Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 213 with Melrose Michaels

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 Melrose Michaels of Sex Work CEO. We’ve doubled our affiliate payouts at ASB Cash. Now when you refer sellers or buyers to us, you’ll receive 20% of our broker commission on any and all sales that result from that referral for life. Check out ASB Cash for more details and to sign up. And we’re proud to announce our latest project, thewaronporn.com. You’ll find articles from industry websites as well as mainstream publications. It’s designed to raise awareness of our industry’s plight in the war on porn and the numerous attacks on our industry. You’ll find all that and more at thewaronporn.com. Now let’s feature our property the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to offer for sale an innovative marketing agency that specializes in managing the top .01% only fans profiles in the world. It’s just under a year old but is growing very rapidly. They fully manage creators workflow from promotion to monetization. They’ve developed an internal CRM that empowers the sales management, marketing, automation and analytics. This is one of the most relevant advantages of the agency that allows it to drive in-target traffic to profiles and monetize them. The company is already doing over 2 million euros in annual revenue from just over 20 creators. They have a database of over 1 million contacts and 600,000 unique user accounts. This is an outstanding opportunity for anyone to enter the world of only fans management and immediately become one of the top agencies in the world along with its software, processes and know-how which will allow you to bring models up to three times their initial gross monthly revenue or established agencies can acquire the company and expand their business. Only 2.59 million euros. Now time for this week’s interview. My guest today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Melrose Michaels of Sex Work CEO. Maros, thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure. Maros was born in rural Pennsylvania and grew up in Chicago. She was a go-go dancer on weekends in Chicago before she started camming in 2011. An entrepreneur since the age of 11, she is a distinguished figure in the adult entertainment industry with an impressive career spanning over 12 years. Maros is renowned for her independent work as an adult performer and has significantly contributed to the industry through her entrepreneurial ventures. She is the founder of SexWorks CEO, an organization dedicated to providing essential business education and resources to adult performers with the aim to enhance their professional development and success. In addition to her educational efforts, Maros has co-founded SWR Data, the adult industry’s pioneering market research company. The initiative underscores her commitment to leveraging data-driven insights to foster growth and innovation within the sector. Her work through both companies has been instrumental in promoting a more informed, sustainable and progressive adult industry. Maros’ field’s advocacy is best done through education, data and community support. Ultimately, those things will drive the industry forward. Her expertise and innovative approaches have set new standards and paved the way for future advancements in the adult entertainment landscape. She was featured in the movie Money Shot about Cornhub. You can find Maros on Twitter and Instagram @melrosemichels and SexWorks CEO on Twitter and Instagram @sexworkceo. Where else? Maros, you’ve been a performer for over a decade. Talk about the changes from when you started to now in our industry. Yeah, absolutely. So, when I actually got involved in the adult industry, I entered the space as a webcam model. You know, the webcam part of our industry is very low barrier to entry. You just need a computer, a Wi-Fi connection and a webcam. You’re off to the races and you can build a business. So, that’s really where I started and I did that and kind of narrowly focused on that for about eight years with the sole goal of just building an audience and building a community. And around that eight-year mark, I started noticing that a lot of my community and my regulars were slowly kind of dwindling away and they were kind of not showing up the way they had for all the years prior. So, I really took a moment to evaluate where I was in terms of the landscape and saw that, you know, people weren’t sitting down at computers anymore. They were putting all their attention into their cell phones. So, that’s really when I decided to shift and try to find a way to get onto people’s cell phones and that’s really where the whole premium Snapchat model in our space took off and blew up as a trend. And because I was able to identify that, I really got to capitalize and ride that wave. And after that, you know, that died down and because that trend and capturing it had such a huge ROI for me, I really saw the fans take its turn in our space and saw that coming. So, I’ve been able to kind of capitalize on trends as they’ve come through just by being really aware of where things are and noticing when things are changing. And I think that it gets really easy to become habitual in our space and to do things that have seemingly worked before. And it’s hard to kind of divorce those ideas and those patterns when they stop working because they have rewarded you in the past. So, that’s been kind of a secret weapon I feel of mine is to just not get married to any of the ways we do things because they are often changing. Well, I think anyone in business needs to do that, right? Yeah, definitely. How