Wasteland at 30: A Look Back with Adult Internet Pioneer Colin Rowntree

So said Colin Rowntree, founder of Wasteland.com, the web’s longest-running BDSM site, about his career prior to taking the plunge into what was then the fledgling online adult entertainment industry.

Earlier this month, as Wasteland geared up to mark the site’s milestone 30th anniversary, YNOT sat down with Rowntree to talk about how it all started, what came before the launch of the pioneering bondage site and what’s on the horizon for the Wasteland brand.

Back in the late 1970s, well before the advent of the Internet Age, Colin was an aspiring musician – much to the dismay of his pragmatic father.

“From the time I was a little kid, I played French horn,” Colin explained. “By the time I was in high school, I was pretty darn good at it. So, I broke my father’s heart and went on to be a music major at the University of Michigan.”

Colin’s father had hoped his son would go to college, sure, but not for music.

“He wanted me to be a business major, because I was the first kid– we were rural, farmland Michigan people – I was the first kid who ever went to college from my family,” Colin recalled. But study music he did, both at the University of Michigan and at Oberlin College in Ohio. As he was wrapping up his master’s degree, an opportunity to study abroad presented itself.

“There was an opportunity for a scholarship to go to do postgraduate, sort of ‘pseudo-PhD’ work, your choice of Beijing – at that point it might have been called Peking – Conservatory in China, or the Moscow Conservatory of Music,” Colin said. “And I’m thinking, Chinese opera? To me, it sounds like a dishwasher with a bunch of broken glass in it. So, I said OK, Moscow sounds pretty good.”

What followed a two-year, paid overseas study program, overseen by the Fulbright program, “so in a sense I was a Fulbright scholar,” Colin noted.

“It turns out the Fulbright people were running this along with the US State Department, and the expectation was you’d go there and do a research paper on something and do as much of a deep dive as possible on travel and exploration into local culture and local events that you wouldn’t actually see the press or books,” Colin explained.

The arrangement, Colin would later realize, had an unusual element of which he was totally unaware.

“It turns out, basically, while I didn’t realize it at the time, I was effectively gathering information for the CIA.” (The U.S. State Department’s overseas embassies and consulates often house the operations of the local CIA station, as well.)

Making matters even more bizarre was the nature of Colin’s other job while residing in what was then the Soviet Union.

“Ironically, my part time job while I was there, I worked for Pravda, in their international propaganda division.”.

In other words, while unwittingly working on behalf of the CIA via his association with the U.S. State Department, Colin was knowingly working as a cog in the Soviet propaganda machine.

For his Pravda job, every other weekend Colin would go to what he described as a “beautiful, multiroom apartment right on the river overlooking the other side of the Kremlin” to meet with his supervisor.

“The guy I worked for was named Peter and he was a New Yorker who had been an American journalist, but who defected to the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War,” Colin explained. “So, they treated him really well, because they used him for propaganda purposes. He’d bring me all this really poorly written propaganda, things about Israel and about the United States and ‘imperialist scum dogs’ and all of this stuff. I would style edit it, figure out what the modern way is to say ’23 skidoo,’ stuff like that.”

After his Russian adventure came to an end, Colin returned to the U.S., but not home to Michigan, as he’d originally planned.

“At that point the auto industry had collapsed and there was the gas crisis going on, so I just went to straight to New York.”

In New York, Colin put his musical education to work, including a particularly noteworthy summer internship.

“I went up to Tanglewood one summer and did a summer apprenticeship program with Leonard Bernstein,” Colin said, joking that “if you see the new movie Maestro, you know where he’s giving a lecture at Tanglewood in the shed, I’m like the third guy in the third row left.”

After “just getting burned out” on the New York scene, Colin moved to Boston, taking jobs with several regional productions, including the Boston Lyric Opera. Colin continued his opera and stage production work for years to come, conducting and producing in forums ranging from Broadway shows to small church choirs. He continued in that vein right up until the early 1990s, when Internet-driven opportunities would soon come knocking.

