An Expert Interview With MakeLoveNotPorn.tv CEO Cindy Gallop
Here at CAM4 we are passionate about working with specialists from across the industry, and we are thrilled to welcome Cindy Gallop for an expert interview. She is the Founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, a glorious ‘Real World Sex’ social platform that is dedicated to cliche-free, hand-picked videos.
Cindy is no stranger to CAM4, having been a guest on our Candid Convo series on TikTok, hosted by the sensational Laura Desiree. Cindy is a firm believer that we should talk openly and honestly about sex, which has inspired so many people to ask her for advice on the subject.
Cindy says that she cannot live without Sex and Martinis!
In 2023, she created a dedicated platform where people can ask questions about anything Cindy related, as well as their burning carnal questions. Simply visit Dear Cindy where you really can ask her anything!
Her dedication to providing a safe place for people to share their experiences has also helped them to change their lives. Cindy is well known in the industry as a consultant, coach, keynote speaker and social-sex adviser, as well as for her deep appreciation of younger men!
CAM4 Interview with Cindy Gallop
Read below or watch the interview to gain more insight:
Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your business, its concept, and the philosophy behind it.
Cindy: Hi, I’m Cindy Gallop and it is a true joy to be interviewed by CAM4. I’m the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, and I would like to emphasize that our tagline says, we are pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference. I started MLNP because I realized, through dating younger men, that we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world. Because of that, porn becomes sex education by default, but not in a good way.
I’m a naturally action-oriented person, and so I set about doing something about it, which led to the launch of a tiny, clunky original website (makelovenotporn.com), some 15 years ago. The concept was porn world vs real world – here’s what happens in the porn world, and this is what happens in the real world. I launched MakeLoveNotPorn.tv at TED in 2009. I became the only speaker at TED to utter the words “come on my face” on the stage, six times in succession!
The talk went viral as a result, and it drove an extraordinary global response to my tiny website, one that I’d never anticipated. Thousands of people wrote to me from all around the world, all pouring their hearts out about their sex lives, as well as their porn watching habits. I then realized that I’d uncovered a huge global social issue, from which I felt a responsibility to take MLNP forwards. I needed to make it more helpful, far reaching and effective, and so I transformed it into a business designed to do some good.
As of today, MLNP is the world’s first and only user-generated, 100% human-curated, social sex video sharing platform. The way to think about it is, if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, then MakeLoveNotPorn is the badly needed documentary. We are a unique window onto the internet – funny, messy, loving, wonderful sex, that we all have in the real world. We are not a competitor to porn, we are the only real world counterpoint and complement, which is very much needed. What we’re doing is, we are socializing, normalizing, and de-stigmatizing sex in the real world.
We are bringing it out of the shadows and into the sunlight, in order to promote consent, communication, good sexual values, and good behavior. We are literally promoting sex education through real world demonstration. Our site allows members to pay to subscribe, rent, and stream our social sex videos, with half of the income going to our contributors. One of my personal philosophies is that I’m all about communication through demonstration. “Don’t say it – be it, and do it!”
Before MLNP, nobody had ever answered the question that everyone has been asking since the dawn of time, “What is everybody else really doing in bed?” Now, there are a ton of videos on the internet which are billed as amateur porn – but they aren’t. There are professional production companies masquerading as amateur, simply because that’s what people want to see. We have to remind people that those dorm rooms really don’t exist! Then there are a lot of creators who are producing amateur porn, but they are replicating what the professionals do. This is because they think that’s what people want to see, so the issue isn’t porn, it’s because we don’t talk about sex in the real world.
In order to further the mission of making it easy for every single person in the world to talk openly and honestly about sex, I decided to simply take every dynamic in social media, and apply them to this one area of universal human experience that no other social platform allows. It really was that simple – bring the power of social to sex in the real world! That’s where the concept came from.
When it came to registering a website with the word ‘porn’ in it, was that a challenge?
Cindy: As it just so happens, over the years a lot of very well meaning people have said to me, “Cindy, you really should change your site name, because it’s got the word porn in it. You should call it something vague and innocuous.” I’ve always refused to do that, because when people ask me what I do, and I tell them I have a business called MakeLoveNotPorn, they may not know exactly what it is, but they know why it exists.