big has the fan site thing been in this industry? Obviously, fan sites kind of came up, came into the space and disrupted everything. We’ve seen this industry go in circles in the past where it’s kind of the live cam stuff, then it’s the membership sites, then it’s the clip stores, and it’s the now we’re in this premium social era of things. But things often work in these cycles after so many years will go by and fansites really came and disrupted everything because it took power away from the studios and the mainstream platforms and sites and really gave that back to independent performers. So for the first time, you didn’t have to invest all this money and build your own membership site and you didn’t have to work with a studio to have or be featured on a membership site. You’re able to join a platforms like OnlyFans, or Fensantro, or Fansley, or you know, name many of them and really just launch your business yourself without having to pay any cash upfront. And that opened the doors for a lot of people in our space to build wealth in a way that they hadn’t been able to in the past or they hadn’t had access to in the past. Yeah, that was actually my next question. How significant is it that creators now have the power because of the creator economy? It’s really significant because it’s changing where the money is handed. So instead of, you know, these big studios and these big marketing machines being able to, you know, gatekeep or keep someone in or out of an industry or space or keep them in the limelight or out of the limelight. It really allows for us to make our own way. And I think that’s really significant because like I said, it changes that barrier to entry where any creator with any niche, with any genre, with any unique selling proposition can kind of come in and make their own way. And we also have the advantage that it’s happening in the social media era where even traffic is accessible to the average creator now. And that also was is different than before. You needed to understand affiliates and understand pay per click and understand how to run ads on tube sites. And we don’t have to know any of that. We just have to make something that’ll go viral and then capitalize on converting the traffic. So the creator economy has really opened up the way the adult industry works to a lot of people that it wouldn’t have been available to before. Well, you said you just have to make something go viral, but there’s a strategy to that, right? Yeah, going viral, there’s definitely a strategy and there’s a formula in a science to it. It doesn’t mean that the formula is like a math formula where no matter how many times you do it, you get the same outcome or the same equation to unfold. It’s more of an art, I would say, than a science, but every piece of viral content has a hook that captures the listener, the watcher, the viewer’s attention. Every piece of viral content delivers on the clickbait that it’s captioned with. Every piece of viral content usually changes frames very quickly. There’s a pace to it that keeps the viewer or listener very engaged. So there’s certainly an art and a formula you can follow. It doesn’t mean if you do it a thousand times, you’re going to get a thousand home runs, but you learn that with practice and you can dial it in and fine tune it as you get better at those things. Sure. What have been your proudest achievements as a performer? I think my proudest achievements as a performer is really the work that I’m doing now on the business side with SexRick CEO because as a performer, I’ve put out beautiful content and I’ve had incredible relationships and rapport that I’ve built with fans and I’ve built a really beautiful community that I get to call home. And I’m proud of that in itself. That’s an achievement. But really being able to take all of that experience and knowledge and then provide it back to a community that has given me so much that I have to be grateful for in my life. I think that’s my proudest achievement because I really feel there’s a debt to this space for what I’m able to have as a result of participating in it. And I think that it’s important that I help make it easier for someone else to succeed the way I have been able to because it’s not an easy thing to do. No, not at all. I think being a performer is one of the hardest things to do. Yeah, I would agree with that entirely. At what point in your career as a performer, did you decide to take things from the next level and become an entrepreneur in the space? Interesting because I feel like I was always an entrepreneur first. My history really goes back from being 11 years old and starting a pet sitting business and then walking 12 blocks in a radius around my house to market it and go door to door and pitch my service and hang up flyers and do all of that stuff. So I was always an entrepreneur first. Of anything I would say coming into this space, I got to apply the skills in terms of business sales and marketing that I already had and naturally kind of am gifted with and bringing that and filling those gaps and approaching it like a business I think has kind of been a secret weapon of mine. Gotcha. I read your mission statement on the sex work CEO side and I want to repeat it here. It says the only way to empower the online sex work community is to make sure the tools and resources they need are available to them. That includes helping them recognize the value of their business skills both inside and outside of our industry. The first step in shifting the paradigm from online sex worker to sex work CEO begins when you press play, begin building your empire with new courses added monthly, insightful blogs