Adult Site Broker Talk Episode 216 with Sam Gibbon of Wick

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 Sam Gibbon of Wick. 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 time for our property of the week that’s for sale at Adult Site Broker. We’re proud to introduce one of the largest tube and cam networks in the world. They just started monetizing one of their largest tube sites. It’s already bringing in over 100,000 euros a month. With its growth, the site could easily become the next X videos. In the last month, the tube network had close to 200 million visitors. The company started with a site that created content as a video production company. That site now has almost 18 terabytes of original content. At the same time, they started the webcam section with the porn stars. This site has a members area where people can buy videos and use webcam credits. The company soon grew and tube sites were launched for different countries along with translations. The network has grown from the original site with 80 tubes and 6 cam sites. Despite already being one of the largest networks in the world, there’s still plenty of room to grow since there’s no ad spend. All traffic is either organic or type in. This is a smart buy for an existing network with traffic or for someone willing to invest money in marketing. Only 7.8 million euros. Now time for this week’s interview. I guess today on Adult Site Broker Talk is Sam Gibbon of WIC. Sam thanks for being with us on Adult Site Broker Talk. Thank you very much for having me, Bruce. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to have you. Sam has a background in content distribution and licensing, leading commercial strategies for user-generated content and social platforms across global studios and key brands. His journey through the content landscape equipped him with a deep understanding of the problems that both businesses and individual content creators face, and he’s inspired to make a substantial impact on the creator economy. Driven by a vision to empower creators with greater control over their content and distribution, Sam co-founded WIC, where he’s leveraged his expertise to develop a platform that enables businesses to tap into the power of the creator economy effortlessly enhancing brand engagement through a seamless, fully managed service. This innovative platform integrates into any website with zero code setup and maintains a fully branded experience, allowing businesses to monetize their audience and generate recurring profitable revenues. The platform addresses the over-reliance of creators on single platforms, by offering diversified and robust distribution channels. Sam’s academic background in investment management provided him with a strong foundation in business and finance. His professional experience includes impactful roles at renowned institutions where he significantly increased operational efficiency and revenue through strategic digital sales and partnerships. Sam is a committed entrepreneur, and he continues to drive WIC’s mission forward, focusing on scalable solutions that meet the evolving needs of content creators and businesses alike, providing all the necessary tools to succeed in the dynamic digital content world. So how’d you like your commercial? Very good, thank you very much. Couldn’t have put it better myself. There you go. So Sam, what is WIC and what does it do? So essentially WIC is a no-code, managed service platform that enables brands to launch and operate their own branded social content and monetization platforms, or what’s commonly referred to in the industry as fun sites, and this is all without requiring any technical expertise. I’m sorry, what does it refer to? Fun sites. So, you know, it’s a large portion of the industry at the moment, essentially like monetizable Instagrams. And yeah, we allow people to launch these fun sites without any technical expertise. We handle all the background operations, including content moderation, KYC, regulatory compliance, customer support, payment processing, and then fraud detection and prevention. This essentially allows our partners to focus exclusively on growing their brand and engaging with their audience. We’re working with eight partners currently in the other industry and we’re keen to support businesses who are looking to expand their digital product offerings and unlock new recurring revenues. Nice. Why did you start WIC? Did you see a gap in the market? And if so, what was that gap? Absolutely. So, we started WIC to address a gap in the market in terms of the success of early funds has led to many businesses trying to capture revenue from this type of content, i.e., direct consumer to creator engagement. And so, we’ve witnessed a lot of these businesses, brands, sending their creators and traffic away from their own branded and controlled environment to only fans and these are the third party websites, rather retaining their users and their creators within their own branded ecosystem. And then we observed that a lot of businesses and brands trying to launch their own content sites were shut out by the high barriers to entry due to financial requirements, technical challenges. Those that are from launch platforms found the demands overwhelming and it diverted a lot of attention from their core business, so they often ended up shelving the products themselves. So, what we do is we simplify that process, we allow brands to launch their own content platforms effortlessly, engage their audience in new ways, all within a fully branded environment and monetize them without a direct focus from their primary business. So basically, it’s like a white label for fan platforms? That’s precisely it. But it doesn’t have to just be fan platforms, we can also do membership platforms, we can do messaging. We’ve built a larger product so it can fit any kind of business or any kind of business use case. So, if I want to start a fan site, I just go to you and what exactly do you deliver? Yeah, exactly. That’s how if you come to