R-n L-vi G-d Of Internet Porn Walks On Water.

[Mike AI]

Ron Levi Shapes Adult Net
by D.U.C. (send email to D.U.C.)

Ron Levi aka Fantasyman of CECash.com created many of the programs that drive the porn internet.

"He structured the industry we're in right now," says a internet porn source. "How can you bash a guy who created the livelihood a lot of these guys are making from his sites and his technologies?"

Ron's innovations include:

* Pay per click banner advertising (8/96). Levi's paid out millions of dollars through his FastCash program.

* Productivity clicks. Ron first began paying on unique hits rather than raw hits. A unique hit refers to a hit from a unique IP address (every computer has a unique IP number).

In the Spring of 1997, Ron developed High Rollers, which paid according to the productivity of the traffic you sent. If your traffic generation lots of signups, you made lots of money. If you generated no signups, you made no money. High Rollers was copied by many people, including Babenet, whose RockinRollers.com program credits Cybererotica for the innovation. At the bottom of Rockinrollers.com/straight.html, is this sentence: "The idea for this program was copied from High Rollers designed by Shai Shprung from CyberErotica."

* Double opt-in email programs. To sign up for Ron's email programs like Risky mail (which sends porno pictures to your email address), you had to first type in your email address. Then you got an email asking for a confirmation. You had to reply to this email, or click on the provided link, to activate your account. This way strangers could not type in your email address and flood you with porn.

"So when UU.net or someone complains that you are spamming," says Levi, "we can go back to our records to that particular guy's email and give the IP addresses and all the formal information that identifies that he did it. Our program has stood up to the scrutiny of UU.net, Real Time Blackhole, MSN Security. Someone played a joke on the head of MSN security once. The head started getting Risky mail. I said to him there's no way. We got down to phone calls. I said, humor me. Look in your out file for email. And sure enough, while he was out to lunch, somebody had submitted his email address, got the email back and confirmed it (but didn't erase the send file). So there's no way someone will get something from our email programs unless they've asked for it.

* Live feeds. "IGallery and Babenet took my idea of putting live feeds in members sections (5/97) which has become common. They feared that the bandwidth would kill them. I had to underwrite any potential loss from bandwidth. And the banner of course would be underneath for the upsell to chat with the girl. And that ended up to being a grand success. It's created a whole business of people creating live feeds and offering them to pay sites."

At one time, Levi helped market IGallery, Babenet and Python's live feeds. "Python wouldn't do it [have Levi underwrite any loss from bandwidth]. They were stuck in their ways and have been licking their wounds ever since."

Babenet principle Rob Gould said in the IA2000 convention right after that, in a workshop roundtable, in an answer to the question, when did Babenet turn around and start making money, Rob said it was when we started listening to Fantasy Man.

* Counter that pays. Cybererotica developed the first counter that people can put on their sites to rate traffic stats and earn income from signups. "They can get fantastic reporting stats," says Levi. "They will learn where their traffic is coming from, search terms, which search engines, what browsers surfers are using, what resolution so you can optimize your site... It is a very complex program that gives more information than any other counter out there."

In 1997, Levi financed Joe Holler's development of the XXX Counter. Holler had partnered with the guys from Websidestory.com, another counter service. Holler was paying for the development of Websidestory's adult counter. He got screwed out of the deal. So he took the code and put up XXX Counter.

"The code was garbage," says Levi. "So BobX rewrote XXXCounter while he (BobX) was working for me. It was supposedly me, BobX and Joe Holler involved in that. Then I went on vacation. And in those days, Internic was controlled by email. My email address Fantasyman controlled XXXCounter's domain. While I was on vacation, BobX walked in my office and sent back a confirming order to move XXXCounter out of my name. By the time I got back from vacation, it was out of my name and off my servers."

XXXCounter was since sold to Andy Edmond of SexTracker.com and Levi received nothing.

Ron Levi says his pay-per-click advertising came out in August of 1996. Al Hadhazy's program came out in September in 1996 and he used to have something on his FAQs that said that we had come out with it before him.