and social community spaces hosted every week. Talk a bit about how you’ve been able to do this and what your company’s work means to you. Yeah. So I would say that the nutshell elevator pitch version of that is just that sex work CEO empowers adult creators with education, resources and community to nurture their growth personally and professionally while advocating for positive change. And the way that we try to do that is in three ways. We believe in tactical empowerment, which is just empowering creators by providing them with the knowledge, tools and resources. And we believe that we can do this through meaningful advocacy, which is actively advocating for positive change within the space and championing organizations and performers along the way. People in organizations like FSC is a really great example of that and the work we’ve done alongside them. And then we believe in this concept of transcendent impact because we aspire to have a positive and transcendent impact beyond the adult industry, recognizing that the skills and resource acquired by our community members can contribute to a much broader professional arena. You can be an adult creator and you can understand and learn how to create, film, produce, edit content, distribute content, manage relationships, do sales, do marketing, do all of these things that big Fortune 500 companies have and dedicate entire departments to. And those things go way beyond adult and those skills go with these creators as they venture into all of these different arenas. But I think that’s how we’re trying to approach this mission is those three things, the tactical empowerment, meaningful advocacy and transcendent impact. And in terms of what it means to me, I mean, it means everything because it means that the people that come into contact with the stuff and the work that we do will leave better than they found it. Like they will leave with information and knowledge that they wouldn’t have otherwise found or wouldn’t have otherwise had access to so much of the information that we put out for free is the stuff that other people are charging for courses or charging behind a paywall. And we just don’t believe that education should be gate kept like that. At a later time, if we ever introduce something that, you know, is a product or the service and it has a cost attached to it, it would only be so under the guise that whatever you’re paying for that thing, it will make an ROI net positive for you for having purchased it. We’re like, we really aim to be different in that way and we want to build a company that has those core values and delivers on its mission and allows for creators to not only want to engage with us and our brand and our company, but want to be a part of continuing to build it. Like, I can’t be the only educator for sex work CEO forever because I only know so many things and I’ve only approached my sex work and my adult performer career from a handful of lenses. I haven’t done every niche. I haven’t, you know, I haven’t done every kind of content. I have my own boundaries and values and brand alignment. So at a certain point, it’s really going to come down to our community to continue this mission with us and to participate in it. And I think that’s really where the beauty and the impact truly lies. Fantastic. I’ll read another excerpt from the site because I think it’s important as well. As a 10 year veteran in the adult industry, I know how hard it is to get started in the space with nothing and no one to help you. With resources for adult content creators being so limited, the best way I could think to give back to an industry that gave me so much was to try and make as many adult creators as successful as possible. As with most things that all starts with education. Talk about how important education is to creators and how you’ve built the curriculum. Education is, I think, fundamental for most things in life. And so without having an education on just how to create content, without having an education on how to create trailers that convert or how to distribute cross platforms, you’re really left with no direction in how you continue on this path. So having the education component, it allows you to have a guide and it allows you to also enter the space with the right expectations and the right understanding of the work that stands before you because it is work and there’s a lot that goes into it. So I think that’s really where education is a key component in this bigger picture. And in terms of building the curriculum, we started this brand mostly on Twitter, which is hard to believe now a few years looking back. But Twitter is where so much of our community exists and it has been able to flourish because they do allow adult content and they do help foster those communications and build that community sentiment. And when you kind of take the Twitter base or that sphere and you try to move it to other platforms, it becomes really difficult not just as a performer, but as me building a business around education about being a performer. So we really encountered some hardship of launching a TikTok and getting deleted and trying to get videos to land on YouTube and be successful. So so much of our curriculum was left to be just strictly written word on Twitter, which is very fleeting. And it’s not very user friendly or useful and it’s hard to track down when you need it. After we did that and we built the audience there on Twitter, we decided it was really fundamental to start to document and share all of these things over on YouTube to build more of a backlog of education. And even if it doesn’t go viral and even if it doesn’t, you know, get all