The
following is a reprint of an article written in the October 2004
(current) edition of AVN
Online.
Dream
Weavers: Teleteria Makes Internet Dreams Come True
By Frank Meyer
With
offices in New York and Connecticut, and a staff of 15 full-time
and part-time employees, Website design and hosting company Teleteria
(www.teleteria.net) is moving ever closer to their goal of establishing
long-term relationships with their customers by providing 24-hour-a-day,
7-day-a-week service.
"Teleteria
is the world's largest provider of custom adults turnkey passages,"
declares Telteria president Jay Servidio. Servidio knows of what
he speaks, as he teaches a class called "How to Get Started and
Make a Profit in the Adult Internet Industry" at The Learning Annex
in New York and Toronto every month.
Since
1995, Teleteria has been providing custom Web design solutions for
large and small clients using HTML, Photoshop, and flash. Their
experienced team of certified design professionals include HTML
coders, graphic artists, writers, and back end application developers
who specialize in complex back end database applications. They offer
a maintenance plan for regular updates and minor changes, spam filter,
chat rooms, message boards, e-commerce via online ordering systems
like shopping carts, and can even transfer Websites between different
hosting platforms.
"I
came into the business in September of 1994 through a very close
friend of mine who was very large in the phone sex industry," reminisces
Servidio, who for 13 years prior worked for AT&T, MCI, and Sprint,
and is a karate enthusiast. "He took me to the ia2000 tradeshow
and introduced me to all the players, explaining what they did and
how they made their money. The majority of people in the room made
their money by offering other people the opportunity to come into
the audio sex industry and then skimming a percentage of their minutes
without paying them on it. These people pretty much invented the
adult Internet industry and they were all doing the exact same thing.
What they were saying was, 'Here's some content. Here's a Website.
Go and market it, and we'll take care of the billing and give you
a percentage of the revenue.' The Webmaster has no control of their
money. So the philosophy that we started the company on was, 'We're
gonna provide a beautiful Website with a lot of content and hosting
and teach them how to market those sites.'"
Yet,
once Servidio got into the business, he immediately recognized some
of the difficulties of trying to make money on the Net.
"We
understood when we started that people are uncomfortable spending
money on the Internet. So we offered people a money-back guarantee
in writing," he explains. "So if we sell a Website to you for $3,500,
you give us a 50 percent deposit with a signed contract. The contract
states clearly in black and white that once the site is built, you
get to review it. If you love it, you pay the balance. If you want
us to make changes, we'll have them done for you in 24 hours. If
you hate it, you can have your money back. We're the only company
in the industry that will offer that."
Building
The Perfect Beast
Teleteria's
key product is a custom adult turnkey Website. They will provide
you with a custom-designed Website where you own the domain, and
the billing company name is set up in your name so you get paid
on all of your revenue directly. Your membership section taps into
their library of over 100,000 images, and they buy various feeds
from other companies. Best of all, the client does not share this
profit with Teleteria.
"One
of the most important things that we do is we get Webmasters an
account directly with the billing company," Servidio notes. "We
don't share in their profit so we can't screw them out of their
profit. They get their money directly from IBill or CCBill, case
closed. So all of our clients get paid on their revenue directly
from the billing company."
In
addition to building sites, Teleteria offers a variety of virtual
hosting plans. Plan 1 includes 50 MB disk space with 50 GB of expandable
bandwidth for $24.95 a month, billed annually with no setup fee
This includes unlimited FTP access, a free shopping cart, and exclusive
control panel with full suite of Web administration tools, a mailing
list manager, and free promotion. Plan 2 is $90 per month (40 to
80 GB), Plan 3 is $140 (50 to 100 GB), Plan 3 is $175 (75 to 125
GB), and Plan 4 is $19.95 (250 MB). "As you and your needs grow,
we grow with you," Jay says with a smile.
Of
course, the bedrock of any Web-based business is its servers, and
Teleteria's is built on one hell of a big rock, as theirs are located
in the Globix.com building, which happens to be down the street
from the Federal Reserve Building. "During 9/11 and the power failure
that the East Coast had last summer, our machines were not down
for a second," boasts Servidio. Unlike most providers, Globix owns
and operates its own Tier 1 Global IP Network, which allows Globix
to control resources and deliver network quality and control. Globix
closely manages capacity and content delivery across all links on
its network to minimize spikes in traffic and ensure that there
is always adequate bandwidth available.
Starting
Up The Start-up
The
first step toward launching a Website is registering a domain name,
and Teleteria is an ICANN accredited registrar, offering complete
domain registration and management services to make getting and
keeping your domain name hassle free. They also offer an automated
submission program, which is perfect for getting top listings on
major search engines. For even more exposure, they can submit a
site to over 1,500 search engines and Web directories worldwide
for $689 (for a 12 month period). An automatic meta-tags generator
is also included. Plus, if you purchase any annual search engine
submission program, Teleteria will renew it for the second and third
year at no extra cost.
