service or whatever the model might be that’s more attractive and start luring people away. So it behooves them to invest it. So that’s another wrinkle here is where’s the investment come from? Yeah, they’re pretty well established, although there is some market share for some others. There definitely is. But market share is getting sliced pretty thin because there’s new creator platforms all the time. And at a certain point, there’s definitely going to be some fallout because just like what happened with the cam site space, only so many can make it. And I think it’s almost to the max, although you never know, things can change. So what trends and challenges in the adult industry does Mariah aim to address? The big one is some of the points that I’ve been talking about already, which is the necessity for these creators to spend most time on developing their relationships and selling their content. And last time, marketing themselves, promoting themselves, worrying about being present and active on five different fan sites. Because on one hand, maybe the world is shifted and like you said, the power shifted to the creators, which is excellent. But the lives of the creators become exponentially more complicated potentially because no longer are they dependent on a channel for business and for work, they actually have to manage that themselves. And maybe some have a passion for that. And that’s excellent. However, when you’re competitive in a competitive market, you want to spend as much time on your core product. Your core product isn’t worrying about necessarily where your information is most present and where people can find the most relevant information about you so they can decide whether or not they want to spend their money with you. There’s a component of that statement, which sounds absurd to people in the entertainment industry because they would say that it’s extremely transactional. People just want to go in and get off and move along and whatever. However, the reality of it is that the big industry players, the people that actually have control all the, a lot of the industry’s content who own public with the rights to it, I don’t know if that’s true. But of course, it seems to be the case because a lot of the creators I’ve found don’t really have access or can use their reuse their content. So it’s owned by the people that had hired them. The creators just to interrupt you, the creators like the ones that are on OnlyFans can very much do that. The ones who work for studios, if the studio owns the content, they need to get permission. But there’s a lot of content trades right now. So a studio will shoot a scene, but they have a deal with the creator that the creator can also put that up on their OnlyFans or other platforms. That’s cool. That makes sense. But what ultimately happens here is a couple of things. So like I mentioned early in the podcast that there are a lot of websites today where you can go in, you can create videos and pictures of people that are attractive to you that are completely fictional, that are completely phantoms that have just been invented. Yeah, I like dfake.com that’s owned by a friend of mine. Exactly. And the acceleration and the quality of that is such that you can imagine a future not too far from now where performers are virtual because they can be exactly who you want. They don’t have to take any sort of flaws or anything like that. It’s like this is the kind of person that I want to see and interact with and it will look as lifelike and real as possible as well. And that’s lovely for the people that have built that product, that technology and who are making money from it. But for the workers, the people that fuel it. So I had a bit of an empathy for them in thinking about this too is that what is the defensibility of your business model amid this probable future because although the studios probably love all their actors, their talent, etc. At the same time, if they could strip out all that cost and complication of dealing with people and simply do what I just described, they would do it too because it makes life much easier and it will happen. And so the only defense against that of course is further. I would think that in many ways for the creators, perhaps through the channels by which they’re communicating their content today or something hybrid like with something that I’m trying to build here, be able to take a little more control over this so that it’s not a commodity. If it’s a commodity, the customer’s time and money is available to anybody. But if it’s not a commodity, it’s not. No way it’s not a commodity is if you have a relationship with Vicky Fatt and you like her and you want to see her do stuff and you connect to her, anything that helps contribute to that should have value to you, to her and to the ecosystem of people around her that make that possible. That’s sort of the economic model that could be defensible. But honestly, if you don’t care, you’d rather have a version of Vicky Fatt that’s completely fictional in your mind and go, somebody else who actually creates it for you. Well then that completely disarmediates everything that I just said before and there’s no longer a business to be made. So I’m thinking along these lines too that there’s an unmet need to kind of fit this. And is it a long term solution? I think it is in part because as I said, I’ve done some research here and you know, you probably participate perhaps in these as well is that I’m not so sure when in fact, a lot of this AI will actually substitute for the human-human interaction because although they are getting very, very realistic, there’s some nuances that I’ve discovered that suggest that the human element here is going to be really important. That’s really tough in a digital world. It’s easier with pictures, but it’s harder with video. Yeah, totally. Many people want to see video. Absolutely. And that’s not infeasible, you know, to see that be generated through artificial intelligence. Long time away before it’s going to be indistinguishable and I might be discounting technology and how quickly it can move, but I still think it’s a ways off. In the adult space, I would say so for sure. However, in the mainstream marketplace space, there’s already a high services that will generate production quality commercials that are indiscernible from commercial that you would generate with film crew and a script. I’ve seen them. I’ve even looked into those services to create videos to promote my company. So yeah, and they’re very good. They’re