the views because YouTube doesn’t necessarily like the stuff we’re putting out and doesn’t feed it to the algorithm, it’ll be there as a library and a body of work that people can refer back to and can lean on when they need those answers to those questions. So we started to build the curriculum out there in a way where it’s not just tutorials, but it’s also business philosophy and business strategy and the things that people will need to reach for when they hit certain levels of their adult performer career. So it’s not necessarily a course one, course two, course three, it’s kind of a come when you need it and receive it when you’re ready to put it into practice or into place. And that’s the reason we’ve done that is just because that’s how I’ve kind of done it myself. You don’t know what you need until it’s missing and then you seek it out and then you implement the answer and you, you know, you overcome the obstacle. So that’s been our approach thus far. Yeah, just don’t get banned on YouTube. Yeah, we’re trying hard not to. Oh, good. I’ve got two strikes. Anyway, why aren’t there more resources out there like sex work CEO for creators? So with so many creators out there, do you think there would be more places for them to go to learn? Yeah, you would. And it’s a combination of things really. So it’s the first part of which I alluded to is it’s very difficult for even education about this career to exist on social media. We’ve lost accounts, like I said, and it’s hard to find a safe place to put all of that information. But on the flip side to produce this kind of education at scale, it’s being a content creator twice. So not only am I an adult performer and I’m making my explicit content and I’m posting it, distributing it, marketing it, building a sales funnel, converting my fans into subscribers. I’m doing all of that on the creator side. But then on the reflective, on the mirror image side for sex work CEO as a company, I’m creating the YouTube videos. I’m creating every tweet we write. I’m creating every newsletter that goes out. I’m filming, I’m editing, I’m scripting, I’m doing all of that. So I think the reason it hasn’t been done super effectively is because it’s a lot to do and you have to be two creators at once almost. And it’s not easy. And I am not necessarily thriving at it at every moment of every day. But we’re definitely committed to the long term vision and that in itself breeds consistency for me. So. Sure. If you’re talking to a creator, why would you tell them they should come to sex work CEO? I would just let them know that it’s a resource that’s available. I don’t, I don’t necessarily believe that sex work CEO is the right home for every creator to come across and take what we say as gospel, to be honest. I think the creators that gravitate towards us and understand what we’re talking about is typically the business savvy, entrepreneurial minded, early adopter type of creator. I think that’s really our audience. I don’t think it’s every adult creator because a lot of adult creators would be so happy to be swept up into an agency and have an agency come in and manage their pages entirely. And they just stick to filming content and submitting it to a Dropbox link every week. Those are not the creators we’re really talking to. You know, we’re talking to the creators who want to be independent of that, who don’t want to cut in some guy in some part of the country for 35 to 50% of all their revenue. We’re talking to those creators who want to be independent, who want to build the business and who want to take the skills from building their adult business into future business ventures as they go through their career path. We want them to understand how to build a brand, not just how to build an only fans page. And I think that’s the people we’re talking to. Interesting. Yeah. When you suggest like, why should a creator come and listen to us? I don’t think all of them should. I think the creators that want to build businesses should come and listen to us. So what are your thoughts on the whole only fans agency spear? It sounds like you think there’s two different types of creators, the ones that need something like that and the ones that don’t. I do. I do believe there’s those two types of creators, absolutely. And my feelings on only fans agencies are mixed because you get, there’s also two kinds of agencies. So there’s the only fans agency that is super predatory and they actually don’t offer much in the way of value. They come in, they put a chat team that’s usually terrible quality on your page. That chat team then uses this business model of churn and burn where they take your fans, they try to do hard sales on them and get as much money out as they can. And then they let them unsubscribe because there’s no rapport being built. There’s no relationship building happening. And those agencies typically also don’t offer anything in the way of traffic. They come in, they take a percentage of the page from you while they’re actively killing your brand and your page. So for those like predatory type of agencies, which there are many of them, they would be the majority in my opinion. I really am not fond of. And that’s another reason I really push for this independent creator career path is because I don’t want people falling prey to those kinds of agencies. And on the flip side, there are really positive agencies that actually do support the creator long term in terms of building their brand, building relationships with their fans, and relationship management. Those agencies typically also drive traffic that the creator wouldn’t otherwise have access to that’s very valuable. And those agencies