XBIZ World is pleased to present “Execs of 2016: The Year in Review” — a special showcase of the thoughts and strategies of 2016’s most influential and motivational leaders as they offer their take on the year’s top trends.
Each of the executives we spoke to is among the finalist nominees for the Online Industry edition of the 2017 XBIZ Exec Awards.
Flirt4Free has remained competitive in 2016, our 20th year in business, by continuing to listen to the needs of our broadcasting and traffic partners while analyzing market conditions and mountains of internal data to shape our strategies for growth. -Brad Estes, Flirt4Free
The following question about the year in review was asked to those running for the Senior Leadership Award:
XBIZ: How did your company remain competitive this year?
Bálint G. Varga
Lead Media Buyer, LiveJasmin
“Livejasmin focused in 2016 on exploring new interaction opportunities in the live cam market. With the release of the new LiveJasmin white label system in 2016, models are now able to create their own personal site with a simple click. Models can also promote their personal site via social media and they have the possibility to interact with 35 million daily visitors on LiveJasmin. Furthermore, the models can engage users to subscribe to their fan clubs by sharing new videos and photos on LiveJasmin and their own model white label channel. Our newest feature is the Vibratoy, which has been available for our users since this summer. We have also redesigned our mobile solutions to ensure the high-end LiveJasmin experience is accessible on all devices. Finally, the Jasmin Messenger allows for a more personal connection between models and users.”
Doug Wicks
CEO, Payze.com
“Payze.com not only stayed competitive but actually grew by leaps and bounds this past year due to a few factors. These include implementation of new bank relationships worldwide which allowed us to take on many new clients and software updates and better reporting, plus mainstream clients growing by 1,000 percent and the constant factor that our three owners and staff combine for more than 100 years of experience in the adult marketplace. 2017 is going to be even bigger, so be ready for some big industry news coming very soon.”
Brad Estes
Vice President, Flirt4Free
“Flirt4Free has remained competitive in 2016, our 20th year in business, by continuing to listen to the needs of our broadcasting and traffic partners while analyzing market conditions and mountains of internal data to shape our strategies for growth. Internally we have stayed ahead of these growth projections by dramatically increasing the size of our Los Angeles-based staff by more than 40 percent, which has afforded us the ability to execute on multiple large initiatives simultaneously. The challenges presented by this growth and the creativity of our competitors propelled us to new heights in 2016, and the motivation and momentum are growing as we enter 2017.”
Harmik Gharapetian
Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Epoch
“Our business is only successful when we make our clients successful, and this year we focused on bringing our clients great success. We did that by continuing to innovate while improving our core competencies. For example, we added new payment options and released new creative payment page designs that allowed our clients to maximize sales from around the globe. Our clients can now make more sales with more consumers worldwide, using payment types our competitors do not offer. After more than 20 years in business, I believe that never-ending focus is what sets us apart.”
Joel Drapeau
Director of Sales, Gamma Entertainment
“Gamma has always taken pride in offering our surfers the best user experience and the best content in the adult market. Our content team does a great job of analyzing what is popular out there and what surfers are looking for. From there we have an outstanding team of content production who are able to impress us each time. I believe that content is, once again, becoming the key in being competitive and successful, after a time that traffic was maybe and more important.”
Joey Gabra
Managing Director, Wister
“My company has remained competitive by making sure to keep our finger on the pulse of just about anything and everything that is relevant to our business. We have made sure to constantly learn and grow, and listen to everything going on around us. Our competitive advantage has come from communicating with our clients and always trying to better understand their needs and doing all we can do to fill those needs. It also doesn’t hurt when more than half of our team are the tech wizards behind all that makes Affil4You the powerhouse that it is today.”
Rainey Stricklin
JuicyAds
“The JuicyAds team, positioned all over the world, works very closely with clients to ensure we’re meeting their needs. From our support team to our sales team to JuicyJay himself, we’re very accessible and responsive to the needs of our advertisers and publishers.”
Yuval Kijel
Director, Streamate
“This has been an exciting year! We’ve had a very big year due to many projects we managed to accomplish. On the marketing level, we really elevated our Cambuilder affiliate program and website creator to a point where we almost took over the white label cams market, where we place our focus in terms of the product offered to our affiliates. This included many new features so affiliates get better reports, better promo tools, better editing and creating options for their white label and more payment options, really taking it to the top. We also worked very hard to get a new advanced version of our white label allowing a more custom feeling for affiliates who require that. On the tech side, we did some very exciting things. First off we had to deal with the Flash changes and that was a major task but we took a different approach and found a really unique solution that would place us on a fast track moving forward. We also placed some heavy resources on elevating the mobile experience for our members, given the fast growth in mobile traffic from our different partners. We also had a major effort on our expansion into new markets by partnering with companies in new territories and improving and innovating our own products, so they are more localized in different aspects such as UI, billing and available models. We’re really looking forward for a big 2017 with many new challenges.”
Gary Jackson
Vice President of Sales, CCBill
“CCBill stayed competitive by focusing on two diverse sides of our business — our loyal consumers and the CCBill platform. As part of our plan, CCBill has been transforming quietly but dramatically. During my time at CCBill, we have been working on a future platform concept, and in 2016, that concept started to become an exciting reality. By focusing on two different sides of our business with similar intensity, the work at CCBill has been noted this year in the media alongside PayPal, Amazon Payments and Stripe as leading the way in Payments-as-a-Service. One big step in this was our launch of the first system-wide payment storage option, CCBill Pay, which we think will change the industry by starting with the consumer. If they can log in and pay quickly on any CCBill site, the power of multi-sales and mobile purchases expands exponentially. It opens up a door to a smooth modern checkout from any device, anywhere. I take a lot of personal pride in this release. In contrast, but also in line with the expansion of our service as a platform, we opened our doors to a wave of software integrations for virtually any aspect of online business — from shopping carts, affiliate software, and content management systems to business services, such as marketing partners, tax services and off-the-grid payment options. I am very proud of the foundation we are advancing, which we intend will take our merchants and CCBill into the future of payments.”