very, very good. And it’s only a matter of time between, it’s only a matter of time before someone’s smart enough to be able to tell that. Again, the challenge though is this constant tension between what people view as objectionable content and the ability to action with technology versus not. So it’s interesting, right? So they don’t entertainment space has lots of data and obviously very analytically driven et cetera at the same time. In some ways they’re laggards in certain segments because they don’t have, and in this space that I’m talking about here, the resources and investment that this requires is immense. I mean, we’re talking billions of dollars of value and money. And it’s because, not because it’s so exciting, it’s because the amount of technology that processes this stuff is massive. It’s the latest in what’s called graphic processing unit GPUs. It’s immense. And so that’s also kind of a problem because it’s kind of hard to justify looking at that through the lens of, I just want to create something that will help generate a picture of a naked person. You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying? It’s like the disconnect exactly. It’s different. I mean, good luck having that come from the adult industry. I can only think of maybe one or two companies that would even attempt that. Based on where they’re at right now, I don’t see them doing that. So unless it comes from outside the industry, some multi-billionaires going to come in and he’s going to create virtual porn and take over the industry. I don’t see that happening. I just don’t see it happening unless Elon Musk wants a new toy outside of Twitter. Exactly. It would require a very unique individual to do that for sure. No doubt about it. No two ways about it. Walk us through the creation process of Mariah, key milestones and how it functions. Sure. Sure. So like I said before, data is the foundation of any sort of project like this, any sort of product, data product like this. So the first step was to actually see what was going to be possible based upon the data that could be fed into something like this. And so the team went through a lot of research to figure out what information can we actually harvest from the public internet about these individuals. And that’s the first question. The second question, can they be put into a form that is discernible by some logic that would then be served to someone through a chat interface? And once that hurdle was cleared and it was with a minimum set of information, like you read the answer to the big event question and the large part, that kind of reflects in part a little bit of the data. There’s other things that the chatbot can answer about her than what was said there, but that was kind of the essence of it. The idea here too would be to help answer some unique questions, not just facts and figures, but their relationship to other performers, like the ones that they’ve performed with most. Like the interesting things that people sometimes wonder about, but cannot easily find an answer to because the data may be there, but there’s just no way of extracting it. And so the idea then would be then to figure out, how do you actually do this? Because you have to obviously have to, it has to live in a technical database. It has to be in the cloud somewhere. It has to be secured. It has to be connected into the code, which would then represent the chatbot. It has to be represented on a website. So it’s actually the architecture for the whole thing needs to be sketched out and then prototyped and tested to make sure that this actually can function and that it’s still compliant with the terms of service of the cloud providers that are being used to host everything. And so on one hand, it’s relatively simple and straightforward because the user experience that you see seems that way. But what’s ultimately happening there is that the question that you enter, the statement that you enter into Mariah basically passes through a series of gates to get to a point where the logic is processed relative to all of the data that’s available that’s being refreshed as often as we can. And then it’s sending that information back and then that answers being processed and then it’s being returned in a state that reflects the person’s question. The challenge is with anything like this is that the tension between hard coding that experience and making it very flexible, flexible meaning that it’s conversational and that it’s adaptable based upon what someone enters. And right now she’s very rigid. Like it says, she’s a newcomer that we’re just trying to use language like that. Ultimately we want her to be able to basically take any input and be able to provide an intelligent answer even if she doesn’t know the answer and be able to maybe interpret the answer. So if you ask a question about a performer like, what was their favorite color or where did they grow up and what school did they go to or whatever, not that everybody answers that, but if she doesn’t know the answer to that, it’s nice to be able to give a contextual non-response as opposed to a general non-response. And there’s some intelligence that has to be coded into that experience that makes it challenging. But I think the ultimate challenge is the data and its currency. And so that’s why when that chat experience came out a year or so ago, it said that it had only data up currently up through I think like 2021. It was not reflective of current data, but see it’s getting better. So what ultimately occurs is that this becomes more real time, but this just adds resource, constraints and other things. So it’s basically a constant struggle between perfection and what’s going to be usable, right? And so perfection, I know what that looks like, but getting there is really a challenge. Yeah, it’s all a process. How does Mariah generate revenue and who are your primary customers? Well, you mean you raise a great point in terms of the business model. So the idea behind porn star metrics is that it’s really kind of a, it’s a think tank slash consulting company that’s looking for monetization opportunities, which means looking for ways of creating something that makes money based upon data that is available to anyone. And Mariah is an example of that with inherent value in being able to do the things that she does today. The question is that who’s she doing that for? And then what’s the economic model? Who’s going to be paying for that? And why would they want to do that? That is still being formulated in this, what I would