Teleteria founder Jay Servidio gets
written up in front page article on the NY Press
By: Jay Servidio
Jay
Servidio is a ringer
for Matthew Broderick. Behind the sleepy eyes,
under the puffy part, the fecund mind of a Ferris
Bueller: "Listen, if more parents were at home
running adult websites, maybe their children's
tension needs would be met. Maybe these Santee-Columbine
shootings wouldn't be happening."
In the driving rain. Polo buttondown. Pleated
khakis and soaked suede Timberland loafers. Golf
umbrella fairing the gale.
"But that's just a thought. What I tell all my
students is, ‘You're not–n-o-t, not–gonna make
a killing in this business.' These guys who say
they make a million bucks every time they sneeze,
they're full of shit. Seventy-five thousand in
your first year? That's doable. But you'll have
to grab me like a rabbi. You'll have to grab me
like a rabbi and trust me to show you the ropes."
On 34th St., an umbrella graveyard. Spines and
tatters curling at our shins.
"My students don't make any money for the first
two to three months. It's all a process. But then
you get your first check for $500 and you're like,
‘Oops I crapped my pants.' From that point on
it's like a drug. Today you're doing five vials
of crack. Tomorrow you're doing 10. It's the same
thing. More. More. Grow! Grow! Grow!"
On tv, through a ground-floor window of the Empire
State Bldg., the Nasdaq keels over, vomits 94
points. Inside a poor yutz jabs his half-smoked
White Owl into his beer. A new low. The weather,
the stock market–for many, the worst night in
memory.
Half a block away 24 students await their man
outside Source of Life, where Learning Annex and
Seminar Center classes are held. A wilting, eager
knot of black, white, Hispanic, Indian and Korean
cityfolk. In their early 20s, their 40s, their
late 50s, a third of them women. They are Mom
'n' Pop. It's nasty as hell outside and they're
here to grab the Rabbi.
But Really. Why bother with
a dotcommer? The very word draws thoughts of smug
vulgarians. Why, on so foul a night, blow $35
to listen to one of them? Because, say Mom 'n'
Pop, Jay Servidio can stuff real dollars into
our afflicted, middle-class pockets.
It's axiomatic at this point: Adult entertainment
is the only "content" people consistently purchase
on the Internet. We all know how porn has revolutionized
online billing, spurred on live, interactive digital
video, streaming video, Internet video on demand,
server push, Internet telephony, media players
and so on. We've identified the Moloch of our
collective lust as the driving force behind $1.5
billion of annual online commerce. In these poor,
foul-spoken days Mom 'n' Pop could use an additional
revenue stream.
So they're here to wring some profit from axiom.
The question is, is Jay
Servidio really their Rabbi?
A weak signal, from his Mercedes S500 bolting
toward New Canaan:
"Can't talk long, going to the salon for a facial."
"So what's your pitch?"
"Did I mention I work out five nights a week?"
"Right."
"I'm fighting in a full-contact karate tournament
next month up in Toronto. You should come check
out my dojo in Manhattan."
And then we're cut off. He calls back.
"I just got American Psycho on DVD.
Have you seen that movie, dude? It's awesome."
"The pitch, already."
"Simple. Who couldn't use a little extra money
every month? Pay down debts, cover rent. Build
a savings account."
"A savings what?"
"Exactly. Nobody saves these days. The people
who come to me–teachers, policemen, housewives,
blue-collar workers–most of them want to put some
money away for their kid's education, pay some
bills, take a vacation once in a while. They're
not looking to quit their jobs or anything."
"So what do you do for them?"
"I hold their hands and kick their asses till
they start making money."
"How much do they make?"
"Anywhere from four thousand to sixty-thousand
a month, net."
"Bullshit!"
"I'm not lying."
"Can I see your tax returns?"
"No can do."
"Enjoy the facial, friend."
The signal is lost.
A day later, inside a sparsely furnished
meatpacking district floor-through, Magdalia,
owner of three "boutique bondage" websites, speaks
about her avocation.
"It's like the chutney business my Great-Aunt
Suzie used to run." Said with a chuckle. "Sooz
wasn't mining gold or anything, but she had some
fun with it, made a little mad money."