“We just kind of stumbled into this whole online thing,” Colin confessed, referring to himself and wife Angie Rowntree, who a few years later would launch Sssh.com, another of the adult industry’s longest-running sites.

“Angie had this mail order business, selling metaphysical and New Age stuff and Celtic jewelry, through a mail-order catalog,” Colin recounted. “One day, we’re at a convention in New York and I’m wandering around doing the bored husband thing when I find this booth and they’ve got all this kinky fucking shit like corsets, whips, leather, zipper masks, all that.”

Colin struck up a conversation with the booth’s proprietor and a quick arrangement was made. Angie and Colin would create a clothing and bondage gear catalog and promote the company’s products, taking a cut for any sales generated. Of course, to create the catalog, the Rowntrees would need images to work with.

“I’m like, do you have any pictures of this stuff?” Colin asked his newly established supplier. “And there were about 30 beautifully produced photos of mostly naked models wearing this stuff.”

He didn’t realize it in the moment, but Colin had just planted the first seeds of what would eventually become Wasteland.com.

“We start hearing about this new internet thing,” Colin said. “And I’m like, ‘We’ve got to get on there with our catalog!”

Working their network of friends, Colin soon was speaking a friend of Angie’s who worked for Corel, the tech company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada.

“He tells me ‘Well, you’re going to need to digitize those images.’ And I’m like ‘Digitize images? What’s that?’ He tells me I’ll need something called a ‘scanner,’ which sounded complicated.”

Slightly intimidated but undeterred, Colin turned back to his network of friends – a move which in this case took the Wasteland origin story down another those unlikely paths which seem to define Colin’s career.

“I called a friend of mine, he’s a little more tech savvy, who was working as an attendant at a state mental institution for sociopathic teenagers in Massachusetts,” Colin recalled. “He was trying to learn computer science and things like that, and he says ‘Yeah, we have a scanner there.’ So, at night I’d go up to the mental institution for sociopathic boys with these 5.25-inch floppy discs, four of them I think, and with the 30 pictures, to scan them onto the floppies.”

When your story already includes time spent in a luxury apartment overlooking the Moskva, style editing Soviet propaganda, a future stop at a Massachusetts mental institution for sociopathic teenagers to scan photos onto floppy discs in the dark of night is just par for the course, right?

Next, Colin had to find a webhost. (Apparently, the mental institution didn’t have servers to offer along with use of their scanner.)

“I found this place called TIAC – ‘The Internet Access Company’ – out of somewhere north of Boston,” Colin said. “I told them I needed to put up some pictures for a catalog. I didn’t tell them what the pictures were.”

As part of the steep learning-curve he and Angie suddenly faced, Colin then learned how pricing for hosting worked.

“I ask how much it’s going to cost and he says, ‘That depends on how much bandwidth you use.’ And I’m like ‘Bandwidth? What the hell is bandwidth?’”

After being told bandwidth is “basically how much stuff people use on the internet,” Colin opened an account with TIAC and uploaded the images – a process that was significantly less straightforward in 1994 than it is today.

“This was on a dial-up modem, literally the first generation that plugged into the wall with the cord and not putting the phone receiver into a cradle. So, it took like a day to upload the 30 pictures and all the pages of HTML.”

To give you an idea how rudimentary the commercial infrastructure was for online business at the time, Colin noted that “dot coms and domains really didn’t exist yet, but IP numbers did.”

“The hosting company gives you an IP number and says, ‘OK you can tell people go here and they’ll see you,” Colin added. “So, I put the content up there on the IP address and somehow get Alta Vista and whatever other search engines existed then to list it – you know ‘Wasteland bondage leather clothing catalog’ – and that was it.”

At the time, the goal for the Wasteland catalog site wasn’t to make sales directly. The aim was to get people simply to order a catalog, which Colin and Angie would then mail to them, and from which they could then place orders.

Within a week, the site was getting a lot of visitors. What it wasn’t getting was any requests for catalogs.

