The La Fong Archives

Carl’s Mission Statement

Clearly, in planning new fetish sites, I’m not coming out of retirement to spend money on a recreational activity. Some people might see my work, photographing beautiful women in erotic situations, as the best job in the world – and it’s certainly better than digging ditches – but I’m here not just to have fun and provide great content but to make modest profits.

The adult industry makes huge revenues. Total revenue from US pornography is estimated around $12 billion/year. That’s up 35% from the years immediately prior to the internet explosion. There’s a couple of companies out there who make over $120 million/year. The best fetish company in the US, Peter Acworth’s Kink.com, estimates earnings north of $16 million/year.

At lunch with one of my production managers last month, I was asked how my planned sites would be able to compete with the “big boys” both at home in the US, and internationally.

I smiled – hopefully without condescension – and told him that I didn’t plan to compete. It wasn’t about revenue streams in the millions. That surprised him. I could easily have said that it was only important to provide quality and that would be satisfaction enough – but that isn’t entirely true either.

What is true is my strong ambition to prove a theory I’ve held for many years. Back in the days when I was happy to work for various adult entertainment companies in the San Fernando Valley, I was puzzled to find that these large, profitable organizations – all with bulging warehouses stuffed to the roof with VHS tapes ready for shipment – paid almost no attention to the fetish market. I remember begging one Executive Producer to let me take on his “speciality” lines. What he was producing were lackluster BDSM shows with banal titles like “Tarts in Torment” and “Cinderella in Chains”. The dungeons were fake sets, the actors were bored, the fetish activity was by the numbers. It took effort to watch those tedious videos. But my pleas to take over the lines were dismissed – because the producer was quite happy with his sales and saw no need to “improve” the product. What were the sales figures? 300 units per title. 300. Selling for $50 each. Gross total –  $15,000. I told him that I could do ten times that if I were given the chance. He chuckled and shook his head at my naiveté. He told me, in total seriousness (and he was one of the most successful mainstream adult producers of his era), that “fetish” in the US was incapable of increasing a market share beyond the 300 regular buyers.

I found this jaw-dropping. And still do. Of course, Peter Acworth and others have proved him wrong, and made millions. But my ambition is confined to turning a “worst case scenario” domestic audience of 300 into an worldwide audience of 3,000.

Several years back, I decided to try a “no cost” piece of marketing research. I put up a bundle of Yahoo Groups, covering various fetishes. These groups did not use “invitations” and can only be found with deep searching. The first one I put up went to 2,700 members within three weeks. The second one passed 1,600 a month later.

So, my response to my production manager was simple. We make good content. If we get 300 paying customers we’re content and we break even that month. If we get to 3,000, spread over 3 sites, we’re golden and we can make more content with bigger budgets.

Keep it small. Keep it almost a secret. Keep it select, and build an audience that is very defined and very targeted. In other words – no scatter gun approach. Just deliver what our small customer base wants. And sleep easy without worrying about the competition, and without them worrying about us.

And that’s my Mission Statement.

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