Introducing Offbeatr, the Kickstarter for crowd-funded porn
Kickstarter is proving the go-to online stomping ground for the modern, budding entrepreneur, letting them present ideas and projects to a wide, receptive audience who (so far at least) seem very willing to dip into their pockets and take a punt on funding an unknown. It’s seen everything from e-Ink wrist watches to goth rock albums and post-apocalyptic videogames pick up millions of dollars worth of investment.
But what if your project doesn’t fit within Kickstarter’s family-friendly parameters? Where do you turn for funding if your idea or proposed product is, how do we put this, a little bit blue? Enter Offbeatr, a crowd-funding start-up that aims to do for amateur adult entertainment what Kickstarter did for crowd-funded projects at large.
Founded by Ben Tao and Eric Lai, Tao explained he believes there’s an unfilled gap in the market for a crowd-funding website that supports adult-only services and projects.
“For Offbeatr it’s about going directly to the fans and supporters and engaging them in the process and giving content creators access to capital they previously never had access to,” Tao told PSFK.
“By getting this capital the industry will start to innovate and take more risks with business models, products they make, and how they reach out to their customers.”
So what sort of projects are currently being touted by Offbeatr? How does the “Japanese Porn Cultural Exchange”, or “Got Mormon Milk” sound? So long as a project fits into Offbeatr’s liberal guidelines, and the team pitching the project are over 18, pretty much anything is acceptable.
Registered users (who must live in in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Austrailia, or New Zealand) pitch an idea to the Offbeatr team and, once greenlit against the guidelines for the site, then put together a Kickstarter-style page outlining the goals of the project, the details of service, movie or product being offered, and how much funding they’re looking for. All projects then enter a voting stage, and if enough votes are acquired, the cash should start flowing the would-be Larry Flynns.
With Amazon’s payment system and Paypal both strictly against anything of an adult nature, Offbeatr have had to put together their own payment system, which hasn’t quite been finalised yet. As a result, no money is changing hands through the site yet, but this should change very soon.
For amateur pornographers, their fantasy fantasies could soon be crowd-funded into reality.
