Providing consumers with a growing collection of real amateur videos, while enabling a diverse group of content creators to build their fan base and revenue stream, APClips moves beyond the typical line-up of pre-approved models in professionally produced videos seeking to appear “amateur.”
Instead, the platform delivers actual amateurs who upload their own homemade videos and sell them directly to fans. And all of those purchases are stored in a user’s own private library, from which they can download or stream the content anytime.
The AP Creator Team essentially runs the show here. They are the ones who are out there hustling, and through their own experiences are deeply attuned to the needs, desires, and sentiments of the content creator / sex-worker community.
Videos can be upvoted with a special “Love It” tag to help encourage models to continue producing similar material; while the dialogue between fans and models can be boosted through direct tipping, posting messages on a creator’s wall or privately through direct messaging. Fans can also add a model to their “favorites,” to notify them when new content is posted.
Given the aggressive development schedule that keeps new features and improvements coming at a swift pace, not to mention a five-year history behind the brand, XBIZ sought out CEO Gavin Lloyd to learn more about how APClips was founded, how it has evolved over time and his vision for the market’s future.
XBIZ: How did you venture into the adult industry and has your journey met (or exceeded) your expectations?
LLOYD: I try not to set expectations, but it’s certainly been a long, interesting, and delightful journey. I stumbled into the adult-web industry in its earliest days.
I started in early 1996, running adult marketing and product development for a company called Lapis Labs out of Tucson, which in 1995 had launched one of the first subscription-based adult sites on the new world wide web, the Lapis Lounge.
At the time, I’d been a rave promoter for many years, both in Los Angeles and later in Arizona, and was staying down in Tucson while producing a series of events in Phoenix. A friend of mine, the graphic designer who designed all my rave flyers, mentioned that he was involved in a new “internet project.” I said, “Oh cool. Internet. Do you know what would make a lot of money on the internet? Porn!” “Yeah, that’s pretty much what we’re doing,” he replied. I knew I had to be involved, and I just sort of showed up one day and started helping.
To paint a more vivid picture of the unique scene at Lapis, the $20,000 seed capital for Lapis’ startup came in a brown paper bag, from a very legit biker and old-school pot smuggler/distributor everyone lovingly called “Big Mitch,” who, among other things, also ran a large illegal cockfighting ring and breeding facility from his ranch just south of Tucson near the Mexican border. A small-time Tucson pot dealer we called “Uncle Dave” managed the books. Ownership-wise, Lapis was an evenly-divided five-person partnership, but the key person at Lapis was a big quiet long-haired genius named Roger, a brilliant programmer and engineer who created everything, including Lapis’ proprietary web-billing software and website/network architecture.
He built and hosted the servers himself, running T1 lines right to an old craftsman house which served as their offices. The server room where Roger worked had three air-conditioning units constantly running full-blast to keep the servers cool in the 100+ degree desert heat. Roger’s girlfriend Julie handled customer support, and my friend Gian made the web graphics. Every so often, Big Mitch would invite us down to one of his cockfighting tournaments. Attendance was not optional. The old-timer cartel guys would come up from Mexico with their fighting birds to gamble and party. Big Mitch would tell us which birds to bet on, and we would always win.
It was not your average internet startup.
The web was eye-opening for me. I’d never used a computer or been online in my life up to that point, but I was quickly hooked and learned the ropes. I think my first assignment was to bomb adult Usenet groups with blocks of free images tagged with the Lapis URL. These were the wild-west gold rush days of the adult web, and the porn business still had an element of mischief and danger to it. The 1980s and its Meese Commission witch-hunts were not yet ancient history.
At Lapis, in 1996, I launched what was arguably (depending on who you ask) the adult web’s second or third legitimate open-registration pay-per-click affiliate program for webmasters, and the first viable alternative to the era’s dominant Amateur Hardcore PPC affiliate program. With Lapis Cash, we promoted the Lapis Lounge and XXXCellar sites. Alec and Moe from XBIZ were among my top affiliates, with their popular Helmy’s 4AdultsOnly links site, as was Kim Nielsen of ATKingdom, who became a close friend and early mentor.