call this sort of this testing phase, but I think that there’s a few different flavors. You mentioned one that could be explored, which is sort of creating, and that would be, it’s very feasible to create, in some respects, easier to create a very fixed scope version of her that focuses on one particular performer and their entire, all the data about them. And then imagine this, let’s say you have 50,000 people or however many there are that are known or that are worth looking at, you would have immense amount of information about each one of them ultimately compiled into one giant Mariah. And there’s just different versions of Mariah that may be looking at individuals. That would be one model. My other thought here too is that in many respects, the creators themselves have incentive to want to participate and potentially contribute to this because it’s being done in the spirit of helping them. It’s also could potentially be put like the traditional chat experiences that are available now in mainstream technology, general consumers pay a subscription fee to get access to it. And that could definitely be one too. But again, it’s got to be a value exchange. And this goes to what you said earlier about, does it have links? Does it have content? Well, at that point, it better or it might. I just got a link, some links. So in the chat interface, right? And that’s largely just based upon in the design phase, selecting opportunities for that, noting that I don’t know, there’s probably a dozen additional ones that are considered that we may have information for that. We just have not put into that yet. But that’s definitely something that we could do there. So there are multiple methods of making money. However, I guess a little bit kind of like the current sort of mainstream versions of this that are, we know, billions of dollars. They’re also in search of their economic model because it’s often talked about in the press that they’re not making money yet, but obviously they will because the potential here is immense. Look, how long it took Amazon to make money. I mean, it took decades. So they were a bookseller to start out with. What are the key benefits of Mariah for both creators and fans? Well, on the creator side, the benefit is to be able to have a mechanism that you can point people to or that people will find that will help them either discover you or learn more about you such that the relationship that you’re developing with your quote unquote fans can be stronger, more defensible and less likely to a trend or basically churn or leave you as a customer. That’s really the ultimate benefit to them so that they can focus more on content and not worry about what the promotion is to be. It’s got to be exhausting. And whether you’re in this business for five minutes or 15 years or whatever, it’s got to be exhausting to worry about every dimension of your own business. And so the idea in part, this is a business development, customer relationship, generator value proposition to the creator, not to the consumer. The idea is to discover performers because on the inverse of what I just said is the opportunity as a content consumer to discover new performers because obviously there are every day, I don’t know what the numbers are, but there’s got to be hundreds of new people that enter the fray as amateurs or whatever. And they’d like to be discovered too. And at the same time, the people who have been veterans for a long time are in there. They don’t want people shipping away at their business either. And so for the consumer though, the idea here is that you’d be able to discover new people more easily. So if you like a certain type of person or performer that you could find others who are similar to them or share similar characteristics, things like that. And there’s some of the information like that, but the idea here would be to be as specific as possible. And it’s going to be based upon age or ethnicity or multiple dimensions. And so, I mean, it sounds a bit crazy to sort of like the casual, homemade person who thinks this is extremely objectionable. But at the same time, when people are looking at these things, they have these very specific thoughts, done some research about this and it’s true. It’s like, I like this type of person. Right. Show me some creators with big tits, that kind of thing. And even more specific than that, right? Because in one hand, it’s like, that question can be answered. Some creators with 42Ds are bigger. Exactly. Or more very specific dimensions within a range. The more information that is available, the more people will actually use it because the idea here is that you can find much more specific things that are more appealing to you. Because at the end of the day, that’s kind of the human element here is that, you know, you’re constantly searching for something that matches that thing in your head. And she’s learning constantly, right? Well, the idea is to make that self-learning. So yes, the idea is that every time someone understood their question and the answer is the same, that that is captured as part of the experience and that that can be repeated and/or it can be learned from in terms of adding it. So the flip side of that is that for the things that she can’t answer, basically we know all that stuff and we’re going to be adding those capabilities when it makes sense for those things that she cannot answer, whether it’s the way people are asking questions or the people that they’re asking about. What kind of data does Mariah use and how does it stay current instead of relying on outdated information? That’s a very, very good question. I know I asked it. As I mentioned, there’s data all over the internet about performers, profiles, and they’re littered with pop-up ads and viruses and all sorts of things like this. And they’re also not very consistent. So one of the challenges that this project has, just like any project, including that mainstream one that I keep referring to, is that the questions and the answers are only as good as the data. So there’s this concept of hallucination that’s being talked about, which is such a funny term to apply to technology or artificial intelligence. But that’s really what it’s called when the answer is completely confident but completely false. And we’ve done some research into this with some of the language models behind some of these larger companies. And they actually have information about a lot of adult entertainers and their backgrounds and the like. What’s fascinating is that every single answer