From porn to pop-ups to virtual worlds, Brian Shuster has done it all. What he hasn't done is share his hard-won knowledge with mainstream marketers...until now.
Even if you don't know his name, Brian Shuster just may be the most hated man on the internet. If you believe an old MSNBC report that named him the prince of pop-ups after he was awarded a patent for what he insists is an exit survey, you might have to fight the urge to rip him limb from limb for inventing the most hated ad format in history.
On the other hand, if you believe Shuster when he says that all of the outcry can be traced to a single reporter who misread his patent application, you might find him a sympathetic figure – a bona fide internet impresario with an innate ability to grasp and exploit the constantly evolving digital medium.
Perhaps the truth about Shuster is somewhere in the middle. But controversy aside, Shuster has seen the good, the bad and the ugly of internet marketing since the mid-90s, when a $700 investment made him one of the elite players in online adult entertainment.
While it would be easy to paint Shuster as simply a pornographer, the truth is that many of the marketing tactics that he and his competitors pioneered have helped build the basis for both the mainstream and adult internet alike.
Not all of those lessons are being used by mainstream marketers, according to Shuster, who says clumsy advertising runs the risk of destroying the online space as we know it. And Shuster should know; an early experiment with online ads enraged many of his users.
"We were deluged with hate mail when we put up our first banner ads," Shuster says of his first viable internet business model. "There was a big uproar from users who thought the internet should be a commercial-free space. We were seen as evil."
But it was commercialism, not porn, that made Shuster evil in the eyes of those who had taken the time to write him hate mail. Shuster was still a year away from his start in adult entertainment. His pre-porn business, he explains, was not unlike what DoubleClick does today, aggregating smaller websites that lacked the scale to sell ads on their own.
At the time, Shuster ran a website featuring his comic strip "Chaos." While the site was a small success with about 500 daily visitors, Shuster says it suffered from a problem that plagues publishers and advertisers to this day.
"I had the traffic, but my readers were spread out all over the country, so I could only show one or two fans in a given city," he says, adding that finding thousands of similarly situated publishers inspired him to start aggregating and selling ad space.
It could have been timing or it could have been execution, but the ad network business wasn't for Shuster in those days. He confesses that a prospective angel investor told him that the only business likely to yield a profit online was porn.