Killshot, altporn O.G. and long time friend of APN, who has been running EroticBPM for nearly a decade, worked with Fatal Beauty, and also launched SpicePlay in 2004, shared his thoughts on the latest heavily funded venture in the altporn user generated content adult membership site category, Zivity. His points on PayPal and the inherent issues of unfair competition raise some real questions. A lot of people, particularly in the DIY adult site community lost a lot of money when PayPal suddenly radically changed it’s rules on adult sales and many of them are still reasonably bitter on the point. We have some questions as well about how models and photographers can get excited to contribute for free to a site that might eventually give them a potential payout based on traffic and popularity they have to generate for themselves by spamming their friends for ‘votes’ when they could easily make more money simply joining the affiliate programs of nearly any other altporn site and promoting just as hard. Killshot also points out some interesting similarities Zivity has with his Spiceplay site, which we miss a lot. It had some great interactive features and some really innovative ways of sharing the wealth with it’s participants.
Lately I have been hearing more and more about Zivity, a new adult site that pretends not to be an adult site. I largely ignored it even after seeing a few mentions by some members here at Ebpm. Then I heard some more details from a friend and started to check into it more.
I signed up for a beta account and got access a couple days later. I looked around a bit and was not really impressed because parts of it as even fleshbot noticed seemed pretty similar to what I did with spiceplay. (Sharing revenue with models based on members giving credits to models or each other.) And they even have a patent pending on that.
Yeah there are some pretty girls, some of them are naked, some of them are not, and there is all the basic social features you can expect to have. But nothing else really notable.
The thing that caught my eye the most was the fact that they take paypal. Most people wouldn’t think twice about that. But talk to anyone in the adult biz and you will probably hear the same story about their account getting banned. Or you may even hear stories about paypal once upon a time courting the business of adult websites (myself included) only to ban them all a few months later when Ebay bought them out.
So why does Zivity get a free pass?
Well, it turns out that Founders Fund and Blue Run Ventures put up the $8 Million in VC funding to get Zivity started. The same people behind paypal and numerous other tech startups. And the people behind Zivity is quite impressive.Jon Elvekrog – CEO
According to his bio on Zivity, he has worked for HP, TIBCO, Volex, and helped build LinkExchangeScott Banister – Chairman and Co-Founder
Founder of ListBot which sold to Microsoft
VP of Idealab – sold to AOL
Co-Founder of Ironport – Sold to Cisco for $830 millionCyan Banister – Co Founder and Editor in Chief
Scott Banister’s wife – Details on her background are lacking
*edit* Cyan was kind enough to link me to her linkedin profile. She was a senior manager at IronPort and has had a successful career in recruiting for bay area startups. */edit*Jeffrey Wescott – Co Founder
Former Ironport engineerJordan Ritter – CTO
Napster Co Founder
Cloudmark CTO
Columbia Music Entertainment CTOJohn Manoogian III – Director of User Experience and Product Design
Worked at Organic Inc
Designed Yahoo’s homepage and UI
Claims to have invented social bookmarkingSo why is this a big deal to me?
The fact that they can use paypal and no other adult company can is only a minor annoyance.
The fact that they are attempting to patent something that is neither new or innovative is a little more concerning and makes sense coming from an industry that is increasingly patenting anything obvious just for the sake of having a large patent portfolio and then suing people.
Non Obvious innovations that took hard work to develop certainly deserve to be patented for a period of time. Obvious patents only serve to stifle innovation and end up doing far more harm than good.
However, the biggest thing that has me going is why are they doing this? Why would all these people decide to get into the adult business? If the VC investors hope to see their money back. Zivity would likely need to maintain a paid membership of over 100,000 users. I really don’t see them lasting long.
However, if they are successful. I feel that it will be another sad day for all the creative people out there who don’t have access to piles of money but have plenty of amazing ideas.
Part of what makes the internet great is the ability to share ideas, art, and collaborate with other people to create new things. When big companies and big money comes along and lock down ideas with patents and further stifle creativity by throwing so much money at their project that other people do not even get noticed. Well, it makes the internet less diverse, it puts a lot of money in the hands of a few people, and it certainly takes away a lot of the fun.
Maybe I would feel better if Zivity had come along and done something truly different. But I just don’t see it.
I’m glad I’m not the only one questing the “innovation” that everyone mentions in articles about zivity.
I also think it’s questionable when adult sites go so far out of their way to claim not to be porn. zivity is currently making a documentary on their own site titled “It’s not porn”. Why is a site that’s not even that popular yet making a documentary on themselves? Seems like they are assuming the site will do well just because they have money to throw at it. It will be interesting to see if that actually works out for them.
So I took a look at this recently as well. They are def trying to separate themselves from ‘porn’, at least as the government is likely to describe it, and they also seem to be staying clear of any sort of ‘extreme’ content, probably to avoid any comparison to content that is currently under attack, at least in the U.S. and the U.K. I doubt the general public will not view Zivity as porn, Playboy-style porn at the worst I guess. Here’s what they say in the content guidelines:
“Because Zivity is focused on celebrating the beauty of women, photo sets on Zivity do not depict men, more than one model, sex acts (including masturbation or hands placed within 3 inches of nude bikini area), death themes, animals, child themes, or real or implied bodily fluids (blood, fake blood, etc).”
The other thing is that it is NOT a free site, you get a free month, but its $10/month after that as far as I can tell. You also have to be a paying member to post sets, and that goes for both the model and the photog.
I read all the contracts and the thing that strikes me the most is that Zivity waits 230 days (!!!) before paying the photographers and models. They claim this is to avoid chargeback issues, but I dont really buy that. Waiting 8 months to get paid for sets seems a little excessive, especially since you need to be paying $10/month to submit them in the first place.
They also get to keep all of your content on the site for 2 years after/if you cancel your subscription. Its not clear if you keep getting paid for income on the sets after you leave. They can also sell the content to anyone who buys Zivity during this period.
It seems to be a very softcore porn site that relies on its members for free content. I guess if the numbers work out for models and photogs it could work, but since (according to the site) they wont get paid for 8 months its going to be a while before anyone sees income from it.