“People are coming and coming, but nobody ordered a catalog,” Colin recalled. “But they all wanted to see the dirty pictures of the mostly naked girls.”

The worse news came in the form of bills from TIAC, the company hosting the page.

“First it was $75. Then it was $150, then it’s $300,” Colin said. “At the $350 mark, I said, ‘Angie, we’re fucking going broke on this, and nobody is ordering a catalog.’”

The dilemma presented by their hosting bill served a positive purpose however, leading to a flash of inspiration.

“What do you think if we charge people to look at the pictures?” Colin asked Angie.

Angie was skeptical, at first. “Do you think people will pay to look at pictures on the Internet?”

“I don’t know but we can’t do this,” Colin replied.

Putting their heads together, Angie and Colin hatched a plan. They decided to put the photos in a hidden directory – “this was before the days of htaccess and htpasswd,” Colin noted – and when someone signed up for the site, they would receive an email with a link to the temporary directory which contained the pictures. The directory name would change monthly, as a security measure and to deter users from sharing the link.

At that point, the new site was “all set up, all optimized for Mosaic,” Colin said – adding that it was also “ugly as fuck.”

“We had Compuserve GIF tiki torch flames on the sides, the whole horrible thing. I think it was a Friday afternoon, I hit the go button and made it live.”

The Rowntrees didn’t have to wait long to find out whether their new idea had potential.

“By Saturday morning, we woke up to $350 in $10 purchases,” Colin said, recalling his disbelief. “And I said to myself, ‘What the fuck did we just stumble into?’”

Whatever they’d stumbled into, it didn’t come with a convenient means of billing their customers.

“We put up a page that said something like if you’d like to get a lifetime membership for $10, or whatever it was, you can send a check, here’s our address, or you can send a fax with your credit card information – people were still faxing in those days, we used to get a lot of faxes  – or you can email your credit card information, but for security please send two emails back-to-back; one with your name and the first 8 digits of your credit card and the second one with your name and the last 8 digits and the expiration date (this is before there were CVV2 numbers).”

To Colin’s astonishment, “most people were emailing,” with some failing to read the directions, sending their entire credit card number and associated information in a single email.

“So, that’s how we billed for it and after about six months, we raised the price to $20 for a three-month membership, or something. People would just send us $20 every three months and we literally had index cards in a little plastic box with the password and the date that they had to be reminded to send us money written on the cards. There was no automated system, we’d just send them an email every 90 days and say ‘Hey, give us another 20 bucks in a check, fax or two emails.”

A rickety and decidedly analog system though it may have been, Wasteland began to pick up steam. Within the same year, Colin and Angie learned how to get domain names through ICANN, registering Wasteland.com when some other early adopter allowed the name to expire.

The news wasn’t all good, however. Inevitably, the rapidly growing site landed squarely on the radar of Colin’s hosts at TIAC.

“We were making pretty good money at that point, but then I get a call one morning from one of the guys at TIAC and he says we just looked at why you’re using so much bandwidth – and you’ve got dirty pictures on that thing! I said, ‘Well they’re not really that dirty…’”

TIAC wasn’t mollified by Colin’s attempt to defend the content. They wanted Wasteland off their server – quickly.

“They said you’ve got one week to get out and then we’re closing your account.”

What Colin did next not only shaped the future of his fledgling adult site, it shaped the future of the online adult industry itself.

“I went on to Alta Vista and found this ‘Cave Creek Internet Exchange’ in Scottsdale,” Colin recalled. “I called the number, and it was a chiropractor’s office in Arizona. I talked to this chiropractor named Ron Cadwell and I said, ‘We just lost our hosting; can you host us? I see you’ve got servers.’ And he’s like, ‘Well, we’ve got one server, just for my chiropractor’s office and my brother-in-law’s juice bar franchise. What kind of stuff do you have? And I’m like ‘it’s adult pictures.’ He said, ‘What’s that mean?’ I said, ‘Like, naked stuff.’ He says, ‘Is that legal?’ I said, ‘Yeah?’”

