If you don’t know Mark Bauman, you know of him.
Bauman’s one of the cornerstones of the online adult space who has spent time mastering the techniques and initiatives used by paysites and tube sites to generate traffic-building ad revenue.
We offer controls like frequency capping, geo-targeting, language targeting, operating system targeting, device targeting, IP targeting and keyword targeting. We offer other features to help optimize a campaign and for quick campaign creation as well.
He’s one of the founders of one of the hottest brands that sprouted up in the early 2000s — Naughty America. Later, Bauman moved over to EMC Ideas Inc. to manage the valuable PornTube properties as president.
But five years ago, Bauman, the “idea man,” identified several needs that the online adult world was seeking and later moved out on to his own with TrafficHaus, a premier ad platform with real-time bidding and self-serve ad management; ad brokerage Media Reps; and DigiRegs, a provider of content protection services.
XBIZ World last month interviewed the chief executive to learn more about his entrepreneurial spirit and drive, as well as his companies’ offerings.
XBIZ: How did you get your start in the adult business?
BAUMAN: I started in the year 2000 with my friend at the time. He had an idea to start his own adult paysite after promoting adult sites. So we built sites together, literally by hand with very little HTML experience.
We built gallery pages, submitted them to traffic sites in the TGP days and kept pushing on building what you know today as Naughty America. As our brands launched, I managed all the marketing and sales.
I left that organization in 2009 to become president of EMC Ideas Inc. where I managed PornTube.com and other properties.
We found that brokers were selling our ads and keeping 30-50 percent of our revenue, so I quickly took over ad sales and pulled it away from the brokers.
That rate was incredibly outrageous, so my friend and partner at the time came up with the idea of Media Reps. The company was formed at the end of 2009. Its goal was to reduce brokering to a 10 percent figure and provide a professional management service.
In 2011, I created TrafficHaus, which was built as our technology for ad serving and reporting.
XBIZ: So what is TrafficHaus all about?
BAUMAN: TrafficHaus is our adult forward-facing brand today, and it is our technology for publishers creating zones and monetizing, advertisers for buying traffic and growing their brand, and real time bidding and reporting system.
Some TrafficHaus customer-first features for publishers include:
- You can always work with an account rep;
- You can count on our pricing to be fair and based on performance;
- You can count on our reporting and payments to be accurate and timely;
- You can work with our system by setting up an ad zone and sending traffic to that zone, by selling us a specific zone, or by hiring us to manage your entire property; and,
- You can rely on us to constantly add new technology and features to support your growth. Talk to your account representative about our many options such as traffic source performance tracking, Partner.TrafficHaus.com, DigiRegs.com, TubeLayouts.com, and many more products we offer to our publishers.
XBIZ: Your company offers “an elevated ad serving platform” that allows better control for clients. What does that really mean for your clients?
BAUMAN: It means it is a cut above the rest in our premium model, and all our inventory being directly from the publishers themselves since we manage their ad sales or particular zones. We deal with premium sites exclusively, like YouJizz.com, HardSexTube.com, xHamster.com, FuckBook.com, ClipHunter.com, LubeTube.com, AmateurMatch.com and many others.
We offer controls like frequency capping, geo-targeting, language targeting, operating system targeting, device targeting, IP targeting and keyword targeting. We offer other features to help optimize a campaign and for quick campaign creation as well.
XBIZ: What’s the future of where traffic is headed for desktop, mobile and tablets?
BAUMAN: We believe that dynamic sites are the future supporting all formats based on screen size, device, and OS combinations; not just one or the other. We have a very strong presence in mobile, tablet and desktop.
We see almost 50 percent of all users are now becoming mobile only; tablet has a strong market share and is sometimes looped into mobile, but is only 15 percent. Desktop has shrunk to 40-50 percent of all browsers and traffic.
Will this continue? Maybe. We believe it is slowly plateauing now. We are seeing increases in smart TVs, but they are only 2-5 percent of the market.
Those who optimize thrive, those who don’t won’t get as big a piece of the pie compared to those who optimize.
XBIZ: We’ve heard about DigiRegs, and its copyright protection technology. What are your clients saying about it and its results?
BAUMAN: DigiRegs is new, and clients are very open to it and are excited for how we are going to revolutionize the industry. We are giving producers and publishers an information exchange, which will help them better the user makeup on the publishers site, and the content allocation and leveraging for the producer, as well as help them avoid misconceptions and legal mistakes.
The DigiRegs AVTracker system is a fast and easy-to-use content protection and rights management system. It provides real-time copyright content identification of audio, imagery and video content to allow for automatic removal to ensure the protection of a site or content.