This one is bouncy-cute. She says "mad" with
these bugged-out eyes. A self-described "full-time
cog" in the book publishing industry, Magdalia
say she's been grossing an additional five grand
a month over the last half year. An offer to mention
her URL is declined. "We're choosy. We turn down
a lot of potential customers. Don't need the hassle."
"That part of the whole dominance bit?"
Her left hand disappears behind her razor-sharp
bob, her right pets a riding crop cradled in the
bevel of her coffee table. "Well, we've been at
this a while." Three years to be exact. "Our membership
fee is almost $50. It's our little world and we
get to say who lives in it. But we do offer added
value to our clients."
"How's that?"
"We hold ‘events.'" Bug eyes again. "That keeps
them coming back."
Giggling, she clicks on a photo from a recent
event. The client with the clothespins on his
nads seems pleased with the added value.
"You do business with Jay Servidio?"
"No, but I've heard of him. He's a rock star
on the trade show circuit. Knows everyone. Our
business is a little less, uh, mass, if you follow."
"What do you do with your profits?"
"Some of it goes back into the site. The rest
of it helps pay food and rent. Book publishing
pays shit, you know."
"Is it really possible to make, say, $5000 a
month without quitting your job?"
"Absolutely! Sex is recession-proof. But I'm
speaking for myself. I mean, I keep costs down.
I have my own Unix right here [procured on eBay].
And I produce my content locally, instead of buying
it from others."
"Locally?"
"That brick wall you're leaning on?"
"Yeah?"
"That is the dungeon."
Dateline: Winnipeg. On the flip
side of the screen. My contact is O'Reilly, a
short, crumple-faced moppet with a bush of wiry
black hair descending to his browline. He's got
a high squeaky voice like rubbing styrofoam. O'Reilly
is known to all players. The carte blanche he
enjoys is a residual benefit that goes along with
his title: "Phone-Sex Infomercial King of Western
Canada." Jack O'Reilly's Lounge Dial-A-Date!
Weeknights 2am from Dundee to Dakota.
As arranged through channels, the phone sex king
believes I'm a well-to-do "Manhattanite" looking
to partner with a content provider for my new
Web empire. In this business, it never hurts to
know people with discretionary funds. O'Reilly
is only too happy to help me (unwittingly) accomplish
my real goal: a firsthand glimpse inside that
which no news organ has ever been permitted–Camera
Delights.
From Camera Delights' base here in Winnipeg,
there flows an estimated 85-90 percent of the
world's continuous live interactive hardcore,
orgy, dungeon, gay, lesbian, scat, geriatric,
ethnic, pregnant, gyno amputee and freak sex feeds.
According to Jay Servidio, due to U.S. indecency
laws Canada is a repository of this stuff. Camera
Delights is to adult online what, say, McDonald's
corporate is to its franchisees–beef central.
"Everything but snuff," says O'Reilly, adding,
"but who knows, eh?"
Camera Delights practically mints money by selling
its feeds both directly to webmasters and to middleman
content providers. Their content gets repackaged
and resold a thousand times over and, according
to O'Reilly, "everyone profits along the way."
The feeds eventually become available to small,
turnkey businesses like the ones Jay Servidio
sets up for his clients. Though live interactive
currently represents only 15 percent of total
adult Internet revenue, a membership site cannot
draw customers without packaging it in its menu
of services. Live interactive share of the revenue
pie will grow as availability of highspeed bandwidth
increases.
Camera Delights is an hermetic operation with
alleged mob ties. My initial requests for journalistic
access were all flatly declined. Unreturned phone
calls, unanswered e-mails. I was on the verge
of trashing the idea until some surly low-totem
Canuck in their back office practically challenged
me by assuring me over the phone that I was receiving
the exact treatment proffered two highly connected
New York glossies and a major cable network film
crew.
"Why," he reasoned, "if we've turned them down,
should we accommodate you?"
Why indeed, Terrence. Now I've come, and I've
got the phone sex king of WesternCanada with me.
And so we wait from a busy street in downtown
Winnipeg. A crisp, clean, Canada day on a sidewalk
of flower shops, restaurants, record stores and
bookstores. We stand at a doorway with drabbish
brown faux-marble siding. O'Reilly, who lays just
the faintest Elmer Fudd into his R's, is irate
because "you don't keep O'Weilly waiting."