Ron then asked Colin a question, hilarious in retrospect: “Do you think there’s any money in that?”

Assured that Colin and Angie were “doing pretty well, so far,” Ron said he had to run the idea of hosting Colin past his partner, wife and parents. Ron later called Colin back to say his parents and wife were fine with the idea, but that his partner’s wife didn’t want any part of it – so Ron gave his partner $300 to buy out his half of the Cave Creek Internet Exchange business.

With that, the deal was done, and Wasteland was being hosted by CCIE. That was far from the end of the collaboration between Colin and Wasteland on the one hand, and Cave Creek and Ron on the other.

Many months before Wasteland’s move to CCIE’s server, another major figure from the early days of the adult internet industry, Jonathan Lieberman of NaughtyMail, had admonished Colin for failing to rebill his customers more effectively and efficiently.

“You have to rebill these people,” Lieberman told Colin. “Rebill, rebill, rebill! Use the HBO model!”

Having established his relationship with Ron and Cave Creek, Colin decided to see if there was some way CCIE could help him with his rebilling problem.

“About a year after we started hosting with CCIE, when we’d still been fooling around with this analog rolodex of index cards, I came to Ron asked do you know any people in tech or whatever who how to securely do things on the Internet, so people could pay for things on the Internet?”

Ron thought it was a pretty good idea – and repeated his earlier question about displaying naked pictures on the internet: “Do you think there’s any money in that?”

Ron checked around with his contacts and discovered that a friend’s brother-in-law had just left American Express “after having a big pissing match with someone,” as Colin put it. That ex-AMEX employee also happened to have been a senior engineer with the company.

Connected with the former AMEX engineer, Colin explained his idea: He wanted to make a system wherein people could sign up for monthly memberships and get rebilled automatically until they cancel. From there, it took only a couple weeks for the developer to cook up something that was ready to test out.

“And bada bing, bada boom – CCBill was born.”

Looking back on it all, if it seems an unlikely thing for a person on a career track involving orchestras and operas to wind up being a central figure in the creation of an adult internet-friendly hosting provider and billing service, it probably seems even more unlikely that he’d become one of the adult industry’s most prolific directors and producers or BDSM content. But as you peel back the layers of the onion, you learn that maybe the two worlds aren’t that different, after all.

Speaking of his time as a hustling conductor/producer, one who would toss all the essential tools of his trade in the trunk of his car and drive from one gig to the next, Colin reflected on the similarities between his past and current vocations.

“What I found was when you’re doing orchestra and symphonic directing, a lot of the times at smaller places, you’re also basically the orchestra manager. You end up taking care of all the little crap. You make sure there’s enough chairs, make sure there’s music stands, make sure everyone has their music, all that stuff.”

Before taking on the role of director/conductor, Colin noted “I was a musician – I can count to 2, 3, 4, 6, sometimes 12. I’m not really organized.” His time spent as a conductor and director effectively forced Colin to get more organized.

“I developed some pretty good chops in terms of keeping shit organized. Where it really came in handy was when we started shooting our own content.”

Particularly once he started shooting video, Colin was hit with an epiphany: “Holy fuck, this is like putting on a stage play, or an opera!”

“It’s got dramatic elements, it’s got costuming, it’s got casting, it’s got all of it,” Colin continued. “I basically treated producing kinky photo sets, and more importantly movies, like being an opera producer.”

Colin said there’s a “certain kind of thrill” that comes with using everything he’d learned in his time in music theater in the context of creating adult films.

“After doing all the music – for 25 years – I was kind of out of ideas,” he admitted. “It’s like, OK how many times am I going to put up Carmen, or how many times am I going to put up West Side Story? But then, suddenly, I was given this palette and blank canvass to be able to say ‘OK, well we need to tell a story now,’ a story of dominant man and submissive woman, maybe they go to his cabin for a weekend, or whatever. Suddenly, I was making freaking opera on film! And that’s where the entire influence came in. I already know the three-act plot arc, I already know this stuff from my background, how to build tension and have the conflict and resolution and betrayals and the deaths and the orgasms.”