us, you provide your branding, your kind of website theme, you tell us which features you’d want so we can select whatever complements your existing business. And then within a couple of hours, your content site will be live and on your website. So, you could go to www.google.com, for example, if you’re a Google and you could have your own fan site embedded within that. So the user never knows that they’ve left your environment. Interesting. And do you guys take a percentage for that? So yeah, we work on a revenue share model. So we take a platform fee on every transaction similar to what’s in the market already and we share that with the partners that generate the transaction. Interesting. Okay. And then the fan site provides all the models and everything. Yeah, so there’s two options really. One you can have for your content platform ring fence. So it’s just your creators and just your users. Or you have the option to open it up where you can share across the network. So what this is really good for is allowing businesses who only have one side of the marketplace currently successfully have their own platform. So you might only have access to creators or you might only have access to traffic. And we allow user on partner site A to spy content from creators on plus like B, C, D, E and so on and so forth. So the revenue is split between the site that brings the or the partner that brings the creator to the network and then where the site where the user transaction takes place. Yeah, obviously that the winner would be having the creator and user on your own, but allows you to still earn with both sides of the market. That’s very cool. So what makes WIC besides what we’ve already talked about different from existing platforms. So using our platform essentially eliminates any significant time financial investment and technical challenges associated to build a platform to scratch. We provide all the infrastructure maintenance support just essentially allow brands to focus on engaging their audience in new and existing ways. And then our model also offers a much flexibility and scalability than a single silo platform can achieve. Brands can grow and expand the offering without the burden of managing the complexities of actually building, running their own platform and save important resources to where they should be spending the which is their existing business. Absolutely. Who are your ideal customers? So our ideal customers, brands and businesses looking to engage their audience in a new way. Our company was built to cater companies that want to leverage the adult industry specifically in mind, but we can cater to any area for the creator economy. Our partners can choose to utilize, as we said, pre-existing databases meaning the platforms can be populated at the moment so they can earn from day one. And our current partners include cam sites, publishers, affiliates, strip clubs, escrow and sites and even existing found sites that are just looking to relieve themselves of the ongoing commitment of maintaining and developing this type of technology and operational processes. Yeah. And I think anybody looking to benefit from the network effect, the cross-pollination of those creators and users and being able to monetize one another, I think, and yeah, we can really offer benefits in that regard. So if somebody has a cam site and somebody has a fan site, they could actually work together. Precisely that. Yeah. So if a cam site is a lot of the time, they can only monetize certain creators when they’re online, unless it’s pre-recorded and otherwise. So you can have a lot of user drop-off, whereas this essentially allows them to keep their user on their ecosystem rather than then go in a message in the same create role on early files. It’s a streamlined experience for the user and a much better experience for the brand. It sounds like this is something that’s one of its kind. Is that right? Yeah. So we’ve checked and there’s no one doing it in the way that we do. There is private labels where you can essentially just stick your logo on a banner across an existing platform, but yeah, nothing is integrated as this. And that’s not just exclusive to Adel. We’ve looked across the creator economy and there’s no one doing this. There is clones that you can use. So essentially just pre-coded platforms that you can scrape off the internet. There’s no real customization within this and then you’ve also got to go out, find your own vendors for payments, content moderation. You’ve then got to put in your own policies and you still have to manage it day to day. So really all you’ve done is you’ve skipped the build part, but then if you ever want to do anything in the future, you’re still going to have to get technical expertise into to manage that. What kind of support do you offer? So we offer the partners for support. We help with integration and if anyone ever needs anything with that help, we also allow our partners to import quite heavily into our roadmap. We want to find out what features, benefits that they want for their users, their creators. How can we help them best monetize their audiences? And then for the users and creators themselves, we handle all support. Again, that’s all done within a branded experience. So everyone always believes that it’s the support of our partner. Very good. You mentioned payments too. Yes. Yes. So we handle payments and then we both to the creators themselves on the grounds. It just makes it a lot more stream for anyone using the product. So explain how your customers earn with WIC. So there’s two to that really. Creators on the platform, they can earn through subscriptions, tips, messages, clip store and more. We’ll soon be releasing a live streaming video call module later this year and we’re working on. So site monetization models that will provide both brands and creators with more flexibility and new earning opportunities. We take a platform fee on every transaction and the rest is then shared between the partners based on the commission and the