Remember a few months back when I was asking people to suggest up-and-coming webmasters to me for a story? Well, that story has finally been published. Hope you enjoy!
Ken
2005-12-01
Seven Gay Webmasters To Watch: Seven rising webmasters reveal their strategies for conquering the gay marketplace
By: Ken Knox
Posted: 12:00 am PST 12-1-2005
It’s not easy being a gay webmaster these days. As anyone in the business knows, once the Internet caught on in the mid-‘90s, the floodgates of the online adult industry gave way faster than a faulty levee in New Orleans. With market saturation having reached an all-time high, the Net has become flooded with so many sites offering the same services that it’s become nearly impossible to tell them apart. (And we won’t even get into how hard it’s become to wade through the debris and clutter in order to locate the webmasters who are offering something fresh and unique.)
That said, there is hope. Just as the ever-proverbial diamond can occasionally be spotted among the rough, there are several gay webmasters who are helping to give the rest of us a bit of a reprieve from the storm. From the woofalicious and hirsute men featured on Universal-Bear.com and the hot young bros found on Fratment.tv to the “don’t ask, don’t tell” thrill of the straight men of MilitaryClassified.com and the smooth young Asian boys of JapanBoyz.com, there is whole crop of up and, well, cumming websites that are delivering the goods. Catered to the increasingly diverse tastes of gay men, they offer a little something for everyone. Here, then, are five entrepreneurial webmasters who are not only keeping their heads above water, but who are helping to make the Internet a fun place to be again.
John Marsh, Fratmen.tv
For John Marsh, jumping into the adult Internet business was a natural progression from his days at his prior company, Interset, a digital pre-press service bureau which performed duties like running film and doing color separation for gay adult publications such as Men, Freshmen, In Touch and Indulge. But when technological advancements in printing rendered his company’s usefulness obsolete, Marsh was out of a job. But, after a quick stint in DVD authoring and replication, he stumbled into Internet porn. Thinking he’d just shoot come content for other companies, Marsh quickly saw the value in building his own site—and Fratmen.tv was born. Kind of. “It started out as DVD and VHS videos,” he says of the content shot back in 1999. “Then, at the end of 2001, we decided to capitalize on the content we had created for tangible goods and do a membership website—and that was Fratmen.tv.”
Inspired by the sleek homoeroticism of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues, Marsh decided to “take it one step further and make it adult-oriented—Abercrombie with hardons—and have the guys jack off for you.” Utilizing great lighting and production values, Marsh and his staff have created one of the hottest places to go to get your fix of hot fraternity-type guys getting off—almost in spite of itself. “It’s a solo site, so we have a strike against us to start, because most people want to see action and hardcore sex,” he explains. “But I think we’ve done remarkably well just because of the quality and standards we’ve set for the site.”
Future plans include introducing two new sites, SoldierMen.com and SurferMen.com, and introducing—you guessed it—hardcore content featuring more than one person. “We’re experimenting,” Marsh quips. And as everyone knows, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of healthy sexual experimentation.
Ron Navarro, MilitaryClassified.com
If you’ve ever longed to be a fly on the wall while a hot straight military boy is tending to his own needs, then Ron Navarro feels your pain. In fact, as a major lover of military dudes and heterosexuals himself, he has channeled his own longing into one of the hottest gay niche sites around. Tired of the cloying sites that touted “hot straight guys!” but failed to deliver the goods, Navarro created MilitaryClassifed.com as a way of keeping things real. “The site came out of the frustration from the lack of real straight guys on these genre websites,” Navarro says. “A lot of the big websites today probably started off with that intention, but became too commercialized and out of touch with what the viewers really wanted: straight men—not metrosexuals [or gay men pretending to be straight].”
