CYBERSPACE – Award-winning gay adult performer Austin Wilde will be the first to admit his favorite website is kinky in a quirky way — but quirky is working well so far.
Wilde launched GuysInSweatpants.com two years ago as a hobby project; more for amusement than income, he said. In its original incarnation, the site embodied the kind of place he’d like to hang out — a sort of social network populated by sports-oriented men who shared cellphone pictures of themselves wearing sweatpants and little else.
“Basically, I built a site where I’d want to be a member,” Wilde said. “A lot of the sex scenes I was shooting for other companies just felt so stale and repetitive. I’ve got a high-sex drive, so I’d shoot these assembly-line things for studios during the day and then go out and pick up these hot guys at night and have mind-blowing sex. I thought, ‘There has to be a way to make this type of sex work on a site.’”
Turns out, there was. In short order, Guys in Sweatpants attracted significant traffic. The traffic attracted the attention of adult industry veterans who wanted a piece of the action and offered to help make the niche destination into something larger.
Wilde bought two Sony cameras and set about trying to making it happen. Earlier this year, he and his small team re-launched the site as a gay-porn destination focusing on sporty guys and stripped-down sex.
Wilde said the site grew exponentially after that, despite his decision to eschew large advertising expenditures and trade-show booths. A few affiliates have signed on, he revealed, but he never really worked the affiliate angle.
Instead, Wilde attributes the site’s success to social networking. He said he drives much of the traffic from his Twitter accounts; the rest comes from word of mouth, often from performers who appear on-camera and the bloggers who follow them.
“This is a site we’ve built because we love it,” Wilde said. “That it’s doing so well already, I think, speaks to the work we put into it. We wanted to make a site that had real sex, hot sex. I’m glad people are responding.”
While Wilde’s success has been mostly self-made so far, he said he’s now ready to go toe-to-toe with the big boys. To do that, he plans to add to the 30 scenes posted at GuysInSweatpants.com, expand his reach with affiliates and invest in more traditional promotional methods.
“What you’ve seen so far? That’s just us warming up,” he said. “It’s time for the game to start.”
The affiliate program, administered by CCBill, pays a 55-percent recurring revenue share.