We wait. And comes flying down the stairs a young
Hispanic-looking man. A wraith with an Eminem
buzzcut, earrings in both ears and puffy down
vest. Shift over. Done for the day.
"Who is it?" says the intercom voice.
"O'Reilly, for Chwist sake!"
We're buzzed in. We climb a flight of stairs
and turn right onto a long, narrow hallway with
light blue walls and a coating of black fingerprint
smudge. The door frames are a darker blue. There
are 23 small, say 10-by-10, rooms in this first
hallway. To the right of each door is a narrow
vertical strip of glass brick that has been covered
in cardboard from the inside.
We turn the corner at the end of the hallway
and pass a bathroom located at the top of a 3-foot
stair. The door is wide open. Inside are two brunettes.
Both are naked. One is shaving her legs, the other
is on the toilet. A handheld video camera resting
on the white linoleum-tiled floor points up at
the girl on the toilet. A poster of a naked woman
hangs above the toilet. Odd redundancy. I don't
realize I'm staring. But the woman shaving her
legs does. She hops with her left leg still on
the sink, reaches out and slams the door shut.
O'Reilly looks at me, raises his eyebrows.
"Happy Pee Pee Fun Time, eh?"
Camera Delights takes up the entire second and
a portion of the third story of a city block.
It is an aboveground catacomb, a labyrinth of
identical narrow, blue-on-blue hallways. We come
to the brain center, a subdivided office of low
ceilings, desks, rack servers, PCs and monitors.
Surrounding each desk is a collage of cutouts
or newspaper postings reflecting the personal
music/sports tastes of its respective occupant.
It hews generally to hockey.
To our right at the entrance floor-to-ceiling
metal shelving holds about 100 starched white
towels. A hamper sits nearby. Above the hamper
some sort of scheduling board with aforementioned
categories across the top. What's remarkable is
how quiet it is here. I'd expected darkness, covered
windows and so forth. But this is like some sort
of sound vacuum chamber. We've seen nobody other
than the bathroom girls.
"Who the hell buzzed us in?" asks O'Reilly.
We poke into different offices looking for a
guy named Brad. Brad is the company president.
Finally we encounter a ponytailed man sitting
at a computer next to a wall of rack servers.
"Brad's not coming in today."
Fine with me, I think. I buy a Snickers from
a vending machine back at the entrance. A notice
taped to the machine announces sign-ups for the
spring softball league. Fast-pitch league
teams forming. First practice April 16th. See
Terry.
O'Reilly and I stand at a monitor bank. It's
11 a.m. and four of 16 screens are active. On
the first screen a young man is alternately pulling
his butt cheeks apart and typing at a keyboard.
On the second screen are the bathroom girls we've
just encountered. On the third screen a tanned,
completely shaved blonde woman faces the camera,
straddles a guy, throws her hair back over her
shoulders and stuffs him inside of her. On the
fourth screen a fat woman eats fruit.
That's a joke. On the fourth screen a girl in
a Matchbox-Twenty t-shirt talks into the camera.
"I know her!" says O'Reilly. "She was in one of
my infomercials. Sweet girl."
At any given time, Camera Delights employs about
300 men and women (split 20/80, respectively).
Models are solicited primarily through classified
ads on adult-industry employment websites, and
print classified ads in local swinger-sex scene
newspapers. Strip clubs provide a steady flow
of local and international talent as well. U.S.-based
porn actors and actresses working the Canadian
strip circuit will often stop in for a day of
live cam stripping. With enough advance notice,
Camera Delights can send word to its webmaster
clients who can then promote these special visits
to the end user.
Monthly model turnover at Camera Delights runs
about 20 percent. As is the case in phone sex,
models are encouraged to develop personal, ongoing
relationships with clients.
O'Reilly shows me to a room adjacent to the office
suite. Green lockers line the right-hand wall,
cubbyholes line the left. First and last names
are written on masking tape. Inside a few of the
cubbyholes sit heart-shaped cellophane-wrapped
chocolate boxes. The sign below the analog wall
clock reads: Please take your flowers home
with you or throw away promptly.
Matron Chuzzlewit. Of the fleshy
gullet, straight from the Dickens. She's dying
to know: "Isn't there a glut?"
