2006-03-06
NakedSword.com Parent Company Cubik Media Celebrates 10 Years
By: Ken Knox
Posted: 5:45 pm PST 3-6-2006
SAN FRANCISCO - Get out the hats and party horns, gay porn fans. This week, Cubik Media, the acclaimed Web design and hosting firm that spawned NakedSword.com and several other adult properties, is turning 10 years old.
“It seems like just yesterday,” Cubik Media President Tim Valenti tells AVNOnline.com of the festive occasion. “We’ve done so much, from work in the corporate world and all the things that we built and designed over the years, to the whole development of NakedSword and the products we’re launching this year that broaden our horizons in adult. I feel like I’m so busy all the time. I can’t even comprehend 10 years.”
Following a successful venture into San Francisco’s advertising industry, Valenti and his business partner Greg Lindberg formed Cubik in 1996. Many of the original clients were non-adult, although the very first client was the legendary Mitchell Brothers, owners of the infamous O’Farrell Theater.
“For the first few years, the O’Farrell was our only adult client,” Lindberg says. “Instead, we focused on high-tech and high-concept projects like IBM, Hitachi, e-Trade, and Eidos Interactive.”
That all changed when Valenti and Lindberg realized their knowledge of online video streaming could be put to good use by starting their own theater – a virtual one. They created GayMovieChannel.com, where users could purchase credits to watch adult films. That site eventually gave way to NakedSword, which – despite the dot-com bust of the late ’90s – managed to flourish and become one of gay Internet’s most instantly recognized brands.
In recent years, NakedSword has spun off a series of additional adult-themed sites, including TimandRoma.com (home site of adult chat fest The Tim & Roma Show), WetPalms.com (the official site of the hit gay soap Wet Palms), ClubThrust.com (a collaboration with hetero affiliate program ClubJenna), and GayPornBlog.com. Cubik also is responsible for building sites for several major adult studios, including COLT Studio Group, Titan Media, Lucas Entertainment, and the Falcon family of companies, and has kept one hand in the non-adult sector as well by creating and hosting sites for a wealth of arts and entertainment and realty sites for non-adult clients.
“While we’ve excelled in the adult realm, we keep a strategic balance of non-adult clients,” Lindberg stresses. “In addition to providing a greater breadth of income, they force our team to think outside the sometimes-narrow aesthetic of adult. But, ultimately, our heart lies in adult because it’s fun and interesting.”
As Valenti says, it is the company’s ability to grow with the changing technology and trends that has kept it afloat for a decade.
“I think the thing we’ve been most successful at as a company, no questions asked, is our ability to adapt and change and reinvent ourselves,” he says. “More than anything, we have a creative, entrepreneurial group of people and we make the most out of what we want to do, and then we move on to what’s next. When the dot-coms crashed and the text sector was dumpy, we looked at what we liked to do and what we wanted to do, and we changed the way we did business. And I think that’s pretty unique. Lots of times [with] companies our size, once the run is over, it’s over. But all of us like our day jobs, and we can reinvent ourselves depending on where our interest is.”
Valenti adds that he has high hopes that the next 10 years will be just as productive for Cubik.
“I think we are all very excited about what we’ve done with NakedSword, and we want to expand on that,” he declares. “Where I see us for the next few years is leveraging what we’ve done so that we can release more products and get more market share with regard to the product that’s put out there. We want to be a powerhouse in the adult media.”
Many might say they have already achieved just that.
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