might be changing, charging the same percentages to those creators, but they’re really bringing value at scale. So like the creator that needs an agency like that and could benefit from a positive and a well intentioned agency. That’s the creator that is really large. You’re talking about like the Riley Reads of the world or the Lana Rhodes of the world or the line of the plugs, because they have so much at scale. It’s just not feasible to do chat with that many fans. They have just so much value where that really is a value add and make sense for them. So I think it depends on the type of creator. And I think it depends on the intention of the agency. Everything does have its place. Like I do believe that any business model that is profiting is proving that it is working in some degree, whether that’s in a good way or a bad way. So everything does have its place. And I just think that creators that want to go that route should do so with all of the information that they need to make a well educated decision about that path in particular. Yeah. I think the predatory agencies don’t last very long. I think that they close up and open up again. And they have bad reputations because creators talk. We broker some agencies, but we endeavor to broker the agencies that are the top ones, that are the ones that are actually bringing value to the industry. And I think that there is a definite line between the two and it’s a very thick line. And there’s some creators who need it. Some creators who need it. Some of the new ones, they actually end up making more money working with an agency. But I also agree with you that if somebody’s got everything together, then they can get by without it. There’s no two ways about it. Yeah. Absolutely. I think that you’re right in what you were saying that some created greatly benefit because a lot of the creators that came in, especially during the COVID era, the pandemic with that big boom, they came into a time and a place where traffic was heavy because everyone was home from work and the bearer entry was super low because anyone could sign up for only fans. And it was kind of easy pickings to thrive in that ecosystem at that time. We’re seeing that die down now. Whereas those creators that came in during that period, I think they really benefit from agencies because they didn’t have to put in a decade of work to understand how sex worker adult performer careers really play out. They were able to come in, capitalize, join an agency and the agency took them all the way. And I think that’s phenomenal. That’s the path that you were able to pull off as a creator and more power to you 100%. I wish a decade of hardship or struggle to learn all the skills on anyone if they could avoid it. I think that’s fantastic. But unfortunately, that’s typically not sustainable long term for most people. And also those skills don’t get the chance for over should they want to start other businesses and other avenues. So there’s a pro and con for sure. Yeah. All they learn how to do is be a creator and they don’t learn any other aspects of the business. Yeah, absolutely. In your opinion, what makes a successful creator? My opinion, what makes a successful creator is the same thing that makes a successful entrepreneur and that is discipline. It is very difficult to work for yourself just in general in any aspect. It’s very difficult to be consistent with content creation or be consistent with social media posting or be consistent with anything in life. So ultimately, I think if you wanted to dwindle it down to one word or one idea, it’s always discipline. And I don’t think that’s unique to us in this industry or this space. I think that’s unique to entrepreneurs everywhere. Okay. And why do creators fail? The first one, discipline. It’s the same thing. If you don’t have the discipline to script the content, film the content, edit the content, distribute the content and then do it again the next day, you have nothing to sell. You have no unique value proposition. You’re not bringing anything to the marketplace. So I think the same reason people succeed is the same reason people fail. It just depends what you do with that core reason and how you manage it. Always, yeah, absolutely. Makes good sense. Talk about SWR data and its importance. Yes. Okay. So I love this. This is our industry market research company. This is something I co-founded with Mike Stabil. I’m really proud to be partnering with him on it. What it is is essentially a place where we gather data from the creators and performers themselves. So we will survey a ton of creators and performers and then we collect all the data and pull all the insights from it. What makes it so unique is that we are the only ones with platform agnostic data in the space. Only fans will have data on their creators and what they earn or what makes them succeed or fail or what features are useful. Fans, essentially, would have the same on their own. Fans, they would have the same on their own. But none of them know about each other. So we know that data, despite what platform these creators are on, we also know data that is not quantifiable, that has nothing to do with these platforms. So for example, we know how many creators have lost a financial institution such as banking or a cash-up, Venmo, PayPal, etc. due to their work in the adult industry. We know how many creators have faced housing discrimination for their work in the industry. So we also have data like that that is pretty much impossible to collect if it’s not coming from the creators themselves. So it’s been really valuable to have all this, to be able to provide insights back to the creator