IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Kingdom Worldwide Web Operations, Inc. was founded in late 1996. Kim gives us an exclusive interview.

YNOT: Greetings Kim! Kicking things off here…IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Kingdom Worldwide Web Operations, Inc. was founded in late 1996. Kim gives us an exclusive interview.

YNOT: Greetings Kim! Kicking things off here… what are some of the sites that Kingdom Worldwide Web Operations, Inc. operates? Also, what are your responsibilities for the company?

Kim: We own www.amkingdom.com, www.amkingdom.com/hairy, www.atkexotics.com, and www.crazies.com.

I oversee the day-to-day operations of the firm and am also in charge of longer-range planning. For example, I set our corporate strategic direction, including such areas as website positioning and new website development. On a daily basis, I very closely supervise the purchase of our website content and put together our site update schematics.

YNOT: What is your company’s mission? Feel free to sound as corporate as you like…

YNOT: Anything that makes you guys unique, or sets you apart from your competitors?

Kim: Yes, I believe that key strategies in several areas differentiate us from our competition.

1) Site positioning – From the beginning we decided to set ourselves apart from the competition by increasing the reality of the fantasy we provide, specifically by presenting images of more girl-next-door types. By this I mean that we did not want to appear like so many of the other sites out there in terms of emphasizing air-brushed images of stunningly beautiful, professional models many of whom have had breast implants and other surgical enhancements. In contrast, we wanted to showcase the more “everyday” type of woman; attractive of course, but more realistic in that they have some “flaws”. In other words, we try to display the type of women you might see at work, on a college campus, at the local coffee shop or the grocery store; the type of woman you might actually get a chance to date and perhaps even marry one day. Another way to put it might be that we try to showcase the type of girl you could bring home to show your mother without raising her eyebrows too much. Although many other sites have tried to copy this positioning, I feel we are still differentiated from our competition because of the degree to which we are able to offer this in a total package.

2) Content offering – We purchase a lot of material that is custom-shot for our needs as opposed to merely being licensed. Not only does this allow us to better please our target audience by delivering material that more closely meets our customers’ requirements but also differentiates our site from those of our competitors since we are able to devote a large percentage of our site to material that cannot legally be found elsewhere. We also strive to integrate the different areas of our site so that we can introduce a model in regular clothing and then have her strip down gradually. She will then get progressively more explicit in future updates. Finally, we update more frequently and in greater volume than our competition and, in so doing, provide superior value for the money to our customers.

3) Corporate Social Responsibility – From the outset, we have internally self-regulated in a manner that meets my own personal standards and beliefs about playing an honest, responsible role in the adult Internet industry. This approach includes being very upfront about recurring billing practices and providing clear links for subscription cancellation. This also includes registering our sites with key filtering services to allow our site to be blocked by those who do not want to view adult material. We also take this idea a step further by disallowing any hardcore (i.e. showing penetration) material in free or unprotected areas, even though this has meant reduced revenues for us as firm.

4) Long-Term Orientation – We try to develop trust with our customers and our business partners and facilitate the development of long-term relationships in both these critical areas. We have been doing business now with many of the same photographers and customers that we started with in the first year of our operations. We also have the same set of core employees we started with. I strongly believe in the strategic value of developing transaction-specific assets with our firm’s internal and external stakeholders. To illustrate, in our free site we very consistently update our free areas with quality images and at the exact time that we promise. This allows us to build trust with free site visitors, who in turn bookmark our free site if they are happy with it, and who will return week after week to check out the new updates. A repeat visit strategy gives us the opportunity to have multiple selling encounters with a given visitor instead of the single selling encounter that most standardized adult website tours offer. Many visitors do not buy a membership the first time they visit our free site, but may do so on subsequent visits. Honesty is a key virtue that we uphold in all our dealings with others.

5) Focus on Key Marketing Principles – I think our emphasis on applying key marketing science principles also sets us apart from our competition. An understanding of the antecedents and consequences of customer satisfaction and excellent brand equity management are just two examples of cornerstone constructs that we emphasize as part of our overall marketing strategy. For example, since customer satisfaction is a function of the discrepancy between customer expectations and actual performance, we very much gear towards under-promising and over-delivering as opposed to over-promising and under-delivering. Additionally, the asymmetric relationship between customer satisfaction/dissatisfaction and subsequent purchase patterns and post-purchase behavior leads us to emphasize customer satisfaction as a key goal for our websites.

