“…The Internet as a business or occupation is such a recent phenomenon, people who’ve only been involved five or so years are considered old-timers. A completely different group than print and filmed porn drives online adult.AEBN.com Didn’t “Think Outside the Corporate Box”… They Rebuilt It From Scratch.
“…The Internet as a business or occupation is such a recent phenomenon, people who’ve only been involved five or so years are considered old-timers. A completely different group than print and filmed porn drives online adult. A completely different group than television networks and publishing houses power the Internet. The World Wide Web is a medium not yet understood. The ones at its helm are making it up as they go along.” — Internet Porn in Flux! by Titmowse (Cozy Academy)
Getting the company off the ground
Scott Coffman, CEO for AEBN: “What began in my apartment has moved up into an executive office building…”
Scott Coffman, the CEO of AEBN Inc., was once the owner of a humble movie rental establishment. One very late night, while surfing on the Internet, he came to a conclusion. It was much easier and more private to watch movies online than it was to go to a store and rent movies from a public establishment.
Porn on the Internet was going to be the new wave of the future. However, the selection of adult videos available on the Internet at the time was very limited and poor in quality. There had to be a way to get better quality movies on the Internet.
Gathering together some of the brightest talents in Internet technology, Mr. Coffman began the work of creating a better quality, Internet available, movie. Streaming video technology, utilized by the freely available Real Player program, became his medium. The search for a more efficient way to deliver streaming video to the viewer led to his unique and state of the art pay by the minute, or pay-per-view, system.
In January of 2000, they were six guys with no name in the market and they launched an Internet company at a time when Internet stocks were crashing.
Brad O’Dell, Chief Systems Architect for AEBN: “We were just lucky enough to get backed by a lot of good people with vision.”
It was a tough decision for AEBN’s investors. At the time that AEBN was trying to break new ground, Internet start-ups were folding right and left. It was an expensive gamble to put money into an Internet company when all the major “dot coms” were dropping like flies. Their lawyers were completely against investing in an Internet start-up company. According to their statistics, the survival rate for a company like AEBN just to stay alive for a year was virtually nil.
According to one of the investors: “When I called my banker, he did everything but run me out of town. He said: “This is the worst thing I ever heard!” I ran it by my lawyer and he strongly advised me against it. He did not want me to invest my money in AEBN. I did invest because I could see just how committed they were to succeed. It’s a good thing that I don’t listen to lawyers; AEBN is now the leading company in streaming adult video.”
It was a “learn as they went” process and it was not easy. At the beginning, there were long, grueling hours where no one left the office for more than food or a fresh pack of cigarettes. It was not unusual to find one of the founders camped under his desk well after midnight, taking a power-nap while his information compiled. And this continued for days at a time.
Cynthia Kwasny, Senior Vice President of Marketing for AEBN: “We made a commitment to always pay our Webmasters on time. We haven’t broken our word yet.”
It took time to convince film manufacturers that AEBN was a legitimate business and not merely after free movies. “Pay by the minute” had never been done before. No one really understood what it was that AEBN was offering them: the chance to rent out their movies over the Internet at a profit for every minute that their movies were played.
It took polite perseverance and references from the smaller studios already working with AEBN (and already making revenue) to convince the larger big name studios that this wasn’t another scam, but a valid, moneymaking enterprise. These days, pay per view theatres are a common sight all over the Internet. To keep up with demand, AEBN has gone from 6 people to 60 employees. They have become corporate.
Scott Coffman, CEO for AEBN: “As a company, we were very new; who the hell had ever heard of AEBN? People know who we are now. It makes it much easier to pick up the phone and deal with people from other companies. Oh, and we get to have fun at all the shows.”
(Stay tuned for Part Two of “Going Corporate – Is Bigger Better?” in next week’s issue!)
Worldwide Internet Population in 2002:
580 million (Nielsen//NetRatings)
655 million (ITU)
Projection for 2004:
709.1 million (eMarketer)
945 million (Computer Industry Almanac)
From: CyberAtlas.Internet.com
Jo is the copy editor and writer for AEBN and is also a published erotica writer. To contact Jo please email her at hawke@aebn.net.
Her latest book reviews can be viewed here:
http://www.loveromances.com/demoness_ruby.html
http://www.shebitch.co.uk/TheLair….
