Ex-Fratpad guys, where are they now?

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BenjiBastian said:
For those of you that were fans of Fratmen Chase (aka Chance Cruise), I'm happy to tell you that he has returned to Chaturbate and I'm currently helping him get his OnlyFans page started.

I'm unsure if I'm allowed to post direct link to his chaturbate room or Twitter profile, but I've retweet his information to my Twitter and included his handle below.

Twitter:
@benji_bastian
@ChanceCrui78636
Click to expand...
Ok. But I’m hoping a collaboration for both OF is in order, then ??
 
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dapperT said:
I'm afraid you've stirred me to make a long post. Everyone be warned.

I've mentioned in the past that I'm still in the middle of researching the Pad, but so far, there are a few things that I've observed that could have been issues. For one, I'm not so sure it was ever really generating too much money. I've heard some pretty outrageous figures for what they might have been paying their models for duos in 2008/2009, and by all calculations, I couldn't see how HMJ (Hostmaster John) would possibly be making money off of them. Additionally, HMJ seemed to be consistently spread between Arizona, Hawaii, and California, running operations and renting various properties in each state for what seems to me like no great reason. People have been complaining about the prices of all things Fratmen since the very beginning, so maybe those high prices were the only thing keeping it all going for as long as it went, but I do just keep finding myself baffled at what it seems like they were spending money on. (Fun tidbit, though, Fratpad's pricing model since the beginning has appeared to be the same as that of VoyeurDorm/DudeDorm, the oldest cam houses I can find. VoyeurDorm even sued Big Brother when it came out in the U.S., claiming they took ideas from them, as an indication of how new the concept was.)

Then other than that, Fratmen also seemed to never be able to shake the idea that they should be completely refreshing the cast every season, and members were constantly upset that their favorite Fratpad actives were in jeopardy of being sent home. When I first discovered all the online petitions members were making at the time to keep their favorite Frats around, I thought they were being dramatic, but then I found out that every season since they started doing seasons (January, 2008) Fratmen was claiming that they were going to be sending everyone home and getting all new guys in the house every single time. So far I haven't encountered a season transition where the guys in the house weren't saying that they were quite sure they were going home.

Because of the high price of membership (and other things that incentivized never canceling membership, like that if you paid for a duo it would be removed from your account if you ever canceled, then later on as they raised the monthly price, you could keep paying the older price as long as you never canceled), Fratpad very much seemed to me like something that worked on a core base of loyal members and loyal affiliates across various websites. These members really came to love specific Fratmen, and while the Pad seemed to keep acquiescing and allowing their favorites to stay, they never seemed to really understand that this was what their core supporters ultimately wanted from them. I think this connection to the Fratmen themselves was the biggest incentive to the members who stayed around. The members that were there in 2006 were there in 2010, but starting in 2010, the Fratmen seemed to just be having shorter and shorter stays.

Here is an interesting postmortem on Fratpad posted in 2015 by someone who seems to have been emotionally invested and identifies some of the pitfalls as Fratpad, especially in cutting off all ties with affiliates (who really have been their primary source of traffic since 2006 as far as I can tell): Fratpad seems to be dead, but is it gone for good?

Leo was also suddenly let go in March of 2013 (HMJ claims he "quit"), which was a decision that baffled many and launched Leo into his follow-up sites (that are in interesting condition today since the rise of OnlyFans, and he's trying some new things to keep up.) Models in the Fratpad were also allowed to be camming for Flirt4Free since 2013, leaving members to feel like they weren't the priority—you can hear Fratmen in any shows between 2013 and 2015 promoting their non-Fratmen shows, which I'm split between considering a good idea for letting them have some independence and gather outside followings, or a bad idea for moving things outside of the Fratverse. But the biggest thing is that HMJ did indeed lose all of his money and was even evicted from his home in 2017 after defaulting on rent. He tried to pursue a lawsuit against MindGeek/Aylo for leaked Fratmen content across their sites that same year, but I believe he represented himself and didn't seem to file properly, so it was dropped. I also believe he lived with Fratmen Alan for a time but has been homeless since then. And clearly, no one was managing the site or the archives, so now the websites are all down (since summer, 2022) and all those archives are locked up somewhere or gone. That was just months after I'd started my official research, and I was using the thumbnails and archive dates for timeline purposes. The web archive only has bits and pieces of those pages. Adult media is always at risk of being lost to time, it seems...
Click to expand...
Thank You. It was perfect site for my tastes…softcore plus…I am a side. Just a year ago, the site had original content for rental, purchase and download. Now that has vanished. Who owns all that content?
 