YNOT: Wow… Thanks for that in-depth answer! I’m sure our webmasters will greatly appreciate all of your information.

So, what drew you to the industry? You’ll get extra points for originality here…

Kim: I was a doctoral student in marketing at the time I got started. One of the related topics that came up frequently during the PhD seminars I attended was the applicability of the Internet as a medium for data collection for doctoral dissertations, research etc. Anyway, in checking out the Internet, I was continually amazed at the tremendous traffic volume that adult websites generated. I also observed that most sites were not doing a great job of target marketing and positioning. I felt I could do a better job than most and so I started segmenting the market from there and ATK so evolved.

YNOT: OK, that would definitely qualify as a very original answer!

What type of work were you doing, before you started in the biz? Tell me about your worst or most humiliating job if you feel up to it!

Kim: After completing a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration from the University of Washington and then an MBA from the University of Michigan, I worked for General Motors for several years. I began in a department called Advanced Marketing Methodologies where I was responsible for developing and validating new tools and techniques for conducting market research. I then moved on to GM’s Consumer and Product Research Departments and then moved to the GMC Truck Division where I started out at the Compact Pickup and Compact Sport Utility Product Planner. I was promoted to Manager of Market Research at GMC Truck and also served as Program Manager on the GMC Syclone and Typhoon high-performance truck programs.

After the launch of the Syclone I left General Motors and started my own high performance shop in Michigan. We specialized in the design and manufacture of high performance racing engines and also sold performance parts and accessories. After 4 years, I decided to go back to school to do a Doctorate in marketing and sold the business.

When I was at the University of Washington, I did various part-time jobs to earn money while I was going to school. One that was particularly grueling was working on a farm in Yakima, Washington that belonged to a fellow UW student’s father. We rose very early in the morning to milk the cows and I can assure you that while it was a great developmental experience, I didn’t feel particularly clean by the end of the day. Cows do not give you any warning when they are going to have a bowel movement of any kind! Another tough job was picking apples; in fact, this is the only job from which I have ever been fired. A group of college students and I went to eastern Washington to pick apples. We had been told that you could make a lot of money doing so – $9 an hour was what someone had told us and this was in the early 80’s, when minimum wage was $3.35 an hour. When we asked for work, the foreman at the first apple farm we stopped seemed a little skeptical of our ability to do a good job. “You look like coastal folk,” he said glaring at the four of us who must have looked a bit too clean-cut for the job. “Are you sure you have experience?” We all nodded yes, even though this was our first time. He gave is the job and set us up by some trees with ladders and crates. We had to fill a large crate with apples to get $9. Well after a few hours I figured out that we were making about $1 per hour. My 3 friends got fired shortly thereafter for being too slow. I speeded things up hoping to keep my job. I figured out that climbing up the ladder and carefully picking apples was too slow of a process, so I decided to swing on the branches and shake the apples onto the ground and then throw them into the crate. Well, it wasn’t long before the foreman came by and complained that the apples I was picking were only good for applesauce as they were bruised and lacked stems. I was officially fired, the only compensation being the fact that I lasted a few hours longer on the job than my 3 friends.

YNOT: HAHAHAHAHA! That was a great story!!! Ugh, I remember when minimum wage was that low. A few hours at the arcade was worth several hours of work. All right back to business here…Tell us about what it was like getting started. Where did you start? Did you already have friends in the business? How hard was it… getting started that is?

Kim: Getting started was very tough. We literally had very little money and just a single Dell pc to start with. The marketing ideas came easily but implementation was a huge challenge. Being a graduate student who was also a single parent at the time, I didn’t have a lot of extra money to fund the venture. My girlfriend (now my wife) and I really had to scrounge to pay the server bills and buy images. We started out with a $50 per month hosting bill, and exceeded the bandwidth allocation almost immediately. Our monthly server/bandwidth charges skyrocketed, going from $50 per month to $12,000 per month in less than 9 months and the growing pains were noticeable as our sites literally came to a crawl at times due to overloading the servers we were on. We also went through some problems where sponsors failed to pay us or seemed to be shaving the payouts and so we decided to open up our own members’ area instead of reselling for others.

