IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Adult Bouncer
This week we are pleased to have Rob from Adultbouncer.com as our “In The Spotlight” guest! A long time supporter of YNOT, Rob is the founder and CEO of Adult Bouncer, one of the most well known Age Verification System (AVS) websites on the Internet.IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Adult Bouncer
This week we are pleased to have Rob from Adultbouncer.com as our “In The Spotlight” guest! A long time supporter of YNOT, Rob is the founder and CEO of Adult Bouncer, one of the most well known Age Verification System (AVS) websites on the Internet. Rob established the company in 1999 and aims to offer Webmasters a stable platform to generate revenue and to offer their members the best value for their money.
YNOT: Hello Rob, and welcome! Let’s just jump right into things here. In the fiercely competitive AVS arena how do you manage to stay ahead of the game?
YNOT: How do you protect yourself legally?
Rob: A few ways in which we avoid legal problems are:
1. All the content that we have on our network is licensed, either by us or the Webmasters themselves.
2. We do not condone copyright infringement of any nature and delete illegal content off the servers as soon as we find it.
3. Every site also has to go through a two-tiered approval system before getting final listing on our list of sites. This prevents us from having any sites with unlicensed content or pirated content such as warez.
4. Webmasters that signup for our program have agreed to our terms of service before they are able to use our system. This gives us added protection as we are unable to regularly monitor our huge network of sites.
5. However, we do not use this as an excuse to be complacent and do our utmost to uphold intellectual property laws to the best of our capabilities.
We dedicate a lot of time in maintaining a standard in ensuring our content stays within the legal guidelines.
YNOT: How did you get started? What brought you into the industry?
Rob: When I first began in this industry I saw many AVSs offering poor quality websites to their members. There was no real high quality content to be found on the Net. The only content available consisted of either low bit rate streaming clips or poor quality plug-ins such as java apps that scrolled images at a couple of frames per second. With AdultBouncer, we catered to the demand for high quality content. We have every type of media you could name, in every niche possible. The selection is rather vast at well over 2,100 gbs. Although we seem to have become a source for high quality, high bandwidth content, we still do cater to the low bandwidth user through our selection of gallery sites and so forth. Our network is growing rapidly and we accumulate about 1 new terabyte of porn every couple months. I can’t keep up with it myself!
YNOT: What type of work were you doing prior to the adult Internet?
Rob: I was an order entry clerk at an automotive warehouse. I did a lot of custom programming for them on the side. Prior to that I used to be a busboy at the Golden Griddle… the upside of which was free pancakes. Can’t beat free pancakes!
YNOT: HA! Good that you found an upside to it! If you weren’t in the adult Internet now, what would you be doing?
Rob: I’d be a programmer for some firm.
YNOT: Was Adult Bouncer your first Internet job or were you doing something else? What was the transition like for you getting into the adult world and what were some of your biggest challenges?
Rob: I began in 1997, using the space from one of my friend’s servers. He was running paysites and allowed me to share resources with his sites. However, after six months I was generating enough traffic to set out on my own and so I started with my first Unix box. I still have it running to remind me of my beginning, as it helps keep things in perspective. Although it was hard getting traffic at first, we were very diligent in using various banner advertising and search engine campaigns. The toughest part was getting recognition as the kind of quality site we actually were and getting to know the right people and making the business connections that made Adultbouncer.com what it is today.
YNOT: Where did you grow up and go to school by the way?
Rob: I grew up in Malton (Mississauga), Ontario, Canada. It was an Italian-based city back then, but that has totally changed. Now I hear gunshots every time I drive by.
YNOT: Yikes! I didn’t know Canadians were so violent, hahaha!
Rob: I started school in Holy Cross Elementary in Malton, then I went to Ascension of Our Lord, and then I went to Holy Cross High School. I lived with my parents for 14 years in Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada. I have now moved to Brampton, Ontario, Canada with my fiancé.
YNOT: I wonder if any of your classmates ended up in our industry (he said, thinking out loud)…
Moving on here! What changes would you like to see made in the adult Internet industry? Any specific areas you’d like to see improved?
Rob: The large amount of free content available through the various file sharing and peer-to-peer (P2P) systems is making it harder to convert surfers than ever before. Compounding this problem are the Webmasters that offer unreasonably long and high-resolution clips. Add to this the large numbers of mpgs and you have enough free content to last an eternity! Although getting a free clip on KAZAA and including your URL is a great sales tactic for pay sites, the fact that the content is not DRM protected works AGAINST the sites rather than FOR them. We are working on getting all of our content DRM protected. As more and more sites begin to realize the pay off of getting content DRM protected, we will most likely see a huge increase in revenue over a large period of time. But this will only happen if Webmasters realize that DRM will work in their favor. There are studios that will only give out Internet distribution licenses to titles if the site is using DRM technology to protect it. Most Webmasters are biased and tend to shy away from Microsoft and its technology even though using the DRM technology provided with Windows Media Server and the Player can help increase revenues for them. This is causing delays in our rollout of the DRM technology on Adultbouncer.
YNOT: How about some newbie advice!
Rob: This isn’t a make-a-quick-buck scheme. Dedicate your time and effort into your adult venture and it will eventually pay off for you. I see a lot of newbies creating websites and quitting after two weeks! I try to guide them into continuing their work but many of them never listen…
YNOT: By the way, have any funny stories you can share?
Rob: Sometimes the company that shares the premises with us ends up getting our mail. There is a lady that has the habit of opening our mail. She had the bad luck one day of opening one of our larger packages of content DVDs from a studio. The look on her face as she delivered a huge box of adult gay content to us was priceless to say the least.
YNOT: Serves her right for opening your mail, LOL…
Let’s close this out with a big plug for yourself!
Rob: Adultbouncer.com now offers in-house billing due to all of these new regulations being imposed on our industry. We are trying to steer away from third party billing companies. With the new biller, we have been able to keep charge backs and rejections to a bare minimum through our use of the fraud filters and other features provided by our bank.
We have also added a couple of new sites to our family such as http://www.vixeo.com that we believe are great values for the customers’ money. We hope to partner with more premium pay sites in the future to bring even more variety and content to our surfers!
YNOT: Sounds great Rob! Thanks for your time this week, and to everyone out there, go check out http://www.adultbouncer.com if you haven’t already!
Do you know a Webmaster with a great story to tell? Someone innovative, unique or perhaps even entertaining? Tell us about this person for future consideration to be “In The Spotlight” here at YNOTNews!