Sixteen years ago, when I came up with this idea, I wanted to call it something short, punchy and memorable, and one where the URL was still available. And so I simply wrote, ‘make love not war’, then ‘make love not porn’, and that was about as much thought that went into it. Little did I realize that today, I would own the definitive ‘call to action’ in this arena. Because every day, thousands of people hashtag MakeLoveNotPorn across every social channel, thinking that they’re the very first person who ever thought of saying that.
There is one thing that I know you will be very familiar with, which is that I am banned from advertising MakeLoveNotPorn anywhere on social media. It’s especially frustrating that we’ve even been banned from paid searches. All around the world, every day people are searching for us, without knowing that we exist. For example, the top organic search terms that send traffic to us are ‘make love not porn’, ‘real sex not porn’, ‘video sex not porn’, etc., but they don’t know there’s a company with our name.
People tell me that they still have no idea what to search for, and that is how, in the absence of the ability to advertise, our name really helps us in an organic search context. One thing I do believe in is planning for success, and so I have trademarked MakeLoveNotPorn across every possible category. It’s something I’m very serious about – you should always plan for success.
Looking at the future of your platform, and forecasting the developments to come, can you give us some insight as to what might be happening at MakeLoveNotPorn?
Cindy: I’m very happy to share my plans, and I very much hope that the readers and viewers will consider participating. To give some context, I have really struggled over the years to raise funding for the site, and this is because investors just don’t want to touch anything to do with sex, which is simply ridiculous. When I point out that I have a business that operates in one single area of the universal human experience, one we are all engaged with and fascinated by, you would expect Dollar signs to be all over it. Nevertheless, no investor will touch me.
I do, however, have one wonderful investor who put up the seed funding, and has been very supportive ever since. That said, we have just finally launched our first ever equity crowdfunding campaign. It’s our first ever campaign, because once again, unsurprisingly, no crowdfunding platform would touch us with a barge pole, and this happens a lot across the industry. Over the years, every time a new crowdfunding platform launches, I would approach them and they would suddenly discover they had a ‘no adult content’ clause. This year, we were finally able to do it, and this is because of the wonderful actress Jameela Jamil, of ‘The Good Place’ and ‘She Hulk’ fame.
Jameela interviewed me on her podcast. She has a wonderful community called IWeigh, and she wants to encourage her community to fund female founders. She is our lead investor for our Wefunder equity crowdfunding campaign. She’s promoted us to her community, and we officially launched our campaign just a few weeks ago, so fingers crossed we’re going to reach our target. It’s very affordable, but you have to remember this is an investment, not a donation. It’s not your normal crowdfunding, however I’m determined to do my damnedest to add several zeros to whatever anybody puts in, thereby making MLNP into the unicorn I know it can be.
Thinking of the creators here on CAM4 and across the adult industry, please tell us – How much of your business savvy is based on experience, how much comes from business negotiations, and is it possible to learn this from an educational program?
Cindy: Firstly, you don’t need to have taken a course in business to become savvy. You don’t need to have worked in some kind of business capacity in order to gain experience. The single most important thing to enable you to do business the way you want to, is to have a very good sense of your own value. You need to understand that people will value you at the value you are seen to put on yourself, and that’s the starting point for everything. The uniqueness of what you bring to the table is enormously valuable. That should inform all of your business decisions. If somebody undervalues you, then you simply get out. You really must trust your gut instincts, because that and intuition will trump rational business thinking any time.
I’ve been saying for years that in any context, whether it’s salaries, fees, whatever it may be, the amount you ask for is always the highest amount you can say out loud without actually bursting out laughing. Trust me, it works. I’ve been giving that advice for decades, and I hear from people every week saying that they tried it, and it worked. That comes from having a really good sense of your own value. You only want to work with people who not only share that sense of your value, but also share your values.
Take a long hard look at yourself and identify what you believe in, what you value, what you stand for, and what you’re all about. That’s what makes life so much easier. Remember, life will still throw plenty at you, so you need to know exactly how to respond to it in any given situation, and in a way that is true to you. That is the secret of happiness – Living your life, working your work, and doing it in a way that you know is always true to your values.
When it comes to the emotional sense of knowing your worth, are there ways of calculating it in order to know if you’re on track, or do you refer to other rates that exist, and try and stay within what might be an established value in the industry?