Old-timers reading this might recall our super obnoxious “Fuck/Suck/Cum/XXXCellar” animated banners, known for pulling stellar click-rates.
At the start of ‘97, I went out on my own, founding Offworld Media Group, which focused on highly underserved niche segments like mature women and gay twinks. We targeted these segments with a slate of branded niche subscription sites, all heavily updated with exclusive high-resolution images (shot on film and then scanned to digital), which far exceeded consumer expectations; fostering intense customer loyalty and quickly establishing our brands as market leaders in their respective niches. We also placed them under the banner of our NicheBucks affiliate program, which was the first to offer this niche-centric marketing approach.
However, in those early days, we relied less on affiliate traffic and more on our network of showcase feeder sites, which lived on premium generic domains such as OlderWomen.com, Over30.com, FullBush.com, Twinks.com, GayPorno.com, GayBlowjobs.com, FreeGay.com, and of course, AmateurPorn.com. In those days, these premium domains received massive direct-navigation traffic and also dominated pre-Google search engines such as Excite, which powered AOL Netfind. It was a beautifully self-contained system.
For an uneducated and technically inept kid still in his mid-20s, the tremendous financial rewards were staggering and life-changing. It was a bit surreal.
Towards the end of 1998, I returned to L.A. and founded a small indie record label and artist management company, which had modest success in the electronic genre. The following year, I founded Raves.com, a community/forum site with artist interviews and event coverage. Much of my focus for the subsequent seven years or so drifted to these non-adult ventures, and in 2001, I brought in an experienced sales and operations manager to run the day-to-day at Offworld Media.
Around 2006, a friend and I co-founded a site called GodsGirls, a subscription site and community social network focused on “alt girl” erotica and featuring indie alt models elaborately shot by talented up-and-coming fashion photographers. It’s worth noting that over the years, many adult industry alt-stars including Stoya, Skin Diamond and several notable creators such as Vex Ashley (Four Chambers), as well as key members of the AP Creator Team (Jenna Valentine, Jasper Ahptik, Espi Kvlt and others) began their adult careers at GodsGirls.
While most of my involvement in GG was peripheral, I did make one meaningful contribution. Around 2007-08, feeling burdened by the high production costs of the elaborate high-concept shoots we were commissioning, and recognizing the rapidly increasing quality and affordability of digital cameras as well as the untapped artistic talent of the GG model community, I decided we should start featuring “DIY” photo-sets, shot by GG models themselves. This approach quickly galvanized the GG community, transforming it into one of the first true adult creator communities. There was also an aspirational element of exclusivity to the site, as new GG applicants had to be voted in by the community. Many GG models worked on MFC and other cam platforms, and GG, effectively served as a promotional/branding vehicle for models to gain exposure and status. But GG’s underlying “walled garden” paysite business model had passed its prime.
This was an important chapter for me, as it opened my eyes to the tremendous potential of indie content creation.
By 2010, it had become clear to me that the future of adult lay in open platforms which facilitated direct model-to-fan transactions. Cam sites seemed to be the only segment of the market unaffected by tube-site disruption, and from a business standpoint, it was clear that the creator-to-fan relationship essentially provided a barrier to entry against free tube porn, as free porn cannot replicate the unique transactional relationship dynamics which occur between creators and fans. I also noted that the big cam sites had left a puzzling gap here, in not fully facilitating content/clip transactions for models on their platforms. I owned AmateurPorn.com and envisioned this as an ideal home for such an endeavor, and the perfect vehicle for my next venture.
In 2012, after a lengthy recovery from an extended period of what might be most tactfully described as “highly reclusive, chemically enhanced and pharmaceutically induced semi-retirement,” I began restructuring my businesses to accommodate this effort in earnest.