sale. So if the user and the creator from the same platform, then the site owner receives the majority of that platform fee. If the transactor was for selling, facilitated by the network, then that fee is then split between the creator referring site and then the site providing the user. So there’s many different ways that talk and end with us. So why would someone use WIC over building their own platform? So essentially WIC eliminates that time element or the investment of both time and financial resources into getting a platform running off the ground. There’s the technical challenges associated with building a platform like this from scratch. They’re quite complex models to be honest, just with the various different modules that you have. So there’s that challenge in itself and then there’s the infrastructure maintenance support that brands have to engage with. Existing white label early fans and clients then require technical expertise to deploy and manage if you went for a coded pre-purchase code base. These solutions then as we said require you to identify onboard and implement third-party events for KYC, content moderation, hosting payments, fraud reporting and much more. This is incredibly time consuming and costly and usually requires dedicated team to manage it all. We’re unique in the sense that we offer a fully managed solution that integrates seamlessly into any website. So not only does our platform support complete customization, but it ensures a fully branded experience for users. So talk about the network effect you’ve alluded to it. Exactly how does it work? So the network effect in WIC allows users and content to be cross pollinated across partners, different sites. For example, a creator on site A can sell content to users on site B, C, D, all on their sites, all through within the site that they joined up through. So that also means that it’s a partner A, partner B, partner C, partner D are all in. Creators can then manage their content on multiple platforms through a single dashboard. This drastically enhances their visibility and potential while reducing admin of posts and on multiple platforms manually. For users, it means access to a wide variety of content, increased engagement and subscription rates across the network. And for businesses, it really allows them to benefit from their own content platform without having to fulfill both sides of the transaction. So you can launch with either access to creators more traffic, well, half and half both. With all that WIC offers and you certainly run down a lot of things that it does that people aren’t benefiting from now. I say I’ve got an existing fan site and I’m doing okay, but you know, I could do better or same thing with a cam site or whatever type of site. Would there be a particular reason to shift over to WIC? Well I think, well cam sites, they don’t have the ability to monetize their users in this way. And as we said earlier, they’re essentially moving these companies and then sending their creators and users to third party sites rather than maintaining it within their own environment. For fan sites, a lot of the time people like the idea of running a content platform less so than the actual day to day operations of it. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds. So what we really do is allow people to have their fun with the brand and the marketing side of things. So we don’t argue the platform. That’s the only job that I’ve got there is to market their brand and then we handle the rest. So it really does free them up to be a lot more creative and enjoy the process. So do you offer access to creators who say aren’t in your network that you might be able to offer to your platforms? So the network effect doesn’t have to be implemented. So if someone wanted a ring fenced or silo platform just to isolate their own creators, then we can absolutely do that. Creators also have the ability to opt out of the network at any time. At the moment, it is limited to creators on our database that people can access and monetize, but that’s growing with every new parlor that we have. I think the feedback we’ve received so far is a lot of their pain point is the admin side of things and it’s managing multiple platforms. So by having this single dashboard, we’ve seen that creators have a lot more time freed up to actually do what they enjoy doing, which is creating content rather than having to do life admin as we call it. Do you see a future where WIC provides creators for the platforms as well? That’s kind of what I was getting at. Creator branded platforms? No, just creators who WIC has brought in to make available to their clients. Yes. So creators have the ability to opt into the network. We don’t get involved in that and talk to the creator if they want to be across all these other platforms, but we do encourage it because it drastically increases their reach, visibility, and potential. So any creator that doesn’t opt out of that network, they have the ability to be on every platform. So if you came to us to where it wanted your own platform, all the creators that haven’t opted out or were within the network, they will appear on your platform. So you could start at any money from day one. Okay. I’m actually referring to maybe WIC doing some kind of creator recruiting, but I think I got my answer. How does WIC ensure privacy and security? We ensure privacy and security through robust ID verification, content moderation, and age assurance. We manage the charge back process and any fraud analysis. What we’ve done is made up. We’ve built our platform with our partners in mind. So our platform is fully redundant to cloud-based, monitor 24/7 to ensure data integrity, more importantly, security as well. Based in the UK, we’re fully GDPR compliant and we act as a data controller. So we ensure that the data is not shared with any third parties. Security is a top priority for us. So we implement the latest technologies and protocols to make sure that the user data is protected. And then our systems are designed