For
$1200 per year, they will even insert meta-tags into all the pages
of your Website before submitting to engines and directories. This
will rank a site higher as the engines look for meta-tags. Your
site will also be listed higher in at least three of the engines,
including MSN, AlltheWeb (FAST), Lycos, Google, Metacrawler, Northern
Light, Excite, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Overture, iWon, Webcrawler, Alta
Vista. They do all this because they are not just building sites
for the adult world, but for mainstream, the business world and
beyond.
"The
type of clients we have are college kids, mom and pop that want
to make additional revenue from home, dentists, doctors, lawyers,
teachers, politicians, etc. If you pick a category, I've got a client
in there," reckons Servidio, who also recently introduced casino
sites to the Teleteria list of offerings. "Maybe less than five
percent of the Websites we build are for people in the adult entertainment
market. The rest are commercial sites. What we cater to is the average
guy that knows the Adult Internet market, people looking for alternative
sources of revenue."
With
a variety of clients comes the need for a variety of designers to
customize a wide range of sites.
"All
of our designers are Flash and Photoshop certified," he says. "Every
site has unique styles, graphics, colors. We use a certain model
because it has the best conversion ratio that we've ever come up
with, but they all have different domains and are unique. The client
has a choice. I can register the domain under you, which means that
anybody on earth could look up you and find your home address and
phone number, that you've got a porn site. So most of our clients
want to register it under Teleteria."
They
also guarantee top-notch support. "Clients can call us 24 hours
a day on our toll-free 800 number or can e-mail us," he says. "If
a client has a problem, they need help with marketing, they will
e-mail support and set a phone call appointment for an over-the-phone,
online tutorial. We don't just sell the Website and tell people
‘Have a nice day.’ We don't make a big profit on just selling one
to five. We want to sell you two or five or 10. And in order to
sell you two or five or 10, one of them has to make you money. If
it doesn't make you money, it fails, you fail, our business plan
fails. So, we have a robust Webmaster resources area. We teach people
how to use it."
It's
that personal touch that Servidio believes separates Teleteria from
the rest of the pack.
"When
we sell a Website to a client, we take a 50 percent deposit with
a signed agreement. The vice president of production, David Sokorsky,
then calls the customer on the phone and they go over the domain
and layout of the site. The site gets assigned to a designer and
once the customer approves the home page, the rest of the site gets
done. This takes about seven days. Then the customer looks at it,
approves it, pays his balance, sends in an email with acceptance,
we get him fixed with CCBill and the marketing begins."
As
smooth as that may sound, Servidio is trying to streamline that
process even further. "We're trying to make it even smaller. Just
like Ford and General Motors and Chrysler have numbers on how many
cars they can assemble in a day, I wonder how many sites can we
get off the assembly line in a 24-hour period? We're trying to make
our assembly period as short as possible to increase revenue and
to get the customers satisfied faster."
The
Secret of My Success
What
is the secret to Teleteria's success? How have they outlasted much
of their competition and blossomed into the mega site builder that
are now?
"The
object of running a company is not to keep sales flat and maintain
a comfortable lifestyle, it's to grow," explains Servidio. "So I
set out on a campaign on January 1 of this year to grow. As of June
30 of this year, I have sold more Websites to clients than all 12
months of last year. You have to be as smart as possible."
"The
model that he's got for turnkey adult sites and turnkey casino sites
is tremendous," enthuses vice president of sales and marketing Adam
Dreyfus, a former TechTV talent booker. "The goal here is to make
Teleteria the absolute best turnkey company on the planet, for casino,
for adult sites, you name it. We're perfectly positioned to take
advantage of that and constantly looking for new revenue streams.
I think we've got as good a model as anybody out there for adding
bang for the buck, so to speak."
"It's
a very competitive market," he continues, "but the good news is
you've got 150,000 people a day logging onto the net for the first
time in their life and they're all coming to look for porn. But
now they're coming on with high-speed models versus 28.8 like 10
years ago, when I first got on. That helps our industry grow a billion
dollars a year. So when people use words like saturation, I say
there's no such thing because 85 to 90 percent of adult Websites
that are online suck. They poorly built. They have little to no
content. And the owners have no idea how to market them to make
money. So they fail. You can't have saturation. It's an impossibility."
So
what does the future hold for Teleteria?
"Where
I want to be in five or 10 years is doing exactly what I'm doing
now on a larger scale with more employees," says Servidio. "My goal
is to continue to provide A1 service to our clients in design and
hosting. I'm creating wealth for people. Not just our clients that
are buying adult and casino Websites for us, but I'm providing an
opportunity for my employees to follow an Internet dream and make
wealth for themselves."
Jay
Servidio is President of Teleteria, Inc., a company that has been
building and hosting commercial and adult custom Web sites for over
5 years. Teleteria's clients are located all over the world.
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