Developing a multifaceted open-marketplace platform was well outside my wheelhouse at the time. However, after several initial product iterations and struggling to find a capable but affordable back-end programmer, we started development on AP in late 2014 and launched it in May of 2015 with an admittedly unrefined minimum viable product. Initially, AP was a purely token-based clips-sales platform, not built to scale, and with only basic messaging, social, payout, tipping and purchasing functionality. It was very bare-bones and rudimentary, but beautifully designed and alive at last.
With MV launching their well-positioned platform well over a year ahead of us and seizing the first-mover advantage, and OnlyFans coming out with their terrific product shortly thereafter, we knew we were in for a long, tough fight. But good things are always worth fighting for.
AP initially differentiated itself with a 15 percent higher payout than our competitors on clip sales; paying 75 percent versus 60 percent, and a fanatical focus on individual creator support. We built our community and grew our little platform organically, slowly but surely.
In early 2016, at the request and invitation of an old friend, I somewhat spontaneously put my things in storage and moved to India, where I helped my friend with her production company, which created and choreographed elaborate live dance and acrobatic performances, mostly for Indian billionaires’ weddings. Weddings are a big deal in India. It was a blast.
After many adventures and amazing experiences all over India, I based myself down in Goa, and spent about a year studying and practicing Iyengar Yoga, and thoroughly enjoying the Goa lifestyle, while monitoring AP’s slow but steady organic growth and leaving day-to-day operations in the highly capable hands of the AP Creator and Support Teams.
I returned to L.A. at the end of 2017, determined to focus all my efforts on building a solid development team capable of leveling-up our platform’s features and functionality. We began adding features, optimizing sub-par functionality and making improvements relentlessly, slowly catching-up to our well-heeled competitors. Geo-blocking, custom previews, triggered auto-tweets, etc., etc., etc. The list was long. We had mixed results with a handful of back-end programmers until I was finally able to convince a brilliant and insanely over-qualified programmer friend of mine here in L.A. to join our team in mid-2019. It was at this point that things began to click.
AP finally had a small but genuinely outstanding and well-rounded development team, firing on all cylinders and dedicated to building, refining and optimizing a world-class marketplace platform for the AP community. This past year has been a development marathon for them, and I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve been able to accomplish. The new AP is genuinely superlative and ready for prime-time.
As I said, it’s been a long, interesting and delightful journey so far.
XBIZ: It’s been nearly a year since AmateurPorn.com rebranded as APClips.com, to give the company “an influential new identity” in the expansion and development of the site and its customer base. Has the rebrand delivered the benefits you hoped to achieve and how did the site’s existing customers respond to the change?
LLOYD: Yes. The rebrand immediately lifted the burdensome aspects (being looked on less than favorably by Gmail for customer notifications, etc.), which had been of particular concern to us. It is also important to note that the rebrand was intended as one part of a long and multifaceted process, and coincided with redevelopment and optimization, which, in aggregate, has made the site much stickier with consumers. But it’s difficult to attribute this solely to the rebrand.
On the customer side, in addition to the increased stickiness and repeat customer business, we’ve seen a notable increase in international customers post-rebrand. Most of all, we are extremely pleased with the long-term benefits to creators. We consulted with our creator community extensively before making the change, and it was unanimously agreed that this was the right move. At the end of the day, the rebrand was for them.
XBIZ: As a follow-up, both the words “amateur” and “porn” can be problematic in a broader context than simply describing “amateur porn.” Tell us about how the perception of these terms, by both content creators and their fans, helped drive the site’s rebrand — and the shift in the overall marketplace towards non-porn but still “adult” clips.
LLOYD: Indeed! To give proper context, we had initially chosen to use the AmateurPorn domain back when Google still gave a presumed degree of conditional weight to the domain in regards to keywords and phrases. It was admittedly a consumer-side decision that we felt would benefit creators via the high traffic we expected it to generate. It was our poor assumption that once we’d been online for a couple of years we’d wind up at the top of Google for the search-phrase “amateur porn.” We were wrong, because Google reconfigured its algorithm right around the time of our launch.