Moreover, at the time, HTML programming was not as automated as it is today and so we had to manually write all our pages and given the huge size of our updates, this was an extremely time-consuming process.

Anyway, we could barely make ends meet for quite a while and put all the revenues back into our sites in the form of content and of course paying server costs. And we got very little sleep. We didn’t have any friends in the business to begin with but we quickly met some and are pleased to continue our friendships with many of them today.

YNOT: What changes would you like to see made in the adult Internet industry?

Kim: I would personally like to see more self-regulation in the industry. Right now, the industry has a tainted reputation due to the presence of highly objectionable material and dishonest business practices. In the area of objectionable material specifically, child pornography is a very problematic area. There are also websites specializing in extreme violence and bestiality. I am all for the legal shutdown of such sites. Adult sites also contribute to the spam email problem when sending out unsolicited mail, and to credit card charge back problems through unscrupulous billing practices. Such activities only hurt business for the industry as a whole as they tend to cast a negative halo on the honest, legitimate sites. Copyright and trademark infringement is another problem area that needs further addressing. I think that the short-term pursuit of money at all costs is the deviant mentality that contributes to these problem areas.

YNOT: What do you love about the adult Internet industry, and consequently, what do you despise?

Kim: I am particularly fascinated with the Internet as a medium for conducting business. It is an extremely powerful, interactive medium that is perfectly suited for adult entertainment and many other business applications. It offers a unique set of challenges but also some unique opportunities and one can always test and re-test ideas and get nearly instant feedback on them. I also enjoy the comraderie of the honest and creative people we have met in this industry.

I have also been impressed with the genuine good-heartedness and support of our customer-base on a number of occasions. We had a model in our site that had some problems with cervical cancer and we asked for some help from our members and the donations and outpouring of encouragement that was shown was wonderful. Additionally, our website servers are located within a block of the World Trade Center and so we had some downtime due to the catastrophic events of 9/11. Again our customers were very understanding and showed tremendous support during this time.

I despise the problem areas I mentioned above – the child pornography, copyright infringement and other illegal areas. I am also not fond of the “copycat” strategies used by some competitive companies. That is, firms who seem to be unable to come up with ideas of their own and who copy so many aspects of what we do, from the layout of their sites and features they offer, to the segments they go after, to the photographers and models they use etc. I really admire innovativeness as a trait in others and so I guess I am not fond of those who lack original ideas and resort to blatant copying.

YNOT: Boy do I hear you there!

So where do you see yourself in the long run…

Kim: I think I will always work within the marketing function. When I get bored with the current domain, I will develop activities within another that allow me to be creative with my favorite marketing theories and constructs.

YNOT: The future of the adult Internet… happy and shiny or gloom and doom?

Kim: I foresee a mixture of both. I think the adult site industry is approaching some saturation and that the price of traffic has risen to the point that many sites cannot operate profitably in the long run. So I see a shakeout over the next few years and expect to see some consolidation within the industry. I think adult websites will have to become more specialized and focus on specific niche areas as opposed to trying to be all things to all people in order to remain profitable and survive in the long run.

As far as the current government administration goes, I hope that they will enforce the problem areas I mentioned earlier such as child pornography etc. but not dilute the work and limited resources so badly needed for application to those areas by trying to prosecute mainstream pornography. There are so many higher priority areas that need to be worked on.

YNOT: Let’s close this up on a positive note… what one bit of advice would you tell a newbie?

Kim: My best advice to a newbie is to start out by reselling for honest websites in non-overlapping areas and to build a customized network of free sites to aid in doing this. The price of entry into the pay site arena is much higher than it was 5 years ago and so it is too difficult of a task to do successfully for a novice. I would also emphasize the need to be honest with your customers and business partners and the need to be creative in your work. These are all virtues that will aid in building long-term relationships with others in the business and in helping to develop and sustain a competitive advantage.

YNOT: Beautiful… thanks so much for your time, and much continued success to you!

Kim: Thanks for the opportunity to answer some questions. I hope that others will find some of the information useful and/or inspirational.

Editors Note: Be sure to tune in to the YNOT Bob Humpday Lunch Radio Show this week to catch Kim as the featured guest, next Wednesday, February 20 at Noon (PT)!