In 1997, Levi partnered with Richard from Ientertain and Dean. They split the Fastcash traffic. Then Dean and Richard became partners without even considering Levi, leaving him out in the cold. So Ron kicked Richard out of Fastcash.

Voice Media (Levi's company) has over five million names in his Risky Mail program which sends out porn-filled email every day through its double opt-in email program.

VM has never had a problem with UU.net, which controls the internet backbone, because of its harsh anti-spam policies. Nothing beyond a level three escalation.

Dave Rand, who runs Above.net, at one time placed VM on his Real Time Black Hole list for spammers. But VM changed procedures so that people who signed up for programs would receive their code via email, instead of receiving it immediately upon signup. This made sure that those people signing up had entered a valid email address.

Around 1996, AOL gave VM hassle over email spam. VM responded aggressively through its attorney, outlining its anti-spam policies. VM offered to help AOL with its security because the way that email addresses can be harvested off the AOL chatrooms, promotes spamming. AOL never replied.

Ron Levi started in phone sex in 1985 and soon was doing millions of dollars a month in business. He was once burned by a partner who robbed him of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Cybererotica's parent company Voice Media Inc started as an audiotext (phone sex) company in 1992. It launched the Cybererotica.com website, one of the adult web's ten largest, in December of 1995.

Ron: "DMR's problem was when they tried to go public. We weren't DMR's problem. The moneymakers that came in, kicked them out. They mismanaged their accounts. They were a third-party processer. We had no control over them.

"We've never had problems with high chargebacks. We're one of the least fined people out there [credit card companies levy fines when websites have too high a rate of chargebacks]."

Ron Levi and Cybererotica got good reviews for customer service in the summer 2000 issue of MaximumPC magazine for customer service.

A man writes in to a MaxPC columnist Watch Dog: "Dear Dog. I have an embarrassing problem. I don't know who else to turn to. One night last month, some friends and I came back from our house pretty wasted and decided that the best thing to do was to look at some porno. After looking at lots of crappy sites, we stumbled across Cybererotica. It's a paysite with a free seven day trial. We decided to use my credit card after reading the terms and conditions. We thought it would be safe. It turned out to be ok but since I did not want to pay $34:95 ($51.22 Canadian), I cancelled my membership. The page came up confirming my cancellation. Then today I received my Master Card bill. To my surprise, it showed a charge of $51.22..."

Dog responds: "The Dog contacted Ron Levi, owner of Cybererotica... He said that if the account had been cancelled within the trial period, the system should've automatically processed it. Being skeptical of his claims, the Dog tested this by dialing a service number late at night. After a four minute wait, the customer service rep answered to cancell the Dog's membership. Yow! If computer companies offered 24 hour support that answered within four minutes, the world would be a happier place... Cybererotica is a legitimate business."

Wow Ron pioneered pay-per-click for banners, double-opt-in email, and much much more! Who knew. I heard Timon invented the exit console too. I am seriously awed to be in the presence of such genius.

--edit: never mind--

C.



Last edited by Cal at Nov 24 2002, 02:28 PM

[*KK*]

Is this a press release?

[Mike AI]

HAHA luke ford is such a great reporter!! Deep Under Cover!! Maybe it shuold be deep up R-n's ass!!!

I will say my prayers tonight to R-n, and hope he can help me get better conversions, and more traffic. Praise R-n.

[*KK*]

Oh Michael just talk to your momma like R-n's video says...

[Mike AI]

Momma, momma says that taking pictures of nakes girls is wrong...

But, but, but R-n says I can take 'dem photos and put them up on the internet, maybe make a few dollars....

Praise R-n, and is loyal disciple D.U.R.A. ( Deep Up R-n's Ass )

[*KK*]

Momma never said anything about naked men did she?

[Mike AI]

R-n never did tell me about naked men. I wish he would have, maybe I could have been as rich as Jonas!!

It is not for me to question almighty R-n!!!

[PK]

R_n L_v_ = Al Gore??? Makes one wonder