May 20, 1998

Most people in the Central Florida business community have never heard of BadPuppy, even though it could be the most explosively successful Internet business in the area. Its founders (and many of its employees) are ex-NASA techies. It has more paying subscribers than the largest ISP in the area (over 15,000 and growing at $10 a month). Its website boasts over 125,000 pages with over 800,000 images. The result? A business worth over $4 million.

But I guess we all know the real money online is in porn, don't we?

BadPuppy started (as many Internet upstarts did) as a simple bulletin board system in 1994. At the time, BadPuppy founders Bill Pinyon and Max Zechinato were working at NASA as network specialists, but they were already dreaming of setting up their own company. Bill envisioned "not only endless streams of soft porn to the hungry eyes of gays in cyberspace, but also news, current events, reviews, travel information and much more."

By early 1996, just hours after the passage of the Communications Decency Act, BadPuppy had re-invented itself as a kind of "Geocities of gay cyber-porn", with over 30 individual contributors running websites as part of the badpuppy.com domain. Now, with 23 employees (Assistant to the CEO Lisa Turner jokes, "We've got half of NASA working here!") and no end in sight to the growth, BadPuppy has its own original "models" and merchandising. It's also become a sponsor of major events in Orlando (including the upcoming Gay Day activities at The Club).

I wasn't sure what to expect when I met the BadPuppy folks at a party / "model search" they held last month at The Club's Glass Chamber. I certainly didn't expect such kind, happy, grounded people so bent on customer service (amazing the stereotypes we all have of "the porn industry", eh?) In their press releases, they describe their corporate culture as "a nuturing management style that is non-exploitative to consumers, employees and profits." CEO Bill Pinyon better described his philosophy as telling his employees to set priorities for their lives, "placing themselves first, their families second and Badpuppy third."

It seems that most businesspeople (and new media developers) don't consider cyber-porn companies "real businesses". Even with their number of subscribers, level of income, technical pedigree and progressive management style, you don't see BadPuppy even listed among Central Florida's new media industry. Hiding their heads in the sand, the business community doesn't want to admit that the cyber-porn industry is a major piece of the new media economy (and some of the most cash liquid companies as well).

As a new media developer, I'm painfully aware of how the cyber-porn industry is breaking the ground that rest of us will follow - subscriber-based models, streaming video technology, and full-video chat will get their bugs (technical and financial) worked out by the porn industry. Heck, if it weren't for them, we wouldn't have VHS players in our homes, either. Maybe cyber-porn isn't that different from rocket science after all - except in how they are viewed by the business community.

Brian Clark I've worked as a professional musician, a pizza deliverer, a graphic designer, a record promoter, a database programmer, a youth empowerment coordinator and a recording engineer (not necessarily in that order.) Other Articles I've Written