Page 42 - AVN December 2015

TECH NEWS
IN THE C-SUITE | STOP, THIEF | | By Sharan Street
|By Nate Glass
By the Numbers
Homegrown Video installs a new CEO
is well equipped to hold the reins as CEO. He’s been at
Homegrown for about seven years and has been in the
online adult industry since 2000. And with Goldberg still
on the team working on special projects and Timlake fully
engaged with the online community and video submit-
ters, the three-decade-old company is well equipped to
handle the challenges facing any company in the adult
sphere.
Installing Marcum as CEO has been in the works for
several months now, but that is only part of the big shifts
that have taken place at Homegrown in recent years. As
Goldberg explained, “What happened two years ago is
we merged the DVD business into the internet business.
So we were two separate businesses, and we merged and
now we’re one.”
Talking to the Homegrown team, it’s clear they bring
professionalism to a company that got its start selling
content made by amateurs. “One thing in this industry,
people don’t treat it like a business—actually having good
reports, sitting down and having meetings,” Marcum said.
And treating Homegrown like a business is vital to him.
Timlake heartily agreed, noting that early on he saw
that “tube traffic could be like Moneyball and be entire-
ly stats-driven.” Marcum understood that and helped
realize that vision at Homegrown. “That was his defining
moment in showing how valuable an employee he is and
put him on the path to his leadership role today,” Timlake
said.
Assisting Homegrown in the DVD business is Girl-
friends Films, which took over distribution duties in
2014. And in order to come up with titles that will do
well in the marketplace, Marcum said that he puts a high
value on listening to his staff. “Passing ideas off to every-
body, talking to the guy who just does thumbs and asking
his opinion and taking everybody’s opinion and putting
it on a whiteboard … The guy who does the thumbs, he
talks at the water cooler and he hears what other people
say. He might say the things that other people are afraid
to say.”
Goldberg said, “Online, we really have a good sense
of what sells really quick and we’re able to reinforce that
and make money this way in a very focused manner. On
DVD it’s kinda like you were tossing a stone out and
hoping it skips. … By the time you figure out if it’s a good
stone, you’re already three to six months into the process,
you’re going for your next title. So it’s very hard to cap-
ture the zeitgeist of DVD.”
But Homegrown is just as much an online business as
it is a company that produces DVDs, and both Marcum
and Goldberg have plenty to say about that side of the
business. “I’ve been doing the internet for 20 years,”
Goldberg said. “I’ve watched this industry grow up and
become what it is today.” And along the way he and
Homegrown have played a role in disputes over piracy, in-
cluding a well-publicized lawsuit against Acacia Technol-
ogies. Marcum, in the biz since 2000, is a child of the free
porn era. “My generation grew up on Napster,” he said.
A couple years back, during an AVN interview
with Homegrown Video President Farrell
Timlake, the subject of his hard-working chief
executive officer came up. Talking about how
CEO Spike Goldberg took care of the day-
to-day operations of Homegrown, Timlake
commented, “He does the grind, the stuff that
no one else wants to do. So god bless him. I’m
going to drink to Spike right now.”
Timlake’s light-hearted comment is a tribute
to Goldberg’s skills as a numbers guy. “I was
for years adamant about running by the met-
rics, which was impossible to do on the DVD
side,” Timlake said. Creating a separate entity
for the internet side made it possible to focus
on metrics—something Goldberg has done for
many years.
Now it’s time for Goldberg to raise a glass of
his own to celebrate the fact that he’s stepping
away from Homegrown’s day-to-day opera-
tions. But that doesn’t mean he will be leaving
the company—any more than Timlake has
himself.
Goldberg said he’s looking forward to refo-
cusing on the bigger picture at the company.
“I’m going to take on some special projects for
Homegrown, but I’ll no longer be stewarding
or steering the company. Josh will be doing
that going forward—all the fun of my job.”
Homegrown’s newly anointed chief execu-
tive officer is Josh Marcum (pictured above).
Having been promoted to head of operations
and chief operating officer in 2013, Marcum
42 | AVN.com | 12.15
Goldberg mused, “Generations have been taught to
access porn for free. You have to reconcile yourself with
that fact. … I know people in this industry who own
companies who would rather go to a free site to watch
porn as opposed to going to a paysite. When I started in
this business there was something very cool about getting
into a site and seeing the inside of the site and how it was
created.”
Now, however, as Marcum pointed out, porn “became
so easy to find.” It’s not enough to offer video content—
you have to offer a sense of community. “We try to make
a reason to keep your membership and a reason to come
there day to day. It’s not just porn.”
However, that doesn’t mean throwing in the towel
when it comes to piracy. Marcum noted that Homegrown
devotes considerable resources to sending out DMCA
notices, because without constant vigilance, its stolen
content would proliferate over tube and torrent sites.
And Goldberg emphasized the need for coordinated ef-
forts between companies. “Much like I did when I fought
with Acacia in the past, the industry has to remember to
bind itself together at times and work together,” he said.
“This industry is like an organism. And if it’s treated like
a business and people work off the same set of rules, it
grows and it will thrive. If we don’t all cooperate on that
level … everybody’s going to be eating each other alive.”
Fortunately for the company, its flagship site Home-
grownVideo.com does provide a community where fans
can get more than they will find in stolen video content.
On the membership site, there’s more context. “You
have the benefit of community chat and the texturing of
history of what people have done and what’s going on
in their communities to kind of reinforce what you’re
seeing,” Goldberg said. In a video, he explained, “You get
a 90-minute crack at explaining something as complicated
as a couple opening up their relationship.”
Goldberg continued, “I love the context. We’ve seen
this for years at Homegrown. You see relationships evolv-
ing. And to be able to dig in and see that up close it’s not
just porn at the point. It becomes a learning experience
for people. We see some amazing things. One time we
had a real threesome where this woman started crying
because she got jealous of her boyfriend with this other
girl. That’s not something you see in porn.”
When asked about what he’ll be working on in the
future, Goldberg said, “There are challenges that are
inherent to this business that are going to continue to
become bigger and bigger in the years to come, and I’m
going to start to chase some of these structural challenges
that running an adult business in this day and age create.
Beyond this I can’t really say much yet. … Anybody
who’s been in this business now a couple years has seen
it so dramatically change, and I feel like it’s dramatically
changing yet still.”
He added, “society has changed attitudes about porn,
and the way to monetize in this business is changing
along with it. You really can’t look at a business in this
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