The Rabbi is prepared. "At any given time there're
about 50,000 adult websites online, and guess
what? You're still not in a competitive marketplace.
Two-thirds of those sites look like shit. They
lose money and they get shut down."
A knock on the door. A timid gentleman glances
down at his Seminar Center prospectus.
"I'm sorry," he peeps. "Which class is..."
"Sir, this is…PORNOGRAPHY!" Belly laughs. The
door slams.
"As I was saying, design is crucial. You gotta
create a consistent look. The free tour is critical.
It's your primary sales pitch, and here's how
it's gotta be done."
Pencils at the ready and a deep breath. Bring
on the science.
"Page one of the tour says, ‘We have 100,000
pics in our library. We got black girls, we've
got white girls, we've got Asian girls. We've
got girls with penises, we've got girls with no
penises. We've got girls with large breasts, small
breasts, we've got girls with no breasts.
We've got girls with facial hair, girls with beards.'"
Deep breath. "Wanna join now? No? Fine, continue
the tour. Page two, ‘We've got 100,000 feature
length videos. We've got gynecological exams with
the tools, and the masks and the stirrups.' H'bout
now? No? Okay, page three. Page three talks about
jungle fever. We got black guys with white girls,
we've got white guys with black girls, and we're
all mixed up together. Wanna join now?
"Enough!" booms the Rabbi. "Who can tell me?
What's the point of the tour?"
Chuzzlewit with her hand up high. "To sell."
"That's right!"
They high-five.
"Now listen up. Whenever you sell something to
someone, be it porno or lunar shuttle tickets
or copiers, this is what you do."
Pencils up.
"You tell them what you're about to tell them.
Then you tell them. Then you tell them what you've
told them. And you repeat that whole thing over
and over. You stand up on the top of the desk,
crack open the client's mouth, climb inside and
don't stop talking until he's seeing things your
way."
Ken and his wife Farrah are a Southern
couple in their mid-50s. They have two
children. Ken works in finance, Farrah in human
resources. About six months ago Ken launched a
membership website called WantonWife.com. The
sight features X-rated still photos and video
clips of Farrah alone and with other men and women.
"We did WantonWife for fun at the beginning.
The early response was so good we believed we
could make money at it. But technically speaking,
we didn't know much."
Ken met Servidio in January at the biannual Adult
Internet trade show in Las Vegas. He brought his
business over to Servidio soon thereafter. Since
January, Ken's been grossing $6000 to $7000 a
month with about $1400 in expenses. With the Rabbi's
help, Ken has identified some essentials that
affect his business:
(1) Service. Re-bills–the monthly recurring
billing charged to a member's credit card–"are
the name of the game. Re-bills create a consistent
revenue flow which allows me to reinvest and grow
WantonWife. In our case, guys are coming in to
view and interact mostly with one person–Farrah.
It's like they're wanting to have a sort of fantasy
relationship with her, which is great. So it's
important that we provide fresh content every
week and respond to their requests for a particular
type of photo.
"At any time, when a member wants to cancel,
it gets handled right away. Billing is smooth
because we deal with the best company around,
CCbill. Automatic, electronic payment on the first
and fifteenth of every month."
(2) Speed. "Bandwidth is really crucial,"
says Ken. "If a download takes forever a guy's
just gonna get frustrated and leave. Who can blame
him?"
Ken is soft-spoken. But his voice picks up when
he comes to the final principle.
(3) Traffic. "This one's pretty obvious.
You can build the most gorgeous site in the world
and if you don't have an audience, you won't make
any money."
"So how do you drive traffic?"
"Well, we're still trying to figure that out.
We didn't have a great experience with bulk e-mail.
We do some advertising on adult search engines.
Banner linking probably helps, but I haven't had
the time to do that just yet. We're still very
new at this."
Ken and Farrah devote an average of three hours
a day, every day, to WantonWife. He's planning
on launching another site with the Rabbi in the
near future. By this time next year, conditions
remaining ceteris paribus, Ken projects WantonWife
will be generating monthly net of $12,000. With
their profits, Ken and Farrah are building a lake
house and girding their retirement accounts.
As for the political climate and possible antisex
legislation?