Users can customize your content protection settings to integrate into any existing workflows for autonomy and ease of use. For example, if a user wants to segment their licensed content from their sponsor uploaded, we can do that. Or an advertiser or publishers wants to do advertisements around content and truncate any flagged 30 minute or more videos down to five minutes, we can set that up as well.
The system allows users to drive better-quality content by optimizing target audiences with real video metrics. By allowing content producers to only submit content that is backed by geo-locations, devices, or user types that drive real revenue, websites will intrinsically benefit through optimizations using video analytics.
Users can cut down on legal costs and DMCA handling with integration of the system.
They also can capitalize on the partnership with TrafficHaus to place targeted banner advertisements from producers. We help businesses capitalize further by telling them more about their user base as well as more about their content submitters and whether they are driving users to sites that create worth. We dig into the data and draw conclusions.
In one of our examples, we found more U.S. traffic was received as a result of the submitted videos we used in our test on YouJizz.com. If I’m the content owner and all I did was submit, or my videos were flagged on YouJizz.com, then by the data displayed in our example we were able to deduce that if I submit videos over 20 minutes with an ebony and teen mix type of content, then I’ll be able to capture 50 percent of my traffic from the U.S. market, 30 percent Russia, and geos were around 5 percent below that.
So with that information, if I’m targeting U.S. or Russia markets, I would continue with those types of videos. For the publisher, if they want a good converting geo like U.S., they’d see that as well, and encourage that producer to submit more, as well as encourage other submitters to submit that type of content.
XBIZ: So why is this important and why would users want to use this and care about what content producers submit?
BAUMAN: Well, it’s all about the data. By utilizing the data below as well as new data as you get more videos submitted, the producer can set up profiles and submit videos and be able to pin point the user base of you the publisher, and the user base that’s interested in their content. They’ll drive more of those users in, and more of those users back to your site, because they are working in tandem with you to bring users back. They are at that point working in full partnership with you. You can see what niche or keyword, what video length, and to which publication you should submit your content to get your target user base.
Through this process and our five years of selling advertising, we’ve discovered that every site has a different user base and that every user is different. We only increase our position and value by providing the right content to the right people, and giving them more reasons to return. This system lets you capitalize on that process by utilizing real data and adjusting yours and your partners and producers marketing value and perspective, while protecting content from copyright infringement — thus raising the value of their content, your content, and the adult industry as a whole.
XBIZ: What’s coming up for TrafficHaus? Are there new developments or new services rolling out this year?
BAUMAN: DigiRegs is our latest service. We are adding more publisher customization tools, have a site valuation tool we are rolling out, and we have more in-depth data analysis coming out as a result of our big data.
On the advertiser side the same, more controls with setting up sales funnels and accounts, more targeting features, re-targeting, and position targeting are our next steps coming out.
We recently launched a tool that allows our advertisers to target more through the bidding platform including category targeting by any combination of words. We eliminated the need to restrict yourself to just a single keyword.
XBIZ: Who inspires you in the biz?
BAUMAN: I don’t really have anyone I look to for inspiration, but my publishers I work with inspire me every day and inspire me to aspire to be a better business manager. I help them in managing their business; I am their financial and sales partner in their business. I act as both the CFO and CMO at times, and they continue to push me. I think we both thrive in our businesses together and I appreciate that daily.
XBIZ: What’s a typical work day like?
BAUMAN: A typical day for me depends on the week and which department I’m meeting with to see where we are with our goals. If it’s an important meeting with an individual, department or goal, then I try to tackle that early in the morning.
Then before that or after, I do a quick scan of my emails to see if there are any issues.
I review traffic fluctuations across all of our publishers. I review our bidding and rates fluctuations, if any, and some other proprietary metrics to gauge the health of our company.
I do a review of our publications on whether we are hitting our sales goals.
After that we begin tackling any projects or goals or ad zones that have specific needs. If none, then we focus on business development and how we can improve each publication.
XBIZ: What do you like to do off the clock?
BAUMAN: When not thinking about business, I like to relax, disconnect for hours or days, and then reconnect with some new goals or some new projects in mind. I have a cafe, a sushi restaurant and some other investments that keep me busy and distracted enough to come up with new ideas.
Each of those feeds my creativity and stifles my ADD when needed. I strive to make things better constantly, and come up with about 10-50 ideas a day so I like to keep that stifled.
I think exercise like running can excite this, so I like to run a short while, lift weights as that tends to focus yourself on the weights at hand, and boxing as that also shifts my focus to the bag, mitts or face that I need to engage at the moment.
Taking yourself out of your element and introducing new things is what helps me thrive. Life is about experiences. The more well-rounded I am, the more I can learn about those experiences and apply them.
