Andrew Conru.
Business 2.0’s piece on Friend Finder Networks founder Andrew Conru is worth reading. Not only does it treat the adult business as - GASP - business, but it also provides some hard numbers for an area of the online market which, thanks to private ownership, doesn’t publish figures.
The figures are impressive. $200M a year in revenue, 40% growth per anum for the last nine years, 75,000 new users a day and 35 million visitors in 2006; making Adult Friend Finder bigger than Match.com and Yahoo! Personals (almost combined!).
Conru also highlights the dilema faced by all seriously successful adult companies. Unless you build a brand which trancends porn and becomes connected with ’sexy’ (i.e. Playboy) your success is a limitation. Friend Finder is now too big to be bought by another adult company, and too subversive to be bought by a mainstream operation in the US. Conru can’t sell out and has to rely on his own ideas to sustain his growth an income. There’s no cashing in, it’s porn for life.
Not a bad problem to have.
(via AVN)
It’s a lot of pressure (not being able to sell to a mainstream company) at 200 million a year. I had no idea that he was worth that much/earned that much. How many years has the Friendfinder enterprise been around in total? I used to use it in 1999-2000, so that’s seven years, but it was around before that too.
Anastasia - I think AFF launched in 1996. Did you meet anyone interesting? You’re right about the pressure but damnit - that’s good pressure to have.
It is good pressure to have, especially if you’re your own boss and don’t have to sit behind four walls (I’m glowing green right now lol).
I did meet, okay let’s say interesting people from there, and I confess I did abandon it because it was driving me a little crazy…and then via AFF I met one of the most enthralling men I’d met in my life, but later down the track, six months down, he freaked out about the possibility of commitment.
It’s interesting through, culturally. There are so many people listed, from all around the world, and all come across differently. Those years, I’d find North American men to be more open about sex (via IM, etc), and not sure whether that’s due to the Internet exploding here (in Australia) much later, and people being more accustomed to online dating in other parts of the world. Wicked cyber during that time though lol
Anastasia - I really need to see cyber transcripts to fully understand what you’re talking about…
..I was so behind the times back then (a total techie virgin, I didn’t even know ‘cut and paste’ lol) that I didn’t save anything (much to my dismay)