Along the way, Colin has experienced his share of missed opportunities – like the time spent not rebilling customers automatically, an especially costly delay – but he has learned from those mistakes, as well.

“I learned my lesson from the rebilling thing; ever since, I’ve been known as an early adopter.”

One prominent example of being ready at the right time was BDSMPad, Colin’s response to hearing about this new “really big iPhone Steve Jobs was working on.” Paying close attention to the reporting about the soon-to-be-released iPad back in early 2010, Colin was ready when the devices made their official debut that April. While a lot of adult companies were still figuring out how much attention to pay to the tablet market, Colin had an iPad-optimized version of Wasteland ready from day one.

“We made bank on the tablet stuff for a while after that,” Colin said, noting that in addition to having the site iPad-optimized site ready to roll, he was also at or near the top of search engine responses for a wide range of iPad and tablet-specific keyword search terms.

Asked what’s next for him and for Wasteland, Colin said the next big thing isn’t a question of “what;” it’s a question of “how?”

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years now; it’s time to find some people to take this thing forward who are not 65 years old.”

Along those lines, Wasteland recently introduced Joe Evans as the company’s new Director of Business Development, a role in which Evans will have a broad mandate to establish relationships with other studios and platforms, growing the company’s existing traffic and revenue streams while coming up with new ones.

On the creative side of things, Colin already has largely stopped directing and has embraced the role of executive producer.

“I find young filmmakers, a lot of them in Europe, some in the United States, and they have some really good ideas,” Colin said. “They have good equipment, they have good chops, they know how to hire people or cast people – they make good movies. So, I get together with them, I mentor them a bit on what’s going to be commercially viable, and I fund them to make movies, which I then own, and they get paid to make them.”

In the months and years ahead, Colin said his goal is to “further expand my role as an executive producer of independent film in the adult space, as well as have Joe Evans and maybe a couple of other mini-me’s, mentoring them, giving them ideas, listening their feedback – and making sure they don’t sell the fucking farm on some sort of a deal – and go forward that way.”

“That way, I can gently ease into retirement, still own the business, still have people working for me, but I don’t have to be beating my head against it seven days a week, like I’ve been doing for 30 years,” Colin added.

Colin’s vision for the future of Wasteland flows from a crucial self-awareness – and an acceptance of his limitations.

“Everybody I’m dealing with, like the young filmmakers and people like Joe, they know what’s going on right now,” Colin explained. “I’m a fucking boomer. I’m the classic boomer. I’m bad at all this new stuff. I can barely use Twitter. I’m a boomer, I know it – and it’s good to know what you are. It’s good to admit that and find other people who are more in touch with contemporary trends and technology and tastes and salability, then to fund them and support them to do what needs to be done.”

As he looks forward to a future in which he’s loosening his grip on the reins, Colin’s parting thought for younger entrepreneurs, investors and creators in the adult space is a cautionary one.

“As the adult industry is such a crowded place right now, with so much competition, use extreme caution with startups,” Colin admonished. “There are so many grifters out there. Use your common sense. Do your due diligence.”

In performing that due diligence, Colin advocated for doing what he did in shepherding Wasteland along through the years: “Ask around and work your industry contacts.”

“Talk to people you know and trust, ask them, do they know anything about this new platform that’s offering the moon? Some new crypto opportunity? If it sounds too good to be true, scrutinize it. Use your network of people — build your network if you don’t already have one – and vet people. Because there are a lot of scoundrels and scallywags floating around the periphery of the adult industry.”

It has been a long journey for Colin, from Michigan to Moscow, New York to Boston, TIAC to CCIE, orchestras to orgasms. And while the next steps may take him further from the director’s chair, you can be certain Colin – and Wasteland – won’t be caught sitting still.