We can also thank my antiquated domain-centric views for overvaluing the URL to some degree, as the domain used to receive about 15,000 daily unique type-ins back in the day.
From the beginning, we always recognized the potential shortcomings of the AmateurPorn name on the creator side (both words) and made a somewhat clumsy but well-intentioned attempt to “soften” the brand by filling the creator-side interfaces, as well as our marketing graphics for creators on social, with a cast of proprietary “Kawaii Friends” characters. We went considerably overboard with this approach, but our heart was in the right place, and we dropped all of it after the rebrand. In the end, AP’s beloved “Caticorn” mascot came out of this effort, so no regrets.
Yes, the twofold core of the rebranding decision was the recognition that many creators were essentially full-time hard-working people, so the term “amateur” may not have been a fitting description for them. And certainly, for the growing “naughty influencer” segment or those producing softcore erotica, the word “porn” might be highly off-putting, inappropriate and unfitting. We’re pleased to have removed the burden of these unsuitable categorizations.
XBIZ: What is the current reach of the APClips platform, in terms of the overall number of content creators, available video clips, registered members and the rate of growth?
LLOYD: There are currently just over 3,500 active creators selling over 100,000 videos on APClips, with just over 100,000 registered members, including about 40,000 paid customers.
Compared to the mega-platforms we are quite small, but we feel this has advantages to creators … less competition means less potential cannibalization of fans’ attention and dollars, and more individualized attention and a focus on creators. It would be presently fitting to call AP a “boutique” platform, with a smaller and more tightly-knit creator community.
Across the board, our historic annual growth rate has been around 20 percent, but this has risen considerably during 2020. We attribute this to increased stickiness of the platform post-redesign, the rebrand, the general growth of the creator-to-fan segment and increased creator engagement via the array of new tools and features now available to AP creators.
Naturally, it would be inaccurate not to admit we’ve benefitted alongside everyone else in the industry from the rise in porn consumption due to COVID-19 quarantine, and that a portion of our increased growth rate is attributable to this.
XBIZ: How has the clip market changed over the years? How do camming, free porn and social media fit into the equation?
LLOYD: Obviously, the clips market has grown to account for an ever-increasing percentage of the overall adult consumer dollar. I believe it has also revitalized the growth of the adult segment as a whole. Undeniably, the segment has also grown more crowded. Competition for consumer attention is at an all-time high, with more and more creators choosing to make a full-time career of it, and new creators coming online at ever-increasing rates.
This ubiquity has helped sway the public perception of sex work and rightly placed it in a more positive, natural and accepting light. This has lowered the social barrier to entry and further accelerated the wide adoption of sex work and adult content creation as a viable and accepted career path. It has also begun to re-normalize the concept of “paying for your porn,” which is wonderful.
More and more, I think ambitious creators are feeling the need to hustle a bit harder and take a more multifaceted and proactive approach with their marketing to stand out in this increasingly crowded market. I think the days of relying on Twitter alone are in the rearview for the majority of full-time creators.
Looking forward, from the platform side, I feel as though the classic business cycle will continue to play out, and that a period of consolidation and growth via acquisition is naturally forthcoming. In the meantime, many new platforms will launch, and I think we will see a flurry of interesting innovation combined with a degree of classic feeding-frenzy/copycat mentality and intense competition, as new platforms vie for a share of the growing market.
At AP, we feel very fortunate to have five years under our belt and to have built a solid creator community and customer base, as well as a great deal of goodwill and brand equity. I feel that the older established platforms like AP have a strong competitive advantage in this regard, so long as they continue to innovate, improve, and work hard for creators.
To me, the most troubling trend these past few years is the race among platforms to see who can build the largest “exclusive stable” of top-selling “influencer” creators. This, in my opinion, has overshadowed what I believe a platform’s mission should be. Optimally, independent creators should not be bound to any one platform. They should be free to roam. Free to A/B test one platform’s conversions against another’s. Free to manage risk by spreading their eggs into multiple baskets. Free to tap a variety of consumer bases on different platforms.
