Written by 3XWEST and FRANK STACY
The Tortoise & The Hare might be a popular fable, but did you ever think you would hear it talked about by a porn company? No, this isn’t some wacky announcement for “Aesop: A XXX Parody”, don’t worry. Instead, it’s a recounting of one of our more interesting product journeys that Frank and I have gone through together in our many years as colleagues and series architects. This is the story of how Mommy’s Boy came to be one of our most viral and top-trending sites… well over FIVE YEARS after it first got pitched! Like the tortoise from the tale, we inched along to the finish line at a record (slow) pace, but the determination and conviction he and I clung onto finally persevered in the end. With seemingly countless cosmic clogs in the wheels of our progress, our “little step-engine that could” still merrily chugged along and has now gone on to be one of our best-sellers. Read onward to learn about the rocky road Mommy’s Boy faced over the years, and how patience proved to be all we needed to succeed.
Blue-Balled Beginnings
Even before Adult Time was a twinkle in our parent company’s eye, Frank and I had bounced the idea around of eventually doing a straight counterpart to Girlsway’s “Mommy’s Girl” series. When Girlsway came onto the scene in 2014 through to this day, Mommy’s Girl was the most-watched and top-selling series on the network – a clear success by any and every metric. I couldn’t tell you the exact first instance of us having discussed the strong potential of the idea, or even which one of us pitched it to the other – but we talked enthusiastically about it early and often. At the time, our product launch process was much more stringent than now, when Adult Time is set up to house any number of new brands, pilots and limited series. It would have had to be a full-scale site during a period when we weren’t looking for any new ideas for product launches, so Frank and I kept the idea in our back pocket for when the time seemed right.
Then, the perfect opportunity presented itself in 2018 – Adult Time was being developed as a platform, and we wanted to greenlight several new series to support its catalog of original content. We were jotting down every idea that the team had, to be narrowed down to a select few that we would produce in that first year of Adult Time’s release. Surely, everyone would see the obvious opportunity staring ourselves in the face, to replicate one of our most successful series for a new audience and reap the rewards…. right, everyone? …ANYone?!
But nope – it was not meant to be. Not yet, at least. The pitch was met with a bit too much ambivalence internally – from concerns about market fatigue towards the family roleplay gimmick, to some hesitation about oversaturating our catalog with too much similar content, to even some resistance to producing more family roleplay in general since it’s admittedly not everyone’s cup of tea. Amidst all the other (regrettably awesome) proposed ideas for new series, Mommy’s Boy just didn’t have the votes or the support to get selected. Frank and I lost the battle… but we weren’t going to surrender the war!
Plans + Pandemic = Pandemonium
Flash forward to early 2020. Frank and I had bided our time for two whole years, waiting for our time to strike. It was around this time that as a company, we began to look much more heavily at our tube operations (such as uploading clips to our official channels on Pornhub, Xhamster, XVideos, and the like). We had seen from many reliable sources, such as our site traffic data and surveys asking respondents how they first heard about Adult Time, that many of our subscribers were discovering our brand from these tube efforts, which led to a new business strategy for us to explore – produce more content that performs well on tube sites, so that we can get more visibility and exposure for our content and brands. This included analyzing what channels, clips, categories, and story themes earned high viewership on tube sites, so that we could reverse-engineer our own attempts to get our videos featured.
This was the “in” that we needed – our research (as if you couldn’t tell just by looking!) was that family roleplay themes were undeniably strong on tubes, disproving the worries about market fatigue from a couple of years earlier. We presented some concrete stats to support our point, and laid down the gauntlet – if we were really serious about growing our tube presence, we’d be fools to overlook the mama-sized mammoth in the room! At this point, nobody could really say no to our reasoning (or maybe we just had worn everybody down by now, hehehe) and so we got formal approval to begin development of the series.
And thennnnnnn…. March 2020 happened. If you’ve read our earlier article about producing porn during the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ll know that it was a chaotic time that took us months to recover from before we were able to get production back on track in ANY capacity. Even when shoots resumed at long last, we needed to start with our existing brands for which updates were stretching thin – this was not the time to introduce anything brand new or uncertain, not before operations were stable and secure again. Our poor little step-brainchild would have to wait a little longer to see the light of day. But that sunrise was just on the horizon…
The Son Always Rises From The East
By early 2021, the worst of our pandemic woes were behind us. With new production safety measures in place and government restrictions lessening, things were gradually approaching a return to normalcy, and we had gone from red-alert to blue skies ahead. All of our strategic plans that had been put on pause for the past year were now back on the table, and with it the inevitable launch of Mommy’s Boy that had been waiting patiently on the back-burner. It was finally time to take that next step forward!