"We're Republicans. I was for Bush. I know they're
more aggressive in legislating against this sort
of thing, but I don't see it as a threat. My personal
feeling is it's so big and so powerful, I don't
see how it could be shut down."
He adds, "I'd love to see more control put on
it so that minors can't get access."
The WorkingGirl.Com is a feature-length
documentary film currently in postproduction.
It was written and directed by James Ronald Whitney,
whose first project, Just Melvin, debuts
April 22 on HBO. Hearing that I was writing about
amateur adult porn as a cottage business for Mom
'n' Pop in the new recession, Whitney suggested
I screen a rough edit of his film, since it touches
upon some of the personal and professional pitfalls
people encounter when running an amateur online
adult site.
Whitney explains, "About a year ago I was contacted
by my old friend Sharon Alt, who'd written to
tell me that she couldn't pay her bills, especially
the health insurance and preschool bills for her
four-year-old son, Jake. Sharon said she'd done
due diligence and concluded that the Internet
was the place to be, because of the terrific amount
of money going specifically to these amateur sites.
"Essentially," says Whitney, "my old friend had
decided to become an amateur porn star to pay
her son's bills. The problem was she had no audience."
Alt appealed to Whitney, a vice president at
Wall Street brokerage firm Tucker Anthony, and
he set to writing a business plan.
"I soon realized that if I made a movie about
her business venture, the movie audience might
then traffic her website. If they liked what they
saw, they might pay for membership."
So Whitney was going to shoot porn and use it
as content on his friend Sharon's new and improved
website. But first he had to do some due diligence
of his own. To learn how to properly design and
market an adult website, he turned to none other
than the Rabbi, Jay Servidio.
In The WorkingGirl.Com Jay Servidio
struts the floor of the Cybernext Expo 2000 Trade
Show in New Orleans, introducing the doc crew
(Whitney, et al.) to all of the big players in
the online world. Later, at a table inside of
what looks to be a Cracker Barrel restaurant,
Jay Servidio gives Alt a point-by-point tutorial
on porn site marketing and design.
Unlike so much of the popular discourse on the
subject of porn and porn people, The WorkingGirl.Com
suspends moral judgment, leaving that entirely
up to the viewer. The lighter and less effective
side of the movie pokes self-effacing fun at the
director and crew, whose purportedly monastic
sensibilities are quickly drenched in the sticky
fluid of discovery of the reality of shooting
porn (sights, sounds, delicious smells). In the
course of preparing content for Alt's new website
they take "Porn Cinematography 101" lessons with
online triple-X celebrity Teri Weigel and her
manager/husband Murrill Muglio.
So it's a film with an avocation (and vice versa):
to drive membership to a website, whose profits
will then fund a trust for Alt's four-year-old
son. If that sounds a little slick, the film recuses
itself of its own cleverness ("Wall Street and
the Porn World join caring hands to save the life
of a child!… A movie to sell an adult website")
through a fierce, exhaustive and objective mining
of the ethical issues at its core.
Thoroughly explored are Alt's tangled relationships
and dubious motivations for doing porn. One of
the film's more wrenching scenes shows Alt in
a bitter quarrel with her ex-wife Marci (the guileless,
lovable bulldyke with whom Jake was conceived
through insemination). Marci believes Alt's choice
of online sex is potentially hurtful to the child.
She also thinks Alt is a flake and is simply using
her/their kid to justify what amounts to a personal
fetish. Where between Alt and Marci there was
once love, there's now only paint-peeling hatred.
That scene which occurs late in the film eventually
delivers a much-needed cathartic chestnut. But
neither woman actually emerges victorious and
this is how Whitney prefers his art: unsettled.
Alexa is 33. BA and master's in journalism,
both from Columbia. Listening from the
back row to the Rabbi's solipsistic drone.
"…so then my friend Bill tried to get me into
the phone sex industry back when we worked at
Sprint. Late 80s baby, 900 was born and we knew
it was gonna be huge! Only I'm Roman Catholic,
didn't want to get into that…"
Unlike most of the others here, Alexa's already
got a business up and running. She's here to learn
what new tricks might be applied to her fledgling
phone sex site, GoodTimePhone.com. Somewhere in
the course of the narrative, the Rabbi praises
some credit-card billing outfit and Alexa demurs.
"What?" he snaps.
"It's just–"
"What?"
