Are All Generative Businesses a Little Naughty? The case of MakeLoveNotPorn

by cv harquail on April 3, 2014

No startup challenges our norms about ‘appropriate business’ more than MakeLoveNotPorn.

MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP) is a user-generated crowdsourced video platform that celebrates “real world sex”. MLNP is a legal, lucrative, and liberatory disruptor of the adult entertainment industry. It’s also a profoundly generative business.

MLNP is generative not because it’s naughty, but because of how it’s naughty.

MLNP disobeys our culture’s norms about how a for-profit business should behave.

mlnp-tv-logo1MLNP deliberately disregards the central claim of capitalism: that companies should focus their energy on what will build their profits. Instead, MLNP is growing its own business while transforming how we think about business relationships, how we share what we learn, how we create value, how we capture value, and how we define our roles within our network and community.

MLNP flaunts a generative, full frontal ambition: to make money, create opportunity, share value, and transform the ways that we talk about, think about, and enjoy sex.  

(Note:  It’s okay to go look at their site. When you’re not playing a video, the whole site is “safe for work”.)

The Basic Model of a Generative Business

MLNP’s CEO Cindy Gallop and her team of revolutionaries started with a very basic business model. Stripped of its specifics, MLNP would be an online marketplace. MLNP’s marketplace would rent videos that depict ‘real world sex’ and offer an alternative to the fantastical, verging-on-ridiculous sex offered by conventional porn.

MLNP would be profitable and gain market share because customers (known as members) would prefer and pay for a curated, reliable selection of alternative videos. MLNP would open their marketplace to include a second set of customers: members who wanted to make videos to be included in the MLNP collection and earn money when other members rented them.

The MLNP business model meets all the criteria for a generative business.

The platform creates an opportunity space for stakeholders, who can use these opportunities to create what they want to. The marketplace design aligns stakeholders’ interests so that they’re mutually-supportive; what benefits video viewers benefits video makers, and also benefits the marketplace owner, MLNP.

For example, revenue from video rental is shared evenly between MNLP and the folks who made the video. A feature where members can “admire” or follow video makers’ profiles not only offers social proof of quality to potential viewers but also tells video makers what their audience enjoys. The system is designed to gather and share information that lets stakeholders improve the quality of the video collection and participate in the financial growth of the marketplace.

Generating Shared, Thick Value

MLNP’s business model lets participants enjoy and share not only financial values like fair prices and profit, but also non-financial values (aka thick value) such as aesthetic quality, creativity, self-expression, and learning.

533d9930dbf3ec178900009a

Video renters get production values that don’t offend their taste and intelligence, as well as content and narratives that promote values they believe in. MLNP videos depict a range of adults, personalities, and body types similar to what we see out in the world, in relationships that are real enough to be inspiring.

Video makers get to create the kinds of video stories they’d want to see, to enjoy the thrill of performing for future viewers, and to have their videos featured on a site that promotes values they believe in.

These non-financial values have an important payout for MLNP’s members: As a result of using the company’s products, members enjoy their sex lives more.

Explains one member, quoted on the MLNP blog:

When I discovered MLNP.tv, it was like a light went off: …Your #realworldsex videos have helped me regain confidence post-baby and inspired me to reconnect with my partner. (link, sfw)

MLNP doesn’t need to capture this kind of value in dollars and cents to know that they’ve achieved an important generative business goal.

Catalyzing A Generative Ecosystem

MLNP’s commercial ambitions don’t stop at the boundaries of their online platform. They take aim at the broader ecosystem around their business, starting first with the online adult entertainment industry. Although the industry itself has a negative reputation, sex videos are a popular form of entertainment (comprising an estimated third of all internet traffic) for a large portion of adults (over 65% of young adult men report watching porn once a week).

Still, most porn has a quality problem. Story lines are hackneyed and uncreative, behaviors are unrealistic, and lighting and sound are poor. The industry is perceived as exploiting both the performers and the production crews who make the content, while disproportionately rewarding those who distribute the content.

Like every other content-related business, the adult entertainment industry is being challenged online by price competition (e.g., an influx of free content) and degrading production values (e.g., amateur/inexpert/hackneyed content creators). The industry could use some disruption.

MLNP offers the adult entertainment industry an alternative, lucrative and generative business model.

By demonstrating how all participants who contribute to the marketplace can also profit from it, MLNP challenges the revenue model of the online sex video industry. And, since their profitable and vibrant marketplace proves that customers will pay for sex videos that are more realistic, creative and entertaining, MLNP promotes the financial opportunities of ‘real world sex’ entertainment.

Supporting Social Change

MLNP rents videos, but it sells social change.

Perhaps the most provocative challenge to taboos comes from MLNP’s aesthetic model. MLNP had to establish curatorial standards that defined ‘real world sex’ so that they could guide video makers, attract video viewers, and select appropriate videos to host on their platform.

makelovenotporn

 

By developing their aesthetic model interactively with video viewers and makers, the MLNP curators are creating a library of work that makes a shared value statement about what sex can be and should be.

For example, MLNP’s guidelines encourage people who use condoms to show how they put condoms on and take condoms off, as well as everything in between. By asking video makers to keep this ‘real world sex’ activity in their videos, MLNP not only normalizes condom use, they encourage people to make condoms sexy.

Offering a different kind of adult entertainment that explicitly promotes realistic, sex-positive values, MLNP fosters a conversation about what porn is, what adult entertainment could be, and where real world sex fits in our lives.

