Life’s a MeanBitch: Interview With Glenn King

This article originally ran in the May 2017 issue of AVN magazine. Click here to see the digital edition. In this month’s issue, AVN turns its attention to Porn Valley’s unofficial sister city, Las Vegas, and the industry folks who are carving out a living there. One of those individuals is Glenn King, this year’s reigning Best Web Director, who moved to Vegas in the summer of 2016. And according to King, it’s been a great move. Like everyone in adult entertainment, King has a story to tell about how he ended up in the industry. And his background explains why King can talk about the business of porn with the same articulate passion he brings to the topic of femdom erotica, his chosen form of expression. Before he started working in adult in 2002, King spent a tumultuous time in the tech world. “I was founder of a web hosting company. We had unbelievable success on the stock market and in the world of web hosting for a short period of time,” King explained. “It was a two-year roller coaster. The company was actually worth a billion dollars on the NASDAQ if you capitalized it, and my shares of it were worth $30 million. And a year and a half later the company was bankrupt and there were lawsuits all over the place. … We are talking about a company that was founded in 1999 and crushed up in 2001, and those two years of my life count as 50.” Looking for a complete change of pace, King sold his house, came to California, spent time hanging out around mainstream movie sets, and eventually bought half of a mainstream casting company. As to how he ended up it porn, it was an accidental offshoot of the casting business. “I started up a website company to make websites for actresses,” King said. “And we had a girl working with our company who wanted me to make a website for her, but she wanted it to be an adult website. And I said, ‘I’m an upstanding citizen of society here. I come from a background of being an executive with large corporations. I would never be in the world of porn.’ And she said, ‘When I want something, I get it.’ She was a six-foot-tall blonde with huge boobs, and she basically did not take no for an answer.” Eventually the new enterprise took off in a big way. “Pretty soon my adult site was making four times what my casting business was making, and I had to start thinking about focusing on that business instead.” But there was one problem: a site with one dominatrix had a single point of failure. If the main attraction “partied too much or decided to get out of the business, you have no business left,” King said. “So MeanBitches grew out of that. The same thing … but with multiple mistresses.” During his 15 years in Porn Valley, King got to know every twist and turn of producing content for DVD and web. He had a long and productive association with Evil Angel before leaving in 2015 to focus on femdom and online distribution. And since going out on his own, he’s had to master promoting his own content as well. These days, in addition to his titles that are still available from Evil Angel, such as When Pornstars Attack!, King distributes MeanBitch Productions DVDs through Third World Media. And he also sells content through Clips4Sale, especially from the femdom clip store/website FemdomInteractive.com. As an indie adult producer, King has experimented with many ways to lure fans. For many years he did a radio show, starting at Playboy Radio and moving to Vivid Radio and then to his own online network. He even had a TV show on Roku for a time. “There are two ways to make money on Roku,” he said. “You could charge for the channel, or you could sell advertising on the channel. And we actually had some success selling advertising for a while, and the only reason we left Roku is that our Roku channel provider couldn’t provide us with the statistics we needed to sell advertising. An advertiser is going to want to know the demographics of who’s watching.” Those demographics, King says, are “part of the future of our industry.” The many adult stars amassing more than 100,000 legitimate followers represent a bona fide marketing opportunity. “I think we’re going to get to the point where advertisers are willing to pay to be in porn companies’ [social media] penetration, whether it be Roku, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope.” For King, Twitter is “the biggest form of advertising you can get in this industry. If you don’t use Twitter, it’s hard to survive. If I don’t put up dirty pictures on Twitter, I don’t know how people are going to find out about me. Number one place they look.” As it was with the original website that kicked off his career, one of the biggest factors to success in femdom is the dominant female—and King finds joy in helping his stars unleash their inner MeanBitch. Take, for instance, Anikka Albrite, who stars in Superiority Complex and Femdom Anikka. Asked how AVN’s sweet and sunny 2015 Female Performer of the Year was able to explore her darker side, King said, “That’s one of the monsters that I’ve created. ... I shot Anikka’s first femdom scenes, and now she is really a demanding, controlling domme and has worked for a variety of femdom companies at this point. “It was always in her! I just had to find it and tap in!” He points to some other success stories over the years. “We shot Alexis Texas’s first femdom scene. Randy Wright went on to become a pro domme; I shot her first femdom scene. Numerous girls. Lana Violet became a pro domme—we shot her first scene. … It’s really exciting for me to see girls go on to really open up a new area of their careers once they shoot for us.” One of King’s current endeavors is his showcase series, which started with Femdom Anikka. “We have FemDom Jessa—who I think is the number-one performer in the business. We’ve got a mix of our traditional femdom scenes and our femdom interactive scenes,” King said. Just last month he released Femdom Briana, featuring all-new content with the adult star, with the next in the series coming in June: Femdom Luna, starring Latina powerhouse Luna Star. “I think the future is just going to get more and more interactive,” King mused. “Like what we’re doing with FemdomInteractive.com. What we’re shooting is basically the slave’s perspective, or the viewer’s perspective as if they’re in the room.” His stars talk to the camera as if it were the slave or cuckold, so the guy who’s watching at home really feels like he’s part of the action. It’s a type of content that seems tailor-made for virtual reality, and King concurs. “I know that some companies are making this great virtual reality stuff right now,” he said, but he hasn’t made the leap himself. “We’re clearly not there at the end game just yet, but I think a year or two years from now, the majority of porn is going to be shot as if you’re in the porn, not that you’re just watching the porn.” Until then he’ll focus on giving his fans what they want. “This has become an age when we have to start listening to our markets, and we can do it because the stats are there for us. We didn’t have breakdowns before. I can see ratings on all the girls,” King said. And those fans, “the first thing they’re looking for is a big fat butt that looks good bouncing up and down on a guy’s face.” Above, Glenn King on the set with adult star Ana Foxxx.