community about where we’re thriving, where we’re challenged, what kind of content is performing, what kind of content is not performing, what your fans might be looking for, how to better interact or engage with fans. So providing it back to the community has been amazing. And then also on the reverse side, we have these platforms that are trying to make the best platform for creators and have no idea what our needs are. So being able to provide insights through our lens of like, this is what creators want from the platform. This is what features they use on a platform. This is what’s going to make a creator successful on a platform. And providing that data back to, you know, platform the companies within our space to help make better products and better services for our creators. So it’s really a twofold approach to making a better future and a better landscape for our adult industry. One that serves the creators and one that serves the platforms so they can better serve the creators. And that’s really been kind of our mission and our goal there. That’s really awesome. I didn’t know Mike was involved. Yes, he is. Yeah, it is a very happy marriage. I love that man. One of my favorite people. I agree with you. Me too. You recently did an AI instructional video on your platform. How important do you expect AI to be to creators? Love that question. I’m a huge fan of AI. I also believe that I understand a lot of the inherent risks that it’s going to bring to our space and to our industry and to the economy as a whole. I think AI is going to be a huge disruptor in everything that’s going on in adult right now. You already see it with the AI telegram bot girlfriends that they’ve released on the market. You see it in a product like Sleshy that has AI profiles. And you see all of the mainstream social media platforms really bracing for this new wave of AI because they have the ability to mark content AI generated on these social platforms. So I think it’s going to be very disruptive. I think creators need to really understand AI and how it works and what it means and how to use it to their benefit and capitalize on it. From my experience, our community is very torn on the topic of AI. There’s the camp that really believes that it’s going to be great and can use those tools to their advantage and put them in practice and in place. And then there’s the other camp that is really kind of afraid of AI and they think that it’s going to replace them or divide their audience and deplete their revenue. So I can see where everyone’s coming from and I think that as long as we can have really honest, transparent conversations about it and as long as we keep those conversations open to being continued conversations that all of us ultimately can benefit overall from my eye. But I also tend to be pretty optimistic with things. So maybe I’m naive. Who knows? It’s early days. Got to try to be optimistic. I think you put it the perfect way. You’ve been very outspoken about the legal aspects of our business and the mounting war on porn against our industry. The religious right has always been against us. So that’s nothing new. Why do you think all of a sudden the attacks have become more frequent? It’s hard to know why they become more frequent. I think an easy thing to attribute it to is the little bit of success organizations like Ennecocy have had against Born Hub as of late. And also just the policy and the legislation in the US has kind of swung to this more conservative side of things for the last couple of presidency. So I think everything kind of swings one way and then swings the other. We’re in this more conservative right swing right now and it’s very frustrating. I feel I have no choice but to be outspoken about these things because one, I am a female identifying cis white creator. So my body and my bodily autonomy has been jeopardized with the loss of like Roe v. Wade. I also am from a state in Tennessee where I lost my access to abortion and that kind of healthcare. So I’m personally affected and a lot of people don’t understand that Roe v. Wade set a lot of precedent and principle that helps porn become legal in America. So all of these things snowball and they gain momentum upon each other. So now when we’re in this conversation as of late about age verification in adult and you’ve got something like 19 states riding this wave of requiring an ID to access adult sites on the surface of that, that sounds all good and great because of course I don’t want minors or children accessing adult sites. But at the same time, you have to understand what rights you are giving away in terms of privacy and safety when you’re doing these things. So it shouldn’t be called age verification because it is not that. If we wanted to age verify children and keep them off of adult sites, you could do that with parental control. You can do that with good parenting. You can do that with changing the Wi-Fi password. There are many ways to do that and accomplish that outright. But age verifying with an ID on adult platforms actually doesn’t achieve that because the reality is anyone can get a VPN and can go around that state’s policy. So this is what we saw in Texas is that the moment they implemented this instead of people giving their ID to the government to mishandle, which is what happens. What actually happens is they get a VPN and they reroute their IP address. So not only is this kind of policy not effective and we’ve proven it, we’ve seen it, it’s also very, very dangerous. So what people don’t understand is when you ID verify on these websites, these adult sites, the third party that does this process to check the ID, they ping it off of a