SANTA MONICA, Calif. — MEL Magazine — which covers sex, relationships, health, money and culture from a male point of view — has published a short autobiographical feature on Wasteland.com’s Colin Rowntree, who is described in the piece as “internet’s kink pioneer.”
Rowntree, of course, has been one of the cornerstone voices for the commercial online erotica world for years — always offering his experience to others, whether through commentary on panels or in publications like XBIZ.
Rowntree told XBIZ he liked the description in MEL, “internet’s kink pioneer,” which was used in the headline.
“I did not write the headline for it, but somehow feel like I am the Al Gore of online porn the way they worded it,” Rowntree said. “I am delighted that MEL Magazine did this profile on me. Brian Gross, our publicist, set this up for me and the entire process was wonderful.”
Rowntree, in the MEL piece, starts off talking about his BDSM venture in the dial-up days — “back then, brutal download times were part of the punishment,” he said.
“Wasteland started by accident,” he said in the piece, which was told to MEL writer Tierney Finster. “My wife Angie had a Celtic and occult jewelry mail-order catalog at the time, and I tagged along with her to the Boston gift show.”
Rowntree went on to say that he was given 8x10 glossy pictures of beautiful women in leather corsets and bustiers to use as advertising. And then he got the idea to post those pics to the web.
“We found a way to very primitively scan the photos and host them to a web page with contact information for people to have the catalogs mailed to them,” he said. “As it turned out, nobody was ordering any catalogs, but they sure were visiting the site and looking at pictures of pretty girls in leather.
The money became pretty good once Wasteland got off the ground. Then the idea of Sssh.com, a porn site for women came about, was introduced by wife Angie.
“A couple of years ago, we upgraded our equipment from HD to Ultra HD,” Rowntree said. “We now use Red cinema cameras and shoot in 5K. The cinematic quality of our content is a key differentiator between us and other sites. And needless to say our stuff is in a different realm visually from most of the crap you see on the tube sites.
“When the tubes came along in a major way around 2008, that decimated the industry. It’s still crippled it to this day, and it’s probably the biggest “game changer” we’ve experienced since launch. We’re constantly trying to find ways to provide better quality video than what you can see on the tube sites. Luckily, it turns out that people are happy to spend money on better content if you can just show them enough of your goods to get them interested.
Rowntree said that there’s one thing that separates Wasteland from other BDSM sites — “We’re authentic. When I say authentic, I mean that we work with people who are part of the kink community and consider BDSM part of their lifestyle,” he said.
“Our performers often shoot with their real-life scene partners. Some of them are married. That all shows in their scenes, and the real BDSM lifestyle folks totally sense that right away. This is opposed to some of the rough sex sites that pretend to be BDSM sites but are mostly creations of what I call the flog-and-fuck school of filmmaking — where guys just hire some porn stars, and have them spank and beat each other with whips until one of them cries. Real BDSM people can spot these posers from a mile away.”
Read the entire MEL piece here.