"Well, I run a phone sex site and–"
"Phone sex is dead, lady! Didn't you get the
memo?"
Later, Alexa tells me, "Well, Jay
Servidio's right when he says cam-sex is the
new phone sex. But phone sex is far from dead."
Alexa's site is basically a compendium of female
phone-sex subcontractors who are amassed under
the GoodTimePhone.com moniker. They hang their
digital shingles through a private FTP link to
her site. To generate repeat business she asks
that they work a minimum 25 hours per week. In
three short months her site is in the black and
turning a small profit.
"I'm determined to run a dependable, respectable
operation, and I have strong principles about
treating my girls right." Alexa says that her
girls make well above the industry standard 55
percent host/45 percent subcontractor split. "It's
a scam to pay someone only 45 percent of their
earnings."
"Wouldn't you make more money running a hardcore
membership site?" I ask.
"I'm kind of afraid to get into the membership
portion. I feel like I'm on the edge of being
involved in pornography. Not that there's anything
wrong with pornography. But I'm not ready to take
that plunge. With phone sex, a boyfriend and a
girlfriend can do that very innocently. It's very
different from having sex in front of a camera."
But a word on the numbers. When
it comes to porn, verifiable revenue data is next
to impossible to find. There's no way of knowing
if figures are inflated to fire business and fan
egos, or deflated to ward off the taxman. Some
sources insist lowballing is the more common practice.
"Keeps the taxes down and potential competition
at bay."
So you might do well by reducing all quoted revenues
herein by a factor of your own skepticism.
It's also commonly held that it's too late to
become Rockefeller-rich through online adult entertainment,
because of big-player competition and the cost
of continuously updated premium content (videos,
pics, live feeds).
No argument there. But what about a low-overhead
side gig that brings a little stability in these
trying economic times?
Here, the consensus seems to be a resounding
yes, but with two caveats. Caveat number one:
it's more drudgery than you think. Alexa, for
instance, spends a large portion of time checking
up on her link partners, verifying that they've
placed her banners on their sites as they've agreed
to. Caveat number two: you can't simply acquire
a set number of clients and then sit still.
To his credit, Servidio makes this known from
the start. "Members only stay with a site three
months or less. So an owner's gotta be out there
continuously trolling for new business."
Trolling means reinvesting profits back into
advertising that drives traffic. Reinvestment
and growth take time. Like the Rabbi said, it's
a process.
Still, newcomers and veterans alike believe in
the immutable popularity of the product: the barriers
to entry are low, it's legal, it can be done from
home, and if you do the work, it sells.
And so the Rabbi makes his pitch.
"Four thousand dollars for a customized,
turnkey website, plus $100 a month for hosting
and $125 a month for video for the first three
months. That buys you 100,000 feature length movies,
2000 new channels added monthly, with 100 live
rooms."
The hands go up.
What about billing? What about bandwidth?
Should I incorporate? Maintenance? Advertising?
They follow him down the stairs and out onto
34th St.
What about consultation? How do I get paid?
Can I buy a URL direct from you?
The gusts earlier are breezes now. Drizzle. It's
late and the broad midtown cross street is a hollow
chasm, a sound chamber refracting the Doppler
wail of ambulances skidding north toward Times
Square.
"I'm off to Budapest," says the Rabbi. "For the
big European trade show." Card swaps and handshakes.
"But let's do business when I get back."
About the Author
Jay Servidio started his career in the telecom
industry. Having worked for MCI, Sprint and AT&T
in various sales positions starting from telemarketing
up to national accounts. His ability to manage
accounts always had him in the top 3% of his peers.
Wanting more challenge Jay Servidio started Teleteria
in 1994 to resell 900 and 970 numbers and offer
custom adult website packages. Teleteria quickly
became the industry leader in the adult design
business and Jay Servidio started teaching classes
about the business in NYC and Toronto monthly
which led to guest speaking at trade shows and
conferences all over the world. He has been written
up in many periodicals such as a front page article
in The Wall Street Journal. Teleteria also builds
gaming and commercial sites and can be found at
www.teleteria.net
or call toll free 1 866 408 8694.
(ArticlesBase SC #2475657)
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/
- Teleteria
founder Jay Servidio gets written up in front
page article on the NY Press
|