to be highly secure, reliable, and with regular updates and audits to maintain the highest standard of privacy and security. Yeah, because when you’re involved with numerous sites, that’s got to be even more important. Absolutely. And the way we’ve done it is we’ve worked it to protect the, especially users, because if I’m a user and I sign up to site A, I don’t necessarily want to be interacting with users on site B, one of the, that I’m signed up to that platform. So we anonymize users to one another. Creators obviously have the ability to control their own data in terms of the network effect. But yeah, we very much are aware and proactively work towards making sure that people are protected and people are safe. Safety is our number one concern. Okay. What benefits does AI bring to WIC and to your customers? So AI plays a crucial role in content and community moderation. As I said, we want to ensure a safe and compliant environment for all of our creators and users to thrive. So we also use machine learning to provide tailored content and profile recommendations to users, essentially an algorithm that learns what people want and will deliver the more relevant content based on what they engage with and what they like. And so that’s really just to ensure that it’s easy for them to find content that they love. Additionally, we offer AI driven virtual companions so they can interact with users or sell content and enhance engagement through really deep personalized interactions with full memory retrieval. They can essentially deliver interactive conversation, video on demand, capable of intimate dialogue, really cultivate personal relationships with the members and have them with full memory retrieval offer enhanced satisfaction, loyalty. We’re also looking at releasing AI messaging to creators directly. This will allow them to maintain fan engagement for 24 hours a day, seven days a week with minimal effort. Are you doing AI content? Yeah. Yes. So our partners have the ability also to select whether they want AI content on that platform. Some users prefer it. We have a siloed AI platform itself, which is just for AI creators. We’re open to working with multiple AI partners. We really want to be an aggregator for content and essentially deliver optimized experiences for users and creators and brands. Cool. How does Wix support creators on the platform? So we provide comprehensive support guides and a self-help area on the platform for any issues that require intervention. We have a proactive support team that’s always on how to help. We’re Sex Positive and we designed this platform with adult industry in mind. We aim to reduce those administrative burdens for creators. And by offering a seamless content management system, we allow creators to distribute and manage their content across multiple sites through the single access point. The network effect enables them to reach broad audiences and significantly increases their earning potential. We’re continuously expanding our engagement features, monetization tools, and we work closely with creators to gather direct feedback on features and desired functionality. In the future, we aim to offer standalone sites for creators. So rather than just brands, we’ll allow creators to have their own content platform where they’ll be able to post to that individually and it’ll just be there on it. But then it will also benefit from the network effect so that a content will appear on all these other sites as well. But for now, I think we believe that we can deliver them the most value by maintaining our current focus as a business to business offer. Sure. What are some success stories you can share up to this point? So one notable success story is a brand that we integrated with. They experienced a significant uplift in creator earnings within a few weeks. They’re a model agency and by leveraging our network, they were able to expand the engagement of their creators and also unlock to recurring revenues through our subscription models, which they didn’t have access to previously. We’ve also worked with a dating partner who has been delighted in the platform’s ability to recapture and monetize their existing traffic in exciting new ways under their own brand outside of the usual subscription or advertisement business model. And it also compliments their existing business through increased user retention and the process. Any other success stories you can think of? Out of everyone we’re working with, I think they’ve all seen a good optic in terms of brand engagement and unlocked new ways to make money. I think one of the most interesting use cases for me is strip clubs just because they’re traditionally a very offline business, very brick and mortar. And they have engaged customers who develop relationships with their models and they have models who are most likely posting content on these type of platforms already. So this model really allows that model and regular punters to interact with and engage outside of the club’s day-to-day hours, but without having to share any personal information such as phone numbers or emails, it can give them a third degree of separation. And for the strip club themselves, a lot of the time they have no online income. So it completely diversifies their business. So they can use your platform to create like a virtual strip club? Essentially, yeah. And it acts as a shop window and advert for the models that they have there. So let’s say I’m new in town, I’m looking for a strip club, I can go on your website and I can see all the dancers you have there and I might start talking to some of them, draw up some conversation, I might send a few tips just to see what the feedback is and how I kind of engage with these models. So yeah, for me strip clubs is one of the most interesting applications and I think the US especially just because the strip club culture in the US is so open. London’s a bit more dry, so it’s a market we’d love to get into. I can’t imagine London being more dry. So what are the strip clubs like