Luckily, since many of our crews were quite used to shooting Mommy’s Girl for us, they already had a strong grasp of what we were aiming for and didn’t need any hand-holding to get the jist or the jizz of it. The series started strong right off the bat, with some of our earliest episodes like “Family Intervention”, “Rear View”, “Mom’s Closet Crush”, and “Blind Without My Contacts” being instant hits with members and viral sensations on tubes. The series was delivering exactly as promised, following in the footsteps of Mommy’s Girl as a beloved addition both to our catalog and to the “fauxcest” genre industry-wide.
Which made it all the more perplexing when MommysBoy.com just… couldn’t seem to make sales?
Taking The Wind Out Of Our Sales
It was the damnedest thing. Here, we had this surefire win of a product that shouldn’t just work well in theory, but we had the tangible results from the releases themselves to validate it. If people were watching and liking the series, then why wasn’t it getting off the ground financially? We tried pretty much every one of our usual tactics to get the ball rolling – mailing campaigns, ad spots, appearing in top trending lists, and so-forth… but nothing was sticking.
In hindsight, we have some theories as to why this might have been the case, although nothing we can really substantiate.
For one thing, our Mommy’s Boy clips on our tube channels directed users to land on our main Adult Time website for them to join, which was something we often did with our other series in the past to great success. But we have since discovered that for certain niches, a targeted landing page that is more specific and better advertises that niche as the main selling point leads to better results. Sending fauxcest-lovers to our generic tour might have been costing us sales and we never even realized.
Another was that we heard from several of the MILF actresses who star in our Mommy’s Boy episodes that they too had trouble monetizing their self-shot stepmom content on their fan platforms. Apparently these were often the most requested and most viewed clips when offered for free, but when it came to paid sales these clips often underperformed. We speculated that it might have to do with the audience demographic for this content being younger males who may have less disposable income or access to credit cards, limiting their spending despite their eagerness for the content.
And lastly, we might just have needed time to grow. The content archive was small to start, our tube channel ranking had to climb up the ladder from scratch, we hadn’t launched a new site since the pandemic so we might have been a little rusty… Even though some of our bigger successes like Girlsway and Pure Taboo were overnight sensations, we maybe came to expect that as the norm instead of the exception and ended up being impatient towards Mommy’s Boy for not yielding instant results.
Since the viewership metrics were quite strong, often being our 2nd-most-viewed series month over month (just under Pure Taboo) Frank and I were able to justify keeping the series active at its current release rate of two episodes per month. It was all in all a pretty low investment for some content that was satisfying enough members to make it worthwhile. The series could easily have kept coasting like that for the foreseeable future, but something changed in late 2023. And for the first time for Mommy’s Boy, it changed for the BETTER.
Mommy’s Boy Buoyed
What started as under the radar at first, but eventually got spotted by our vigilant sales staff, suddenly Mommy’s Boy was picking up steam out of nowhere. Between August and September 2023, our monthly sales doubled in volume, and by the end of the year our monthly revenues had quadrupled compared to where they started the year in January. These results didn’t come as a “surprise” exactly – we had made some adjustments to our approaches for both tube channels and banner ads in 2023 that were showing lifts in a lot of our products – but Mommy’s Boy seemed to be benefiting the most out of these changes and outpacing many other series for growth. In fact, at the time of writing this, the dedicated Pornhub channel we created for Mommy’s Boy has already exploded to rank #45 in just one year of existence, with a whopping 26 uploads joining the prestigious “1+ million views” club. Wow!
Some of our tactics to promote the brand had changed, but one thing that hadn’t changed at all was the content. Still going strong starting its 4th year of releases in 2024, the series recipe and update frequency are completely unchanged from how they started three years ago. Which just goes to show that the hunch Frank and I had about the idea was indeed a sound one – it just took the world a few years to catch up to us. It’s a good thing that we persisted with the idea even as obstacles came our way, since we otherwise never would have had the happy chance to see it all pay off.
If this were a fable, the moral of the story might be that slow and steady wins the race. Or to stick to your guns and hold on to your convictions. Or it could be that what failed yesterday might succeed tomorrow. But this isn’t a fable, it’s porn! And in porn, it’s the happy endings that matter – no matter how it may take you to get there. 😉
Click here to watch a full Mommy’s Boy scene for free!
