TOKYO – Given the American media’s penchant for terming any wealthy person remotely connected to the adult entertainment industry a “porn king,” any time I see the term used in a headline, my immediate response is to grimace and shake my head.
“Here we go again,” I think to myself. “What’s it going to be this time — another shady multi-millionaire investor who once owned a sliver of a third-party biller for a few months?”
In this case, however, the man dubbed a “billionaire porn king” by Bloomberg fits the title on all counts. Given his financial holdings, his backstory and his company’s longtime dominance of the Japanese porn industry by his company, Keishi Kameyama, owner of DMM.com Ltd., is a porn king if ever there was one.
Of greater interest than Kameyama’s porn industry dominance, however, is the immense success he’s had in transitioning into mainstream products and markets, along the way building DMM into a business monolith that generates revenue in sectors ranging from online gaming to solar energy production, fashion to online English-as-a-second-language education.
Unlike many of his peers in the adult business, Kameyama has achieved a great deal of recognition for his business acumen and financial savvy, opening doors for himself that are hard to picture being extended to the most successful of American porn entrepreneurs.
Earlier this year, in a survey of Japanese undergraduate students conducted by Nikkei, respondents picked DMM as one of the country’s top 100 employers, ahead of blue-chip tech stalwarts like Google and IBM.
“We’re always trying new things, so people think: ‘if you work there, interesting stuff is going to happen,’” Kameyama said. “It’s like, ‘what’s he’s going to do next, shoot off a rocket?’”
Looking at the historical performance of his companies and projects, if Kameyama ever does shoot off a rocket, we needn’t worry about the rocket crashing or breaking apart on launch. While revenue from porn sales still accounts for a nice chunk of change for DMM, porn reportedly amounted to less than a third of the company’s total sales of $1.7 billion in 2016.
It’s not as though porn is viewed significantly more favorably in Japan than it is in other countries, and Kameyama is not without his critics, in large part due to his association with porn. But Kameyama’s track record seems to speak louder than the roots of DMM.
“People are starting to realize just how smart this guy is,” said Akira Ishihara, president of the Japanese firm Kiseki Keiei Risya, which featured Kameyama at a seminar on start-ups last year. “He’s extremely forward-looking, and the way he puts cash to work is just very, very smart.”
When I first heard about DMM (but not Kameyama, who was then and continues to be a very private person) in the late 1990s, the company and its flagship site were barely on the radar of the American porn industry. DMM was already a dominant player in the domestic Japanese porn market, however, where the company was by far the biggest adult DVD distributor in the field.
What differentiated DMM from its American porn industry peers at the time, in large part, was Kameyama’s rapid embrace of the web as a medium for video distribution. At a time when many American studios still saw the internet largely as a means for advertising their hard goods, DMM was already streaming its catalog directly to consumers. A little under 20 years later, DMM.com reportedly has 27 million registered users.
Not too shabby for a guy who doesn’t even particularly like porn himself.
“I didn’t get into the adult movie business because I was a fan,” Kameyama said. “But it was an experiment that worked, and once I had money, I wanted to try other things, too.”
To his critics, some of whom complain Kameyama has built his empire on the backs of sexually exploited Japanese women, Kameyama offers something of a shrug. He doesn’t deny the porn business has its pitfalls and ugly sides, but he’s not about to hang his head in shame because he’s a part of it, either.
“I don’t think everything we do is right, but in this business we’re better than most,” Kameyama said of DMM. “If my own daughter told me she wanted to be an adult film actress, I’d tell her, ‘look, there are risks, but it’s something for you to decide.’”
Is there any business or ambition away from which Kameyama would shy, due to his roots as a porn entrepreneur?
“Imagine what people would say if Mr. Porn built a Disneyland,” Kameyama said, while speculating as to the sort of projects he’d consider, but which are large enough DMM may not be able to fund them without going public.
I don’t know what other people would say if Kameyama built a Disneyland, but given this man’s track record, I’d be inclined to call my broker to say one word: Buy.
Image © Dave Di Biase.