Here again, what MLNP does to build their business and benefit their customers also creates opportunities for culture change.

For example, Gallop and her team relentlessly promote the technological side of the MLNP business at tech conferences, the sex education element at conferences on business and society, and the opportunities for sex-positive marketing at advertising conferences.

With each presentation Gallop sells not only the commercial business of MLNP — driving more members to the site– but also promotes the aesthetic and cultural vision of their business — driving more conversation, more reflection, and more learning about real world sex.

A Little Naughtly Goes A Long Way

MLNP offers real world proof that generative businesses can succeed by being a little naughty.

Flouting the norms of conventional business, MLNP creates opportunities for customers, its industry, and society to grow. It designs its systems so that what’s good for the business is also good for customers and the larger system, and it captures and circulates not only financial value, but also non-monetary, thick value. MLNP’s business creates a marketplace and community of companies, partners, and supporters that generates opportunity for mutual growth while also propelling a larger, shared positive purpose.

If a company that sells adult entertainment can create opportunities for others while making a profit and changing the world, what can companies in more mainstream businesses do? Companies that sell music, software, gourmet food products, handmade crafts, and even real-time travel data can more generative by using design strategies, business models, and practices pioneered by MLNP.

MLNP is not only changing how we think about sex; it’s changing how we think about business.

 

11149_6fa5303482_fullSee my post about Cindy’s earlier venture, IfWeRanTheWorld.com => Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop

{ 3 comments }

Modesty Ablaze April 13, 2014 at 2:00 pm

Excellent article . . . and for me, as a participant at #realworldsex, your statement that MLNP offers “videos that depict ‘real world sex’ and offer an alternative to the fantastical, verging-on-ridiculous sex offered by conventional porn.” is key.
The videos from the community at MLNP are from “real people” (like myself), who share their intimate moments because they want to, because in sharing we want to show that sex should be consensual, fun and “normal” . . . and that even if those values can make the smallest of dents or impact on the “mainstream” or “conventional”, then the world may be at least, just a little nicer, safer, fairer place!

Hazza Jay April 17, 2014 at 6:53 am

I love the concept of Make Love Not Porn! Its a great step forward in the right direction. Modern-day internet porn has lost its way. And along with this, men have lost their way too. While I was tapering off a porn habit, I checked out some of the videos on MLNP. After going weeks without porn, I was aroused & horny. Thus, I found the passion between the real life couples immensely sexy & a huge turn on. It was an amazing experience to watch.

However, I’m still apprehensive about its effects on compulsive male porn users. Since tapering off, I haven’t gone back to the site. The honest truth is that there are still triggers in the videos, so its not really helpful for males. It can easily lull us back into engaging in porn. Are there any studies on the effects of MLNP and porn addiction?

I would love to connect with some of you at some point in the future. I’d like to interview one of the following over on http://thefapman.com:

(i) Cindy Gallop

(ii) MLNP participants

(iii) A frequent user of MLNP

ps: three quick tips for Cindy Gallop & MLNP:

(1) Education, awareness & community is the name of the game. I’m sure you know this.

(2) If you’re not advertising via adult networks (eg. Traffic Junky or Exxoclick), you’re missing out! Your entire male market is there. Its not as expensive as Google, etc.

(3) Encourage film participants to use HD cameras. The low quality of some of the videos would definitely deter some users from renting them. Maybe even send some out HD webcams/videocameras as freebies to your most popular uploaders.

Keep up the great work.

Cindy Gallop April 18, 2014 at 3:48 pm

Hazza – thank you for your comment! I’m very happy to be interviewed 🙂 Please contact cindy@makelovenotporn.com.

To respond here:

We are not a site designed to address porn addiction. I am not a specialist in porn addiction, a professional sex educator, an academic or a ‘sexpert’, and regularly make that clear (I prefer to call myself a ‘sex enthusiast’ :)).

If you’d like to see what our members have to say about MLNP, please check out the section of our blog where we post their responses:

http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/category/realworldinbox/

This is where our MakeLoveNotPornstars guest post about the experience of sharing their #realworldsex (which has proved to be transformative for them and their relationships):

http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/category/mlnpstars-speak-2/

Re your points:

1) There are specific reasons why I concepted https://www.makelovenotporn.tv/ to be both what it is, and what it is not. We can chat about this when you interview me 🙂

2) We have no intention of doing that because that isn’t relevant to our business, our business strategy and our business vision. Again, happy to discuss this in interview 🙂

3) While we provide filming tips on this section of our blog:

http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/category/how-tos/

we’re not about imposing quality and production values on anyone. #realworldsex is #realworld everything including whatever and however you choose to record your #realworldsex (the quality control aspect of our curation philosophy extends only to making sure it is actually visible – have had to decline some videos that are so dark you can’t see a thing :)) We’re entirely usergenerated and crowdsourced, we’re all-inclusive, and we don’t dictate or impose anything: you our community, you the world, show us what #realworldsex is.

We’re not porn, we’re not ‘amateur’, we’re #realworldsex – we’re not competing with porn, and we play a different role, as I explain here:

http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/2013/04/01/what-is-realworldsex-the-first-in-an-occasional-series/

and our members’ responses bear out:

http://talkabout.makelovenotporn.tv/2013/12/04/the-difference-between-porn-and-realworldsex-an-ongoing-discussion/

I look forward to our interview 🙂

Comments on this entry are closed.

{ 3 trackbacks }