Twenty-one-year-old Riley may not be a household name, but the naturalbodied amateur niche model has been splashed all over the Internet like an all-consuming tidal wave.
"In 10 months we have managed to get affiliates to build 1.3 million web pages with her name on [them]," Jay Man says. "We also grossed $1 million in our first eight months. That's kind of a big deal off one girl in eight months."
Sean Trotter, CTO and director of online sales for AdamEve.com, is impressed by Riley's rapid rise to web stardom.
"She has captured the niche of the girl next door that you might run into at the local grocery store and take home," Trotter tells XBiz. "This is a large part of her appeal, but the most impressive attribute is that she came from nowhere to hit every message board and TGP in cyberspace at the same time and with different content everywhere."
Riley, says adult entertainment consultant Kevin Blatt, fits a specific niche market.
"She's young, Latina, cute and natural," Blatt says. "And you can probably add about 10 other adjectives, which just goes to show you how marketable she is."
Currently based in Cincinnati, Jay Man discovered Riley in early 2004 while casting for bikini models for still shoots. Riley, who had never modeled before and was working a 9-to-5 job, accompanied a friend to a shoot and immediately expressed an interest in posing for the camera. When Jay Man – who was a content producer and affiliate manager for AFDollars.com at the time – scheduled Riley for her first session, he was promptly impressed by her business acumen.
For $50 More...
"We were doing an outdoor shoot under a bridge and she began taking her clothes off and I was trying to get a feeling of what she was into and how far she would go," Jay Man recalls. "And then she started negotiating with me, which is something models usually don't do.
She said, 'For $50 more I'll take my panties off.' I counter-offered with $25, and she said, 'One hundred.' You don't see that too often."
Hardly surprising for a young woman who notes in her About Me page at RavenRiley.com that her dream car is a Mercedes and her first ambition is to "make lots of money." If web models need a capitalist idol, Raven Riley is their girl.
Jay Man began shooting Riley for AmateurFacials.com, an affiliate program of AF Dollars, in 2004. That's when his business partner, Tom of PicHunters.com, suggested that Jay Man provide Riley with her own solo girl site. Jay Man and Riley agreed.
"So every time we shot her for Amateur Facials, we had her arrive on set with four more outfits, and we ended up taking five sets every day. We did that for about six weeks and before we knew it we had 30 sets of content that we owned outright." Jay Man, Tom and Riley – collectively, the business entity Third Pentacle, LLC – opened the Raven Riley paysite in December 2004. The saturation of Raven Riley on the web came through a pre-existing network.
"I had worked for resource site Netpond since 1999," Jay Man explains. "I did management support, marketing, advertising, and I had a show on Netpond Radio. So through all of that and my work with Amateur Facials, I was a branded entity. Tom came with his own network of people through PicHunter and that was big traffic people. Tom's network and contacts were pure, big TGP traffic people."
Jay Man, says Kevin Blatt, "is friends with a lot of big players and that just opens up a floodgate of traffic."
"One thing we did at the very beginning with marketing Raven Riley," Jay Man says, "is every set of content that we released to members, we also released to webmasters; every set you could download in the webmasters area – not the whole set, just 20 pictures or so. That gives people marketing tools as an affiliate to push her name."
And before you could say, "a star is born," there were 1.3 million websites pushing Raven Riley. Jay Man reports that RavenRiley.com receives 70,000 unique visitors per day, and 65-70 percent of their sales are direct request type-ins.
"Our type-ins are insane," he boasts. "If we don't get another affiliate we don't care."
Currently, JayManCash and Third Pentacle hosts three niche sites aside from Riley's web address, including Bangin Becky.com, CumOn Candy.com and LadyBoy Crush.com, the latter featuring Asian transsexuals. Jay Man's goal is 20 sites of all different niches.
"To me, niche means exclusive content," Jay Man says. "It's a captured market. There's only one place where the consumer can find exclusive Raven Riley content, and that's on her site. She's not in anyone else's member's area."
Jay Man says Riley is very active on her site, spending three hours daily corresponding with members via email and message boards and webcam.
"She's even on our support forum," Jay says with a laugh. "She's a very strong personality, very dedicated. She's a full partner in the site and in the company. She makes a cut of everything we do. She's long term."
Sean Trotter hopes that Riley is sending a message to all the girls in the industry. "If you build a site, you have to shoot as much content as humanly possible. Too many girls put up 30 galleries and then expect to be millionaires," Trotter says. "If Raven becomes a millionaire off her site, then she deserves it. Her marketing and dedication to the site is unparalleled by any other single girl site out there, and I for one am impressed."
To implement the second phase of their Raven Riley marketing plan, Jay Man and associates are actively looking for contacts in the Los Angeles area.
"Our goal for 2006-07 is to have the hottest DVD out there starring Raven Riley," Jay Man says. "We are not selling tits and ass; we are selling personality and fantasy."
After the full implementation of the three-year campaign, Jay Man says Riley will more than likely switch over from model to model manager and scout for Third Pentacle.
The New Danni?
"I just think that after three years she will have put her time in," Jay Man says. "I would like to see her site become like Danni's Hard Drive, where she is the host with member access to her thousands of galleries, but we start bringing in other things."
Through savvy marketing enabled by the unique distribution and sales channels that the Internet has created, Raven Riley is living proof of the economic theory of The Long Tail, first advanced by Wired magazine in October 2004. Although she is squarely a niche model – attractive, young, natural, though not everyone's concept of the ideal pin-up girl – the total volume of low- to mid-popularity items on the web exceeds the volume of high popularity items.
In other words: Move over, Jenna Jameson, Raven Riley is in town.