is a hallucination because every single answer is unique and different and strange. And it’s very, very, very, very weird. So that’s very different, however, from the chat experience. So those same companies will layer on top of that a chat experience that you can use, but they restrict access to that. So what I talked about just before that, I said that, that’s available to developers and people that can get directly to the language model through APIs and other things like that. That’s exactly what we’ve done. So it’s very, very, very interesting. So that’s a constant challenge, which means kind of back to what’s saying about the economic model is that who should know their content better than the people that actually are behind it themselves. And in the longer term, the idea, potentially, is that the creators themselves would own the extent of the content and the one single source of truth about themselves in an environment like this, as opposed to scattered across the internet where people can be making mistakes and having things be inconsistent and not up to date. Sure. How do creators actively participate or contribute to Mariah? Well, I mean, what I would hope for is that there’s an awareness such that they would want to number one. And I’d say they, I mean, anyone for that matter that either finds themselves reflected in her answers today and or would like to be. So that would be lovely. And we would love to be able to hear and get that sort of feedback. But secondly, the way to do that right now is to either donate money to the cause because one of the things that we have at our costs associated with this. So there’s a place on our website that anyone can go to to contribute like in a Patreon kind of mode, sort of to the project in terms of differing the costs. So that has benefits. And what we say there is that if you do that and you are a creator and you have a stake in some of this, we would like to be able to prioritize communication with that individual as it relates to what we’re doing here because industry participation would be lovely and is important so that it reflects the needs and specific wants of the intended customer. So that would be the principal way today. But a longer term, for example, I could imagine that there’d be a version of Mariah or some other cleverly named human chat experience that would intake and authenticate an individual. Just like when you sign up for these fan sites, you have to provide a passport, you have to authenticate your identity from an economic perspective, etc. The same sort of thing would occur for these creators so that they could then go in and they could maintain their information. And this is where this starts to blur the line between those fan sites today that may be exploring things like this or not because, again, it requires such an immense amount of focus and time and effort to do right and do well. But if you think about the general chat experience that I’ve been talking about occasionally in the podcast, the amount of money and attention and value that’s inherent in data-driven insight, even in an adult context, can be very powerful. Whatever be more powerful than the content, probably not. The content is king, but it’s going to be essential. And I think like I talked about, the creators as a group probably have as much at stake, way more at stake potentially than do the production companies or the people that really control the industry. Absolutely. What’s been the reaction to Mariah so far and have you observed any notable trends? What I’m very thankful for is that we haven’t had people abusing it, which is good. We haven’t had people trying to hack it, which is good. We haven’t had people trying to get into it and mess around with it, which is good. And the people that have been asking it questions are asking it legitimate questions. They’re not asking it what I would call dumb, stupid, irrelevant questions, trying to cross her up or expose her lack of intelligence, which of course there’s a dimension to that. So that’s been very helpful. But what’s very interesting too, and eventually we’re going to publish a blog post about this, is just all of those who have been aware of this, and I think I was ex-predeced for a short piece promoting it, and that’s how you discovered it here. It’s interesting, we’re going to post something that describes who are the people that are being looked at as a consequence of this. And to suggest a couple of different things, right? It’s a very small sample size relative to millions, but it just shows you from a technology perspective, an industry perspective, who’s actually paying attention to it. And a lot of the people that have been asking these questions, could be publicists, could be who knows who, but people potentially related just in terms of daily life or the business to these individuals, checking to see is this person here. And because we’ve gotten comments through our website, which we actually asked for, like this person’s missing and you want to add them, or this person’s information is wrong, and so we’re getting that. So in some respects, it’s informing to my mind, like who’s paying attention, which itself is interesting because it shows sort of like who’s actually thinking about this stuff and thinking it’s important enough to look at. Yep. You’ve hinted at a version 2.0, maybe you can share what new features or improvements are coming up. Sure. So that’s exciting because we’re going to be increasing the amount of data as well as the richness of the answers that are asked and be more specific. So whereas today where answers tend to be very general, you’ll be able to get more specific, more nuanced answers, specific questions. So rather than just a generic backgrounder, you’ll get a much more tailored experience based upon not just the data available, but the question that you’re asking. So that’s kind of one dimension, but we’re also going to be adding, and this is going to be interesting. So we’re going to actually add the generative AI responses from some of these public large language models that I mentioned are available, but that hallucinate because they don’t violate terms of service for anyone because the data is there, but we’re going to add that so that everyone who is interested can see exactly what’s happening. So it’s a little bit of an, it’s a thought experiment to a certain degree so that you could come in and you can see here’s the factual information and here’s what this thing is deriving and look at the distinction there. It’s very