IMHO, single-platform exclusive deals harken back to the days of the adult-industry mega-studio. They have an unsettling feeling of “ownership” to them, in service to platform optics. I feel it’s a step in the wrong direction. It also neglects the vast potential of new and upcoming creators, stealing focus and channeling capital away from them.
Instead of this approach, AP prefers to allocate funds to higher payout rates, larger contest prizes and random giveaways to creators. We’ve bootstrapped AP from day one, and I feel this has forced a more thoughtful and disciplined approach to revenue allocation. We believe in meritocracy, but feel there might be more beneficial ways to spend, say, an extra $100,000, than on optics and prestige. I’d rather see capital allocated to benefit the wider community of AP creators.
We always recommend that creators monetize every platform available to them, and we’ve certainly never demanded or even expected exclusivity. That said, if we can help creators grow into big stars who then choose to take one of these exclusive deals at the mega-platforms, we’re certainly happy for them if they’re happy, and with no judgments in that regard.
XBIZ: A variety of APClips creators have offered valuable advice to the community; such as Diya Rose, who underscored the value of having a balanced life. What do you do to assist creators in learning how to manage time and resources?
LLOYD: Several members of the AP community contribute to our advice section in the AP Lounge. Diya, Jenna and a few others have focused on self-care specifically. We have an entire section of the AP Creator Toolbox devoted to it. I think this speaks volumes about how vitally important balance and self-care is, both for maintenance of mental health, and for optimizing creativity/performance/profits. Only an adult content creator/sex worker can answer this question thoroughly though.
XBIZ: One “Creator of the Month,” FetishDollEmily, advises others to produce material that appeals to them personally, rather than simply to please fan requests; saying, “Do what makes you happy. Film content that you enjoy.” Is this one of the hidden secrets to success in the clips market, because it empowers creators to be creative and makes the whole process that much more enjoyable?
LLOYD: Yes, I think this is a wise and farsighted approach, and one which is critical to building one’s brand and standing out in a growing and crowded field of Indie creators. If creators take a disconnected or a scattershot aim-to-please approach to content creation, it may serve them in the short-term, but will be to the detriment of their long-term brand building and fan-base building efforts.
I think the magic of this segment is the special connection between creators, their content, and their fans. When creators make the content they enjoy making, it fosters enthusiasm and shows through in their content, which is critical to this magical dynamic. Emily’s thoughtful advice is solid gold.
XBIZ: Earlier this year, author and marketing guru Amberly Rothfield joined APClips as its Model Outreach Coordinator. How vital is it to recruit and retain experienced, knowledgeable insiders to help a brand grow, and what is your approach to doing so?
LLOYD: Extremely vital. Amberly has been a wonderful complement to the AP Creator Team. She is keenly and solely focused on what will ultimately benefit creators, regardless of which platforms they choose to engage with. She is instinctively unbiased in this regard, and is not out there shilling for AP or recruiting in the classic sense. She’s someone who will not hesitate to push back on an idea if she does not see it as benefiting creators, and this is what I love about her.
It’s an invaluable ethos and one which is shared by all members of the AP Creator Team. At the end of the day, the Creator Team essentially runs the show here. They are the ones who are out there hustling, and through their own experiences, are deeply attuned to the needs, desires and sentiments of the content creator/sex-worker community. AP’s motto has always been “by Creators, for Creators,” and every move we make, every feature we develop, is dictated by their suggestions and guided by their feedback.
XBIZ: Among this year’s big upgrades was the release of the subscription-based AP FanClub, which offers content creators an 80 percent payout and the ability to have up to three membership tiers. How seamlessly is this integrated and what kind of tiered functionality does it offer?
LLOYD: AP FanClub is baked right into the platform, as seamless as it gets. If creators choose to open a FanClub, it’s integrated right into their AP profile. FanClub sales are also integrated into the creator’s stats and payout reports and then rolled into a single combined payout. Creators are not required to use it, but as it had been the most-requested feature by creators for several months before its release, it is unsurprisingly being widely and enthusiastically adopted by the community.