in London? Very wooden, I’d say, the whole experience. Really? I think, yeah, I lived out in the States for a bit and I loved the part of going out was going out and drinking a strip club and similar to how we’d go to a pub. Whereas in the UK, I think a lot of times strip club is an end of the night thing and everyone’s way too drunk to kind of comprehend what’s going on and really have a good time and it’s usually, it’s not a place I’d want to be. I would never go to a strip club in the UK just because it’s usually past my bedtime but in the US. I loved it. There’s enough fighting going on in the pubs, I could only imagine a strip club where everybody is already wasted. Oh, yeah, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. I’d get me back to the States any day. Thailand, actually, we were talking to a strip club in Thailand about opening up a platform for them as well, which would be our first expansion into the Asian markets. You mean a go-go club? Whatever you want to call it. Well, I mean, they don’t have strip clubs per se here. What they have are called go-go clubs where the merchandise is actually available for purchase and the girls are up on stage dancing but the whole idea is to get interest so the guys will take them out. Well, you know exactly that and we can warm them up online before they even get to the club. So I think it can act as not just a way to engage existing customers but also entice new ones. We’re going to have to come out here and make some sales calls. I’ll see you very soon. I’m on my way to the airport now. Okay. What are you? Hello? Hello? Where’d you go, Sam? Okay. What are your future plans for WIC? So primarily we plan to expand our network of partners. We want to develop more advanced content and creative management tools just to make it easier for the creators to really manage, distribute their content. Also for users to be able to find more relevant content that they want and resonate with. We’re looking at launching a marketplace module which I believe will be an industry first for a fun site. That will essentially allow brands and creators to monetize their audience in new ways and really focus on fine-tuning user experience for both creators and users. We really aim to continue to enhance our capabilities to support our partners’ growth and success and their creators as well. We want to ensure that everyone has the best tools and support because when they succeed, we succeed. So we really want to position ourselves as a partner in people’s success. What would a marketplace look like? So that would allow individual creators to sell their own physical items, whatever it may be, but also brands could sell their own merchandise. Users would be able to gift creators merchandise from brands so we can partner with sex toys, clothing, laundry, whatever kind of fits the creators and what content they’re making. We can make available to them. I would hope their laundry would fit. Yeah, 100%. How can interested companies or creators get started with WIC? Yeah, so it costs absolutely nothing for brands to get started with us and launch their own branded content site. If someone’s a business and they’re interested in launching their own platform, they can visit our website, which is wicent.com or they can email me directly at sam@wicent.com. Our setup process is extremely quick. We can get some live within an hour and our partners can start earning money immediately. Sounds good. And if people who are listening are interested, you can go to Sam’s interview page on adultsightbrokertalk.com. If you’re not listening from that page, you can, for instance, if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or something like that, and you can find a link to Sam’s website and all the social medias. So Sam, I’d like to thank you for being our guest today on adultsightbrokertalk.com and I hope we’ll get a chance to do this again soon. I’ll meet you. Thank you very much, Bruce. It’s been a pleasure and I shall see you in Thailand very, very soon, my friend. I certainly hope so. My broker tip today is part seven of how to buy a site. Last week we talked about the agreement and escrow. So now you own the website. What do you do now? The first thing you should do is make sure you understand everything about the operation of the site. The previous owner will hopefully be available for a period of time to help you with this. As I mentioned last week, you should establish what the former owner’s participation will be after the sale. You’ll need to deal with production of new content, processing, paying affiliates, and many other things. If you don’t have experience in these areas, you may want to consider using our general consulting firm, Adult Business Consulting. You can get more information on what this company does at adultbusinessconsulting.com. We help website owners project manage and guide them to the right vendors. Maybe the previous owner had all the right elements, processing, hosting, payments, production, scripts, etc. or maybe they didn’t. We can help evaluate that for you. Let us know if we can help. Anyway, you’ll now be operating the website. If you don’t have someone like our general consulting firm to help, evaluate all of those items and everything the site is spending money on and using to operate the site. Make sure you’re getting a good deal and that these companies are providing the right service and check to see if you can do better. Hosting is a great example on something where people are often both overpaying and not getting the right service. Many times the server is just too slow. If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to reach out to us on our site. Next week, we’ll talk about how to sell a website. And next week, we’ll be speaking with Alex Guillen of YouToo.ai. And that’s it for this week’s Adult Site Broker Talk. I’d once again like to thank my guest, Sam Gibbon of Wick. Talk to you again next week on Adult Site Broker Talk. I’m Bruce Friedman. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]