It’s not uncommon to hear young guys say their dream is to become Hugh Hefner. It’s a bit more unusual when you hear this same sentiment from a 52-year old businesswoman. Meet Cindy Gallop.
Gallop, who started MakeLoveNotPorn.com in 2009, a website dedicated to sex in the “real world,” is now back with MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. Its focus is on giving people a more realistic tutorial for sex than porn offers. Gallop presented her somehow radical real-world lovemaking opinions to a delighted TED audience in 2009, and insists that though she loves hardcore porn, it is corrupting the bedroom antics of young people. “Young guys think they have to cum on their girlfriend’s faces and the girlfriends think they have to like it.”
The mechanics of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv are simple: couples pay $5 to upload a video to the site. Anybody who wants to view the video pays $5 for a three week rental. Half the rental proceeds then go back to the couple, as a sort of incentive program to encourage new content. Is the program successful so far? Hell yes. Already the website, which is currently running in beta, has approved 11,000 people for access out of 36,000 requests (so far). “We do fast-track you if you are ready to submit your own #realworldsex video, so let me know,” Gallop said, having not met me in person.
In a bid to bolster the site’s appeal with a younger demographic, Gallop has installed similar tech extras to her site, such as stickers and sexual social currency. Also, you can make a playlist of videos to gift to a friend or do MakeLoveNotPorn’s version of a Facebook ‘like’ by pushing the space bar during the video.
For Gallop, the creative stuff came easy; it was the business side that caused a problem. Though the site’s potential to make a profit was never an issue, venture capitalists and banks were squeamish about financing anything with “porn” in the title. It took months for her to come up with funding, and when she finally did, neither Google Checkout nor Paypal wanted to handle the site’s billing. “Every obstacle I’ve encountered is exactly why I’m doing this.”
NMR also got a chance to ask Cindy if she would be uploading her own content to the site:
“We have discussed this as a team, on the premise obviously that all entrepreneurs should use their own platform. There are differing views within the team (some very keen to, others not), but what we did collectively agree was that at this stage of our lifecycle with each one of us interacting with all of our users, it would be distracting for the business if we were to do that. Further down the line, who knows?”
Gallop’s dream is to do for pornography nowadays what Hefner did for it back in the 50s, and redefine what the future thinks of as “pornography.” I’ll let you know if she’s achieved that goal just as soon as my damn website application stops getting rejected.