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Steve6M said:
Thank You. It was perfect site for my tastes…softcore plus…I am a side. Just a year ago, the site had original content for rental, purchase and download. Now that has vanished. Who owns all that content?
Click to expand...
Yeah I agree, it was my start in porn when I was quite young. I was generally a bit timid with sex and sexuality, and Fratmen/Fratpad was the first thing that made it all seem like not such a serious thing. It was fun and I liked that you could get to know the performers as people.

And yes, I'm not fully sure how the website was still running for so long. HMJ's various companies own the copyright for the content, split between Pavlov's Dog, LLC and Icon New Media, Inc. He is—or at least was—the sole shareholder of both. Pavlov's Dog is the registered author of the works (that's the name on the original Fratmen website when it first launched, then Icon New Media showed up later), but the copyright interests were transferred to Icon New Media as "works for hire." I'm not fully sure what all that means, but I think it just means that it's essentially all locked under HMJ. And unfortunately, he seems to be in a challenging place at the moment. Well, to put that more frankly, I'm personally concerned that his mental state could be somewhere that is hard to come back from, and that he would be hard to communicate with.

I've seen some people claim they've tried to reach out for the content in the past but with no luck. I've seen someone claim that even Leo tried (Fratmen Leo), though it's all just hearsay from these forums. I don't have much hope in all of the content being reclaimed, but I do feel grateful for these forums and this active community in sharing bits and pieces, thoughts and memories. I started my research in 2022 right before the website went down and I'm still amazed at what I've been able to learn in a post-Fratpad world.

But to quote a member of some old forums from September, 2009: "Fratpad. Is. Not. Real. So sorry. Turn off the computer and go out of the house." I saved this to keep myself humble. Fratpad is not real. (Lol.)​
 
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dapperT said:
Yeah I agree, it was my start in porn when I was quite young. I was generally a bit timid with sex and sexuality, and Fratmen/Fratpad was the first thing that made it all seem like not such a serious thing. It was fun and I liked that you could get to know the performers as people.

And yes, I'm not fully sure how the website was still running for so long. HMJ's various companies own the copyright for the content, split between Pavlov's Dog, LLC and Icon New Media, Inc. He is—or at least was—the sole shareholder of both. Pavlov's Dog is the registered author of the works (that's the name on the original Fratmen website when it first launched, then Icon New Media showed up later), but the copyright interests were transferred to Icon New Media as "works for hire." I'm not fully sure what all that means, but I think it just means that it's essentially all locked under HMJ. And unfortunately, he seems to be in a challenging place at the moment. Well, to put that more frankly, I'm personally concerned that his mental state could be somewhere that is hard to come back from, and that he would be hard to communicate with.

I've seen some people claim they've tried to reach out for the content in the past but with no luck. I've seen someone claim that even Leo tried (Fratmen Leo), though it's all just hearsay from these forums. I don't have much hope in all of the content being reclaimed, but I do feel grateful for these forums and this active community in sharing bits and pieces, thoughts and memories. I started my research in 2022 right before the website went down and I'm still amazed at what I've been able to learn in a post-Fratpad world.

But to quote a member of some old forums from September, 2009: "Fratpad. Is. Not. Real. So sorry. Turn off the computer and go out of the house." I saved this to keep myself humble. Fratpad is not real. (Lol.)​
Click to expand...
Now I'm intrigued about what happened to HMJ.
It seems to be very dramatic as the way you put it.
 
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