As with many things, I think the most effective strategy for offering tiered content depends on the individual creator. Some may prefer a gradually staggered approach. Some may use a tier solely to offer Snapchat or other DM privileges. Some may want to segment their content by category (solo, hardcore, JOI, etc.). Some creators who already have a primary fan club on another site might choose to use AP FanClub solely to offer one or more higher-priced “super-premium” subscription products to their fans, as other platforms don’t really presently offer creators additional tiers to facilitate this (AP FanClubs can be set to bill up to $1,000/mo.). Managing a fan club takes time and effort, so it’s all about what works for the individual creator.
Ultimately, the coolest thing about AP FanClub is that it is completely customizable, so each creator can structure it in a way that best serves them, their fan-base and their unique circumstances.
XBIZ: In addition to the AP FanClub, the platform has recently expanded its features to include promotional auto-tweets, paid messaging, a message board for custom video requests, a dynamic home page, a shopping cart, plus many other design and optimization tweaks. Which of these has proven to be the most popular and what else does the design team have in the works?
LLOYD: On the customer side, the addition of shopping cart functionality last year was transformative. I was quite proud of and attached to our legacy tokens-only system, and admittedly stubborn about maintaining it. But enabling customers to choose between the two proved that the majority preferred buying via cart.
I think we alienated many early potential customers by forcing them through our incentivized “carrot-and-stick” tokens-only system, with its price premiums for smaller purchases and bonus tokens for big-spenders. We did this with the creator’s interests at heart, and tokens are definitely highly effective with certain consumers, but we’re sure glad we now offer both options.
The recent AP 2.0 redesign, with its optimized site navigation and mobile-first design approach, has also been genuinely transformative. We’re seeing not only increased repeat-customer activity and traffic but vastly increased average customer spend-per-session, which were the precise metrics we were aiming at.
On the creator side, paid messaging is probably the standout. It’s such an effective tool for engaging fans, not only to sell content and messages directly but also to broadcast offers and deliver special gifts to fans, thanking them for their support or rewarding them for big tip-votes in our themed tip-voting contests.
Our Custom Video Request Board, which was Amberly’s wise suggestion, is also very popular on both creator and customer sides.
Many of the other features we’ve added in the past year or so, like scheduled auto-tweets, the dynamic home page and tip-vote contests are admittedly less unique and were honestly more a matter of “keeping up with the Joneses.” These were features that our initial minimum viable product lacked, but which creators had come to expect as standard from their experiences on other platforms. Creators love these features too, but we can’t take much credit here.
Creator Discounting Tools are currently in development and coming very soon. There are a few other nice surprises in development as well, but mum’s the word. I suppose I can hint that a couple of them fall into the category of meritocratic creator rewards, and are both unique, and IMHO, super cool.
XBIZ: What have been your most productive techniques and tools for getting the word out about these upgrades and the value they provide for models and fans?
LLOYD: Well, the biggest PR efforts we’ve made to date have been for the AP Clips rebrand and AP FanClub. These were features that touched both sides of the marketplace, and which warranted a bigger than usual announcement.
However, our standard practice is to simply announce a new feature to creators via a blog post on the AP Lounge, sharing the link via AP DM and Twitter, then let the feature speak for itself. Word of mouth is the best PR, and if creators like the feature, they will share it with others. If they have feedback, we will iterate accordingly. If they have questions, we’re here to answer them.
We have a lot of faith in our creator community and never assume that creators require any extensive salesmanship or hand-holding to interest them in a new feature, nor do we want to push anything down their throats. After all, we work for them.
Our blog posts for new features give creators an excellent overview of the feature’s capabilities and always include specific details, suggestions and FAQs. Similar to the information a good lieutenant would provide their boss with.