interesting, right? So in some respects, it’s making the case for paying attention to this because what happens over time is that that hallucinated, very poorly answered question could propagate and actually become fact somewhere else, right? Well, I mean, come on Gibson, if it’s on the internet, it’s got to be true, right? Well, that’s the thing is that the beauty of the adult entertainment is that the content is all over the internet and that’s excellent, right? So you go to Twitter and someone has like a million followers and there’s 20 trillion pictures and videos and it’s like, what a great promotional mechanism. And the other hand, that’s just open season for something to come in and interpret it a certain way, interpret it incorrectly. And honestly, I mean, the creators, they want people to appreciate them and give them the money, not somebody else who potentially had created something once or 20 times and owns the license to it and ideally, you want people to come to you. Well, the only way to do that is to take control of information about yourself to the extent you can and you can’t control everything. You can’t control everything. It’s on Google or everything else, but you can control potentially something like Mariah in terms of what she knows and understands about you. If that service is open to this idea of representing you as an individual from a data perspective, that is publicly available, right? Because the data is out there. It’s for everyone to use or know about. Are there certain sites? I’ve noticed free ones. I’ve noticed text videos. Are there certain sites that you’re scraping? We don’t scrape sites, but there are certain sites that Mariah is certainly looking at. It’s basically looking for any sort of adult content site or site that has information about the creators themselves. And so there’s dozens of these websites. And so just like the big public companies, the idea is to be able to look at them. I wouldn’t use the word scrape because that’s really not what’s being done. However, it is looking at the site as if it’s a consumer. So I have a Mariah of a million people that work for me, which I don’t, but each of them is basically going out every day and they’re looking at these websites and they’re just writing down on a piece of paper everything that they see. And then it’s going to tell a genie about this information that genie, so it takes a million of those inputs in and that does it. So it’s a little bit more like that. For creators or veteran performers tuning in, what advice would you offer them to best use the evolving digital landscape? So advice is a dime a dozen. I’m sure that everyone has an opinion. But I mean, obviously they already, content creators already recognize that they’re living in an increasingly competitive market. And so therefore you need to spend your time and your money most wisely. So where do you want to spend your time? You want to spend your time developing relationships with your customer, because those are the individuals that will stick with you, that will like your content and you want to be able to evolve with them and their needs. The only way that you’re able to do that is to understand what they’re interested in and give them that information. So if you can automate that, if you can offload that into a chat experience, that would be very wise if you could do that because otherwise you’re spending way too much time. So from an advice perspective, I would say necessarily contact me and us and figure out how we can make sure that we’re collecting your information accurately. But I would definitely keep your eyes on these opportunities because this is going to be a fact, because the worst case scenario is that you don’t want to become a commodity. I mean, you are at a certain degree, but at the same time, if you become a true commodity, that means that you no longer have intrinsic value and then you can be swapped with a fake artificial person. And whether it’s next year or 10 years from now, that’s where things are trending. And so in the future, will there be humans in this space? Of course there will be, but there may be far fewer. The amateur may no longer feel it’s worth it because there’s nothing there for them because honestly, no one can tell the difference between an amateur real person and an amateur fake person who actually is tailored to your specific interests and your desires and what you most value. I would definitely keep your eyes on these things. You don’t have to become a technologist, but it does seem to be the case that the technology savvy in this kind of goes back to my comment about trends. The people that are being looked at and searched on in our testing phase, to me, it illustrates that potentially these are some of the individuals who may be more of those forward thinkers that are thinking about this. And so those might be the ones that have a longer to live careers if they get this, what they want to do. Sure. Makes sense. Well, Gibson, 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. Thanks, Bruce. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, thanks. Thank you. My broker tip today is part two of how to buy a site. Last week we discussed first deciding the type of site you want to buy and then establishing what your budget is. Next, it’s time to look for your new website. So where do you look? Well, Adult Site Broker is a great place to start. We always have a nice variety of website and non-website properties for sale. But if there’s a particular type of site you want, we can also act as your buyer’s broker to help you find just the right site. Other places to look are boards like xbiz.net and gfy.com. But to be completely honest, unless what you’re looking for is a really low-end property, you’re probably not going to find what you’re looking for there. Of course, you could contact site owners yourself who take it from someone who does it for a living. It’s a major hassle and it can be really hard to even find out who owns a site. Most all adult sites use who is privacy from their domain registrar, so when you send them an email, it will be an anonymous address and in most cases the emails aren’t returned. We have a huge database of sellers and generally know who owns what. And if it’s a website of note, if we don’t know who owns it, we can usually find out. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with performer Steph Sia. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest Gibson Allman of Pornstar Metrics. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]