Offbeatr Gets Viced

LOS ANGELES—From the beginning of its short life, Offbeatr has filled a void (or hole, if you like) where others have feared to tread, kind of like MiKandi before it, only with MiKandi it was with the development and marketing of sex-related apps. For Offbreatr, it’s crowd-sourced funding for adult entertainment projects with a decided bent for the ... offbeat.   “I would love to say Offbeatr was a totally original idea; it's not,” co-founder Ben Tao said when Offbeatr launched in early 2012. “While there are hundreds of crowd-funding websites online, there are exactly zero which allow projects of an adult or sexual nature.” That wasn’t exactly accurate, of course. It turned out there were other crowdsourcing platforms in development at the same time, including one called FleshStarter, which in September of last year decided to thrown in the towel and refer people to the superior Offbeatr, whose team, Fleshstarter’s CEO acknowledged, “has done a much better job than our team.” There’s also GoGoFantasy.com, which still lives. But it is Offbeatr that seems to be getting increased attention in the mainstream, where this week Vice magazine gave a nice nod to the porn-oriented service in an article by Mitchell Sunderland titled, “Offbeatr, the Kickstarter for Porn, Is a Furry Playground.” FilmDrunk then followed with a post of its own, showing how increased interest and involvement gets generated out in the real world. The Vice article in particular also adds icing on the cake by underscoring the creative and even artistic bent to the projects and people Offbeatr seems to be attracting. The article includes an interview with Tao, who, along with co-founder Eric Lai, got into the industry the same way a lot of people seem to, by kind of stumbling in. Sunderland explains, “Ben told me he was working in marketing with Eric when the duo discovered that there were some cam models who made thousands of dollars stripping for strangers and, inspired, they started ExtraLunchMoney.com, a cam site that quickly faced financial challenges.” Ben told him, “We didn’t have friends who would take their clothes off and sell content. We couldn’t just tell our friends, ‘Hey, we have this site, can you do this?’” During this time, they also looked around and realized a void existed in which “services like Amazon Payments and PayPal don’t allow users to buy ‘adult’ products and crowdsourcing websites Kickstarter and Indiegogo won’t let you fund porn projects.” That realization led to another. “[We] saw a loophole and exploited it,” Ben told Sunderland. Offbeatr was born. Sunderland goes on to discuss the decidedly different porn projects that populate Offbeatr, the most successful of which are "the stuff furries dream about." He means that literally. Furry Fandom with a sexual slant is big on Offbeatr, as are other nontraditional communities that, according to Sunderland, don't share the same sense of shame that regular porn supposedly engenders. "Offbeatr’s model," he claims, "seems to attract erotica that engages its audience so much that they’re inspired to discuss it, share it, and support its creators, rather than traditional porn—which is consumed in shame and solitude and kept private." For Ben, it's not about the labels but making good use of Offbeatr's canvas. “The ones who can make it and do it are the ones who can make it and build a following," he said. "Every artist needs to build a following. It’s the natural filter of all things.”