DMV or an employer or a lender or a bank. So now, even though this third party doesn’t maintain, you know, you were on a porn site trying to access porn and verifying your ID, but your bank will hold that information. Your DMV will. Your employer could. They didn’t agree to not holding that information. So now you’re facing the lack of privacy for what you’re doing in your own home on the internet. You’re also facing potential discrimination for not getting a new job or not getting a home loan or not getting a driver’s license and all of these other things. And that is all inherently risky and dangerous before you even get to the other stuff that’s going on, which is that people are using these as phishing scams. So when you’re trying to verify your ID and you’re holding it up to a camera for a porn site and it goes through this process of verification, a lot of this is a phishing scam where your camera keeps recording and records you in the privacy of your home after you’ve ID verified and it records what you do on these porn sites. And then not only is it releasing that to a black market, that video of you for extortion, but also your legal identification information off of the ID that you scanned to have accessed it. Lovely, huh? Yeah, it’s terrifying to me. And then the idea that the government is equipped to handle these things or that it is comfortable outsourcing these things when we all know the internet is not a private or safe place to begin with. It’s not safe or immune to hacking or bad, you know, malicious actors. It’s bonkers that anyone could take this as a good thing at face value because all it does is put them at risk as consumers. And it also just opens up a bigger playing field for the people that don’t have to abide by US law so that you’ve got to consider, you know, Russian based websites that do host illegal content such as rape content or CSAM child pornography content because the people that don’t want to age verify, they’re just going to go to a website on the internet because it is a free internet that doesn’t require them to. And the sites that don’t require them to have a lot of really, really bad, unethically made adult content on them. So all of this is bad news and I can’t help but be half spoken about it because I’m passionate about it and it affects me. Tennessee is going to pass an age verification law and not only that, but Tennessee is also criminalizing adult creators in my state with up to 15 years in jail for producing adult content. So I have a lot, yeah, I have a lot to say on this topic and it will certainly not be the last time you hear something about this coming from my mouth because I have to fight it. It affects me. Might be time to get out of Tennessee. No, no, it might be time to change the people in power in Tennessee. That’s what I think. Well, I agree with you. I agree with you, but be careful. So how do we win this war? I think we win the war with our voting rights. Obviously, you need to encourage creators to understand how policy impacts them. There’s a huge part of our community that is just simply uninformed. So it starts there. It starts with information and education and that’s why we’re passionate about being a part of that conversation. And then beyond that, making sure people are informed in voting in alignment with things that are good for them and safe for them and protect them and their careers. It also comes down to making sure that you are a part of the future of our space and that you are helping the community for the long term and helping to shape the landscape in the long term because it’s not just about holding on to or maintaining your rights in this country or in this space. It’s also about advocating and laying the groundwork to have better rights in the future and have better access in the future and have a better future in general. So I think it might start with education and making sure everyone’s informed, but ultimately it leads with the actions we take with that information. We can’t just do nothing with it. We have to take action with it. So that is the second qualifier to that for sure. Well, Ann, I’m sure you agree with this. Also, our best friends in this fight are the Free Speech Coalition and everyone should be supporting it. Absolutely. I’m a Free Speech Coalition member. I donate to them. I’ll talk at any webinar they put me on. I will sit on any panel. I will do whatever it takes because they are really our main and our strongest voice in this fight and in every fight, to be honest. So yeah, absolutely. I can’t support them enough. Absolutely. Talk a bit, and you alluded to this earlier, talk about banking discrimination and adult, which you’ve also been outspoken on. How do we as an industry get past this issue? Well, it’s hard to say how do we get past it because it’s so much out of our hands in terms of being semestical. They really are these gatekeepers in our space. But there are people trying to actively build solutions for this. There are people with the resources that are working on things for our future. So I’m hopeful there. In terms of how it affects us, though, as creators, we lose bank accounts every day. The data from SWR data, my company, shows that one in four creators loses access to financial institutions, and that’s a huge percentage. That is wild. One thing that we’ve been able to do is actually take the data from SWR and take it to Congress. We informed Congress about these financial discrimination practices and how they’re affecting our community and how they’re affecting legal business in the US because this is legal business. For us to not be able to operate and have safe banking, it is completely