Having made the switch from acting to real estate to adult (how’s that for a career progression?), the Los Angeles-based Navarro called upon his love of the renegade filmmaking style of infamous videographer Bobby Garcia (who paid military guys to let him suck them off while they sat back and watched straight porn) and created an homage of sorts to Garcia’s Frat House Boys company. Like Garcia’s often poorly filmed (but always sensational) mail-order VHS tapes, Navarro’s website, he says, “offers a uniqueness in the way the seduction of a straight marine or sailor can be captured on tape as it actually happens—instead of staging situations. I’m a cult follower of Bobby’s. His camera angles and quality sucked but his videos were great. I just improved on what he did and gave people a better choice.”
From the super-hot solo scenes featuring studs like Samuel and Brent (who lets Navarro blow him) to side-by-side J/O sessions with dudes like Jack and Mike (who actually get in the shower together and soap each other’s bodies up rather thoroughly), MilitaryClassified offers the best the straight niche has to offer for gay fans. Look for the launch of a DVD catalogue (just in time for Christmas, Navarro stresses) and two other sites, which are both in pre-production right now and planned for an ’06 release. Though it might sound like a challenge, Navarro maintains that he’s the perfect man to report to this kind of, um, military duty. “My lust for military and ability to make straight men reason with what I am trying to accomplish as a business made it easy to take it to the next level,” he says.
Now, if he could just get those boys in his videos to “take it to the next level” as well…
Danny Z and CJ, JapanBoyz.com
“When we started, we aimed to create something that did not exist in the gay adult market,” says Danny Z, one-half of the two-man team consisting of two self-professed “rice queens” that runs Asian-boy site JapanBoyz.com. “Being that both [my business partner] CJ and I love Asian guys, we were really disappointed with the lack of site offering original content and true quality in the niche.”
The two men originally hooked up when CJ, who’d made the leap to adult following a period selling advertising to and doing web design for holistic health companies and sexual escorts, needed content for a new site he wanted to start that focused on Asian boys. He met Danny—who was involved in a messy partnership with a content company of his own—on a webmaster board, and they instantly hit it off and decided to go into business together—despite the fact that Danny lives in Thailand and CJ resides in Hong Kong. “There’s a lot of going back and forth,” says CJ, who adds, “but it’s nice to have a reason to go spend some time in Thailand every now and then.”
Their first site, GayAsianAmateurs.com (launched just last year in July) fulfilled their jones for men of the Orient, and JapanBoyz.com, which was launched in April of this year, further satisfies their tastes. “I think the fact that we love the niche so much and have such a fascination with Asian guys and Asian culture really shines through on the site,” offers Danny Z, who adds that at least half their customer base is Asian as well. “We translate the sites into Japananese and create the sites in a way that is welcoming both Asians and westerners, rather than just going after the western market as some of our competitors do.”
Both men shoot and edit the exclusive content, which lives up to the site’s name. “We give people what they pay for,” CJ says. “Some sites promise niche material, but it’s really only 25 or 30 percent that. With us, it’s all Asian material.”
Expect an animated site (GayAsianAnime.com), as well as future DVD releases of the sites’ content, possibly as early as November, and even some interracial content. Which should be great news to their modestly sized group of rabidly loyal subscribers. “I think the advantage of being a smaller webmaster is that you can actually listen to what your members tell you they want,” CJ says, adding, “We get a lot of emails that are kind of funny, like ‘You better update or I’m going to cancel!’ We get a chuckle out of those.”
Michael Kealy, Universal-Bear.com
If you’re tired of the proliferation of porn that focuses on pretty young things, then you’ll probably dig the photos of hot and hairy older dudes found on Michael Kealy’s Universal-Bear.com, a virtual honey pot of hotties for bears, cubs, and the men who love them. “I started Universal-Bear because I was so frustrated with my inability to find websites that served up the kind of men I liked,” Kealy says. “While site owners were falling all over themselves to plaster the web with twinks and smooth muscle boys, there were few sites that featured hairy men, chubby guys, older men, bears, or men in the prime of their lives. I call it Universal-Bear because bears are everywhere and men all over the world are turned on by them.”
