Former Vivid Prez Details Move From Porn to Fantasy Sports Biz

Entrepreneur Bill Asher is best known in the adult entertainment as the former president of Vivid Entertainment. But his new online venture, Monkey Knife Fight, seems a long way from porn. The site is the latest entry in the increasingly popular genre of Daily Fantasy Sports—which is basically a new, digital-era form of sports betting. Asher came to Vivid from Playboy when he realized that the “real money” was in adult films, he told the gaming site PlayUSA. It appears he was correct. The PlayUSA profile identifies him as a “billionaire.” Though his name does not appear on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires, there’s no question Asher has made a fortune.Asher this week explained why the move from the adult industry into sports gaming was a more natural one than it might appear, in the interview with the Play USA.“I started talking to people about fantasy sports years ago because I had so much traffic on the internet. I was looking for places to sell it,” Asher told the site. “Adult sites get a lot of traffic, and one of the ways to make money is figuring out where to send it to, but adult traffic is unique. It’s hard to go from an adult site to ‘I want to sell you a coat.’ I felt like fantasy sports had a similar demographic.”The primary demographic for fantasy sports sites is male, with an average age of 34, according to VentureBeat. According to Pornhub’s stats, the typical porn fan is male, with an average age of 36. In other words, the markets for adult content and fantasy sports gaming are largely the same.Unlike popular DFS sites like FanDuel, which require daily drafts of entire rosters in one sport or another, complete with salary cap restrictions, Asher’s Monkey Knife Fight designs its games to be simple, focusing mainly on “proposition” or “prop” games. That is, rather than betting on the outcome of a game or a player’s overall performance, gamers bet on whether or not one simple thing will happen.One of the site’s most popular games is “Over/Under,” in which gamers wager on whether two players will go over or under a certain statistic in a game—for example, will Tom Brady pass for over 350 yards? Or will he go under that total? Picking two over-unders correctly can pay off up to 16 times a gamer’s original bet, according to the fantasy sports news site Lineups.com.Another feature of MKF attractive to gamers, according to PlayUSA, is that  bettors are always playing against the house, rather than against sophisticated “sharks,” essentially professional fantasy gamers who crunch data using computer algorithms to come up with their fantasy lineups—and inevitably win against more casual players.“We’re just a bunch of sports guys who love doing this,” Asher told PlayUSA. “We’re putting together games we would want to play.”Photo By Arturo Pardavila III / Wikimedia Commons