in dissonance with the fact that we are operating legal businesses. Congress was open to hearing and seeing the data. They weren’t aware at the extent of the problem, and it was met with some bipartisan support. So we’re hopeful that in the future, by continuing to provide the data and by collecting the data from our community through SWR, we can continue to help inform and educate Congress on these things so that we can make a path forward to have a future that doesn’t include financial discrimination. All these things take time, of course, and they take creator and performer participation because without them taking our surveys and sharing their experiences, we really have nothing to bring to people in power. So it starts with our community and making sure that they’re willing and open to discussing this with us and having us facilitate those conversations with the people in power. Didn’t I hear something about a proposed law that they’re kicking around? There’s a lot proposed. There’s a lot of stuff going on right now, so my focus is first and foremost on the age verification, since it could put me in jail. There’s no shortage of stuff being proposed, and I’m hopeful because ultimately, in the US, we are a capitalistic country, and things that drive revenue typically drive our policy. So if you consider for the amount of money that comes from the adult industry as a whole, it is a massive segment to try to keep out of banking. Even when you consider recently the new CEO of OnlyFans, I believe I saw an article that she lost her banking because she received payments from OnlyFans, which is hilarious and awful, all in one. But even that speaks to the chokehold that banks have on our industry and the need for a solution to it. In my experience and as an entrepreneur just in general, when there is a need for a solution, that is good business. So someone will enter and build that solution out and we’ll have something in the future. It’s just a matter of time. It’s a worldwide problem. It’s not just a US problem. Yeah, absolutely. Like age verification and discrimination against the adult industry. Yes, absolutely. So you’re a very busy lady. If you have free time, what do you like to do? I don’t know much about that concept. Yeah, I really enjoy all of the work that I do, and despite its overwhelming times and despite the volume and times. So really I do feel a lot of my spare time with work because I enjoy what I do and I enjoy the sensation from achievement and I enjoy the rewards of the fruit of my labor. So I don’t generally have a lot of free time, but when I do, I really focus on spending time with the people that matter the most to me. Like, for example, I just had friends in town this weekend who came and visited and we had beautiful dinner and also a little road trip and we ate great food at this little French cafe that I found and then had a pizza in the hot tub. So like anytime that I can. Don’t drop it. Yeah, no, it was wonderful and also so unnecessary and fantastic on one. But when I have free time, I really try to focus it on being present with the people that are most important to me. That’s the way things should be. Well, Melrose, I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on Adult Sight Broker Talk and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure. Thank you. My broker tip today is part four of how to buy a site. Last week we discussed making an offer and deciding the best price for the site you’re buying. Once you’ve made your offer, the work begins. If you’re working with a broker like say, oh, I don’t know, maybe Adult Sight Broker, we handle the negotiation for you. Let’s say the seller doesn’t accept your offer. They may make a counter offer. If you decide that you’re willing to pay more, you can either accept their counter offer or counter back to them. A good rule of thumb is to always leave room to negotiate. So don’t make an offer that’s the absolute most you’re willing to pay. If you do that, then you have nowhere to go if the owner counters your offer. Once the owner and you have come to a deal, then it’s time to do some due diligence beyond what it is you’ve already done. During the initial process of looking at the site, you should have asked some questions, like in the case of a pay site, how many joins and rebuilds there are per day, and any other pertinent questions. During due diligence, you need to make sure everything is where you need it to be, technically, to integrate it with what you’re already doing. You may even get your developer involved if you’re not tech savvy. You and or your developer should ask these pertinent questions. Once those are answered to your satisfaction, you should either have the seller or yourself draw up a sales agreement. I always tell my clients to do the agreement. Why? Because that way you can dictate the terms. So whether you’re the buyer or the seller, you can make the rules. But just get ready to have the seller’s attorney change some of those rules. Nothing is final until everything is signed off on. Another thing we do for our clients is a letter of intent prior to the sales agreement being done. This gives your attorney a roadmap for the agreement. The letter of intent and more so the agreement will have all the terms involved, including who pays for everything, who pays for escrow, for instance. This can be paid by the buyer, the seller, or split between both parties. We’ll talk about this subject more next week. And next week we’ll be speaking with Ricky Levy of Woodhole Freedom Foundation. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Melrose Michaels. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]