The site was born out of some rather trying times, Kealy says. Two years ago, Kealy and his life partner, Ted, found themselves unemployed when they both lost their jobs, and then watched as first their beloved pet cat, then a friend suffering through a crystal addiction, died. With tons of free time on his hands, and while Ted took a meager job as an operations supervisor for a security company to support them, Kealy channeled his energy into something positive—hot guys. Universal-Bear soon followed in 2003, and, by the time Ted was fired (again!), the site was doing well enough to keep them both happy.
What separates Universal-Bear from other sites isn’t simply its emphasis on hot hirsuteness, but Kealy’s insistence on creating an “experience” for his surfers through fiction and other copy that he includes on the site. “I put a lot of effort into the site,” he says. “I don’t just slap up a few pics and say, ‘Join my site.’ I write a lot of copy for each gallery and a good friend writes some really hot fiction.
“I write about the men I’m featuring, why I think they’re hot, even what I’d like to do to them if I had the chance to invite them into my bedroom,” he adds. “I think that adds a very personal element to the site—one that I don’t think surfers see a lot.”
Kealy updates the site’s content every week (“Surfers like to know they can count on a site to deliver quality and consistency,” he stresses), and says that adding live-action video content to the site is his next priority. Until then, he’s enjoying the much-deserved happiness the site has afforded him. “I love that Universal-Bear continues to surprise Ted and I,” he says. “We hit one milestone after another and it’s wonderful. We started the site two years ago during the worst year of our lives. It’s been a non-stop joyride ever since.”
To us, that sounds very, beary good.
Bryce Thompson & J.D. Going, JustUsBoys.com
Though Bryce Thompson and J.D. Going may have been working in the adult Internet industry for several years in the early to mid-‘90s, it wasn’t until the two AVS webmasters joined forces in 2004 and purchased the links list LinkMeAllOver.ca that their fortunes really began to turn. After toiling around with AdultCheck and providing web hosting under then name Xclaim, they decided to revamp LinkMeAllOver and create something unique and special. And thus JustUsBoys.com, a free “community site,” came to fruition. “It was this pretty ugly looking list—there was nothing to it,” Thompson recalls. “So we made a little change here, a little change there, then we added the forums, the message boards, and that really developed this community, and now it’s a thriving gay message board community.” Toss in an exclusive monthly publication (JustUsBoys magazine, which boasts a readership of 160,000) and a pay site version of the site on the backend (JustUsBoysClub.com) that features over $60,000 worth of exclusive content—and that enables paying members extra-special perks on the free site—and you’ve got a very happy community of surfers.
In fact, the community has thrived so much that its members—who refer to themselves as “Jubbers”—have taken to creating Jubmeets, organized meetings where the members get together to hang out and party all over the country. “There’s just a lot of pride that comes from that with us,” Thompson enthuses. “We created the property that brought them together, but now they’re being proactive and creating these meetings. That’s where the sheer joy of knowing we’re doing something that has meaning in peoples’ lives comes in –it’s just not just about porn. It’s about people.” Or, as partner Going sums it up, “The site has a personality that comes directly from the community. Where else can you see gay men talking about Hurricane Katrina, the taste of a guy’s jizz, and Karl Rove in the same place?”
“We get thank-you letters from our members daily,” Going adds. “We have many members in isolated parts of the country and the world. They don’t know any gay folks in their communities, so they reach out to JustUsBoys to provide support and camaraderie. There are a lot of happy endings for a lot of stories on JUB. Even among our moderators on the forum, we have an attorney, a physician, and a clinical psychologist. Common-sense and real expertise is just a post away for our many community members.”
So what does the future hold for the community as JustUsBoys? “The site is energized, and is going more mainstream,” Thompson offers. “I think as you watch it grow, it’s getting a little bit further away from the hardcore porn and talking more about gay life. And that’s because of the membership.”
Who says porn can’t bring people together?
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