It would be hard to find a more unlikely porn mogul than Colin. A child of the conservative Midwestern United States, he started his adult life as a professional musician and conductor in NYC, studying at one point with Leonard Bernstein. In the early 1990s, he and his wife started a mail-order business for Celtic jewelry that quickly expanded into bondage fashion and toys. From that seed grew Wasteland.com, arguably the world’s most popular fetish site. In this interview, a true industry pioneer and visionary talks about the past and future of fetish porn.
How did Wasteland get started?
In late 1994, my wife and I heard about this new thing called “The Internet” and decided it might be a great place to get people to order one of our bondage gear catalogs. We created a website with our nice collection of photography of pretty girls in leather corsets and included e-mail, phone and snail mail information on how to order a catalog in order to buy the wares. Within a month we figured out that not only was nobody requesting a catalog, but a lot of people were looking at the photos. Our bandwidth costs were so high that we pieced together a system that required surfers to pay us $10 to view the catalogue online. The process was extraordinarily crude. The customer sent us two e-mails, the first with the first eight digits of the credit card number, expiration date, and basic information, followed by the second, with the final eight digits of the credit card number. Security at its finest!
How did that work for you?
To our joy, within 24 hours, we were almost immediately flooded with dozens of $10 payments. However, we quickly noticed that nobody was buying anything! So we decided to drop the entire concept of selling fetish gear and ramp up the amount of photo content on Wasteland. We simply downloaded tons of what was already available on BBS dialups and newsgroups, increased the price to $50 a year (non-recurring, as nobody had thought of subscriptions yet). Our sales tripled overnight! However, we soon found out in no uncertain terms that magazine scans were not legal, so Wasteland Studios was born and we began shooting original content.
I understand that online porn was pretty controversial back then.
We’d been in operation for a little over a year when our local hosting company found out we were selling “porn” and gave us five days to get off their servers. We frantically searched that new thing called Yahoo and found a small Arizona-based hosting service. Turns out it was owned by a chiropractor [who] was using his server to host a juice bar business on the side. After a bit of explaining what “adult content” was, he took us on as his first adult hosting client. And that was the genesis of both Cave Creek and CCBill. By the end of that year, we had a solid business model, the first of the online transaction providers was born, and the founder of Naughty.com talked me into the wisdom of recurring monthly billing.
What has been the most significant change in the industry since Wasteland was founded?
Tough question! During the last two years of the 1990s, the industry grew at breakneck speed. The affiliate model was conceived and the TGP system came into play. In the early 2000s, the growth of broadband turned video into the king of content. Today, the industry is wrestling with the “tubes.” Since the industry is always changing, I can’t think of any truly seminal event. However, things have gotten a lot more competitive and a lot less friendly in the industry. Back in olden days, we were a small club of people who did everything possible to help each other out. Things are a bit more difficult these days, but personal relationships with like-minded webmasters (even though they’re more difficult to find), continue to be the staple of our business.
How does the fetish segment of the market different from the more traditional segments?
Originally, the two segments were vastly different. As a general rule, “porn surfers” were looking for sex action while “fetish surfers” were people who were into the fetish lifestyle and looking for the specific things that turned their kinky crank in a psychologically dramatic way. That differentiation is still true, but there’s a new “hybrid” element that consists of vanilla porn models involved in fetish content. Neither fish nor fowl, this type of sites attract what I call “cusp” members-vanilla porn consumers who want to see their favorite porn star get her butt whacked. I’m not exactly sure what to think about this market segment, but some companies are doing well with that concept. At Wasteland.com, we prefer to focus on the “BDSM lifestyle,” which is the core of our business.