I’ve always been partial to the phrase “the proof is in the pudding,” so we don’t like to overhype, make wild claims or set unrealistic expectations. We’re essentially here to serve creators, not to tell them how great our new thing is or try to sell it to them.
XBIZ: Tell us what characteristics the ideal creator has to have, in today’s diverse ecosystem, for long-term success? Does APClips have a particular creator genre it’s known for?
LLOYD: I’d honestly say there is no such thing as an ideal creator type or customer type. Creators are contributing to the community in such a wide variety of ways. Moreover, it is the diversity of creators and their fans which creates the marketplace.
On the fan side, naturally, a fan who spends lots of money on their favorite creator is more “ideal” than one who never has and never will, or one who wastes creators’ time and energy.
For us, diversity is the entire reason we’re in the game. The diversity of creators and the content they create is what makes the market, period. Fan expectations run the spectrum, and smart proactive content creators manage them accordingly. In every individual case, it’s the creator’s relationship, and we simply give them the tools to manage and monetize it according to their good judgment.
As far as unique attributes go, for creators, I’d say it is AP’s sense of community and our genuine appreciation for them. Oh, and AP’s 75 percent clip sales payout. I suppose that would also technically fall under creator appreciation.
For fans, I’d say a lovable easy-to-explore interface and the knowledge that a higher percentage of the money they spend on clips will remain in the hands of the creators they love, are at the top of the list of what differentiates AP in the consumer’s eye.
XBIZ: What adult companies and/or individuals in the biz inspire you and why?
LLOYD: I’m most impressed with and inspired by Indie content creators themselves, and by any companies or individuals working in earnest to serve their interests.
As someone from the old-school adult web, I was not crazy about the first wave of disruption in the adult web, so it’s both inspiring and refreshing to witness and be part of this second wave of disruption which benefits individual creators. In that sense, the entire segment is inspiring.
Historically, I’ve always admired the late Reuben Sturman. People always talk about “The Big 3” — Hefner, Guccione and Flynt; and certainly, they are all visionaries and pioneers to whom the industry owes a great debt. But Sturman was, in my opinion, on another level. A breed apart.
Unlike the other more well-known pioneers, he sold actual XXX hardcore pornography, operating a massive nationwide distribution network supplying red-light district bookstores and sex shops. Both directly and indirectly, he provided more employment opportunities for sex workers than all the others combined.
Right up until the end, he outwitted the self-righteous political puritans at almost every turn, despite the unfathomable odds against him. His brilliance, toughness, courage and relentlessness in championing free speech are genuinely awe-inspiring.
XBIZ: What does the future hold for APClips and you, personally?
LLOYD: We’re just going to keep doing what we do best at AP, continuing to serve creators and improve the platform to suit their needs and desires. Innovating, as well as adopting and integrating new technologies as they arise. We are also making a concerted effort to facilitate more exposure for AP creators and to expose the site to a wider variety of customers through advertising and other traffic-building methods.
As for me, there’s nothing more engaging or rewarding than building or creating things that people enjoy and benefit from. That’s all I’ve ever really done, and can’t see myself deviating from this. A great marketplace platform is essentially a virtuous circle, facilitating both benefit and enjoyment so I feel I’ve found a rather ideal vehicle to keep me engaged and rewarded for many years to come.
XBIZ: What does a typical workday look like and what is the most rewarding part of your job? What do you do for fun on off days?
LLOYD: I’d say typical days are rare for me, but I am pretty much glued to the AP transaction report for a fair amount of the day and night regardless. It’s fun to observe the site at a granular level, and I learn a great deal from it.
By far the most rewarding part of my job is hearing positive feedback from creators, and watching them grow with us. When I see a creator having a stellar sales day, or a creator’s new video release selling like hotcakes, or a creator making a big sale or getting a massive tip from a fan, it’s super-exciting and makes my day.
I don’t take days off. My OCD tendencies keep my mind occupied with AP and all its operational facets. To me, if you enjoy what you’re doing, there’s no work/play distinction anyhow.