No, absolutely not. You should set out to establish new standards of what you should get paid in the industry. I cannot say this emphatically enough, and it’s worth making the readers aware that after fifteen years of working on MLNP, it has made me feel like a champion and an advocate, insofar as I can be for the adult industry as a whole. We all face the same challenges. I’ve been saying this publicly for years, that the answer to everything that worries people ostensibly about the adult industry, and indeed porn and sex frankly, is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, block or repress, it is instead to open up. Open up the dialogue around all of this. Open up to welcoming, supporting and funding the entrepreneurs who are the future of the adult industry. But most importantly, open up to allowing us all to do business the same way that everybody else does, because we all know the financial barriers that we face.
It’s also worth saying that I absolutely believe it’s possible to change all of that. Speaking for myself, from when I began building MLNP fifteen years ago, I discovered the financial obstacles that I was up against – the ones we are all familiar with. If you told me fifteen years ago that I’d spend this much of my life talking to banks and payment processors, I would not have believed you. I’ve been looking for friendly banks over the years, and as I talk to investors about MLNP, some say that I should raise funding to buy a bank. Given the recent Silicon Valley bank implosion, it’s a lot easier to buy back than it ever has been.
In the ideal world, I would love to buy a bank. I’ve said to my team that if I ever get to do that, I’m opening the bank up to every single sex worker who’s been refused a bank account everywhere else. I’m sharing this because I want our audience to know that there are people out there, who want to change all of this. They don’t look at the system and agree to work within it, they have a unique value. What I want is to make sure that value is rewarded and compensated. I’m going to set my own standards, my own benchmarks, and my own goals.
Given the stigma of the adult industry, would you say that what you’ve just described should be the mantra for those in the industry to remember, especially those who are brazenly ambitious?
Cindy: Absolutely, yes. When I talk about unique value, I’m sure that all CAM4 creators and members will know exactly what I mean. Because interestingly, the same is true of those at MLNP, we celebrate ‘real world’ everything. Real world bodies, real world penis size, real world breasts, anything and everything. That’s important because, we are in a world where popular culture sends us messages all the time, saying you are not hot, attractive or desirable, unless you look a certain way. But when our members write to us and say, “you made me feel better about my own body”, that’s because we’ve proven at MLNP that in the real world, what is hot and desirable is you. Because of that, you then have a unique relationship with your customers and your clients.
That’s what it’s about, the uniqueness of you, your unique spirit, your unique interactions – it’s your personality. That is why you have the customers and the clients that you do. That is the true value. It’s not about conforming to the industry standard. It’s by the way people are not subscribing, in any way at all, to the industry belief that you’re interchangeable with every other creator, because you’re not – You are you!
You have given us a lot of inspiration from delving into your world, so tell us – Who inspires you?
Cindy: I’m honestly inspired by everybody around me, every single day. Each day we are working to change the world we live in, to become the world we all want to live in. I very much believe in humanity, and I love people, because people are all around us every day doing extraordinary things. Whether it’s in the course of reading the news, or catching up on social media, I come across so many people who are just doing what needs to be done to change the world for the better, and everyone like that inspires me.
How do people get connected with you and learn more about all of the wonderful developments and opportunities with MakeLoveNotPorn?
Cindy: First things first, I would encourage everyone to come and visit us at MakeLoveNotPorn.tv It would be great if you were to consider becoming MLNP stars, so please do share your real world sex on the site. You can follow me, Cindy Gallop on Twitter and Instagram, and MLNP is also on Twitter and Instagram. I also have a Substack site called Dear Cindy, where I answer reader’s questions, so do please check that out as well. All social links are provided below.
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CONNECT WITH CINDY GALLOP & MLNP
Dear Cindy: Ask Me Anything
Twitter: @cindygallop
IG: @cindygallop
MLNP Website: MakeLoveNotPorn.tv
Twitter: @makelovenotporn
IG: @makelovenotporn
TikTok: @makelovenotcorn
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STAY CONNECTED WITH CAM4
CAM4 Community: @cam4
C4 Women: @c4_women
C4 Male: @c4_men
CAM4 Gay: @cam4_gay
TikTok: @c4culture
YouTube: @cam4official
