Fame Registry has garnered a reputation in recent years as one of the top statistical websites in adult entertainment by using a unique points system to track the most admired porn performers in the business. In addition to its monthly Most Popular-themed honors, FR will present the inaugural Fame Registry Porn Star Awards via Twitter on August 30.
Fame Registry owner and operator Kelli (who also runs Kelli Internet Services, an umbrella of adult industry and performer sites) kindly granted Luke Is Back an online interview to discuss the background of FR, next month’s awards presentation, and her other numerous projects within the porn business.

Can you tell us about Fame Registry and the purpose behind the website?
When I first bought the domain name years ago I was going to make a venture into running a mainstream celebrity site, much like my collection of porn star fan sites. They have been successful for me for the past decade-plus, so I figured logic would dictate that a mainstream site based on celebs would be the same.

So just before I put too much work into it, another website posted their list of top porn stars and I was like, “OMG, no way! That list can’t even remotely be accurate.” I don’t know why, but that really annoyed me to no end. I then Googled a few other sites trying to see how they came up with their top porn star lists and I realized that really people just pull names out of their ass to come up with their lists.

So then I decided to run a domain name valuation on the stars they listed.

In short, I would take each porn star and treat her name like she was a domain name – like Bree Olson would be valued as BreeOlson.com and Chasey Lain would become ChaseyLain.com – and I ran them through the established valuation process as if these stars were domain names.

I then used this information to come up with my own list of popular porn stars. I shared this information with a friend and he posted about it on his blog. I really had a great time investigating the popularity of porn stars so I decided that is what I was going to make out of Fame Registry.
It would become a site that would track hundreds of porn stars using data that is publicly available and then we will use that data to determine a real way to see who is most popular.

What criteria is used to determine the monthly winners in each category?
I realized right away that no single source of information could be used to determine the popularity of a porn star. I mean, just because a porn star has the most friends on MySpace doesn’t mean she is the most popular porn star in the world now does it? Or just because a porn star has been in more movies than another, does that make her the most popular porn star?

So what I did was come up with a list of resources like the site that tells us who gets more searches, a list of porn stars who grace the pages of men’s magazines like Penthouse, Hustler, Club, Genesis and Swank. Then I made a database of every porn star who has ever won an award from AVN, XRCO and FAME.

That took foreverrrrr.

From there I started keeping track of every porn star’s official website, MySpace page and then later on Twitter. I don’t track Facebook pages because far to many porn stars get their Facebook pages deleted at random, so they get left out of the calculations.
At first I did everything by hand, typing it all up, doing all the calculations using simple PHP scripts. In time however the site grew to over 180 porn stars and that is when I had my sister April start helping me update the site every month.

We run each of our 20 some odd reports once per month. It then automatically updates all the lists we show on the site like the hot 100 list, the most popular porn star on Twitter, the porn star with the most popular official website, and so on.

I can only imagine the amount of work involved in running a page such as Fame Registry. How much time do you spend maintaining the site on an average day?
Not including the time it takes to add a new star to the website, which I try and add one or two a month, April and I spend the last 2 to 4 days of each month doing our updates. Some reports are more automated than others, with just simple PHP scripting while others have to be done by hand. There is just no way really to automate reports like the AVN awards. When the winners list is posted each year we add them in by hand.

Are there others involved in operating FR or do you run the website entirely on your own?
I do most of the work myself, but April helps me do the end of the month updates and my husband Zach Roberts helps me by when I send out press releases a few times each year. He checks my spelling, grammar, etc.

Let’s discuss the upcoming Fame Registry Porn Star Awards, which will be announced via Twitter on August 30. Why did you decide to create the awards?
In 2009, someone asked me who the winners were overall for the previous year, so I came up with a method to calculate the winners for the year based on the winners for each previous month.

This year I refined and improved the calculation method for the year, but just before posting the results I came up with the idea to buy little award trophies to give out to the winners, and instead of just doing an overall thing I broke it into the categories. There is really no major reason I did it. I just wanted the girls who work hard for their fans each and every day to have something that says, “Hey, we totally recognize your efforts and we appreciate it.”

This year’s awards will be for the calendar year 2009, is that correct?
Yes, the winners will be based on the calculations made from 2009. That means that porn stars we just started tracking this year won’t qualify for the awards we are giving out this month. They will, however, qualify for the awards for next year!

Is this the first year the FRPS Awards will be distributed?
Yes. Like I said before, last year just put up a list based on the overall most popular for 2008. It wasn’t until this year that I came up with the idea to give out actual awards and broke them up into categories based on the type of lists we display on the site for each month’s normal update like the most popular porn star on Twitter, etc.

Do you plan to make the Fame Registry honors an annual event?
Absolutely. I don’t know if the award trophies will be the same look every year, but for sure the awards will go out every year.
Can you explain how the 2009 award winners will be determined?
Every month we enter huge amounts of data for each porn star, like how popular her official website is, how many friends a porn star has on MySpace, how many followers she has on Twitter, how many times she has been in various magazines, how many movies she has been in that year and so on. I then use that data to determine the winners.

We use a very simple point system. For example, each month we track porn stars on Twitter. So I take the top 20 porn stars on Twitter, that is those with the most followers, for every month of 2009. I take the one with the most followers for that month and give her 20 points, the next most popular gets 19 points and the least gets 1 point. I do that every month for the entire previous year. So then I add up all the points, and in the end, the porn star with the most points wins.

You would think it would be the same every month, but actually data fluctuates a tiny bit here and there, and where like one month a porn star may be #6, she may be #9 the next month and that small difference can really hurt or help her overall points for the year in any given category.
The winners in each category will receive an actual trophy to commemorate their victory, is that right?
The little trophies I picked from this year are adorable. They have stars on them and one of the stars spins. But, you know, next year I want to have something different, I’m just not sure what we want. I have ordered like 40 more samples for next year.
I saw a photo of the trophies to be presented on Fame Registry. They are beautiful.
Thank you. I actually ordered 3 different samples from a trophy company to try and determine which one I liked best. So they wouldn’t go to waste though (because I hate spending money on something to just throw away), I had them engrave the names of 3 of my young nieces on them and gave them to the kids and told them they won them for being so fabulous!

I showed those sample award trophies to my sister, April, who helps me with the website. She picked one, I picked another. So we showed my housekeeper and she picked the third one. LOL.

So then we showed my mom and my husband, and in the end the one little trophy with the spinning star won.

Which category in this year’s awards intrigues you the most personally?
Well, actually a few of them. Right off the bat the one that comes to mind is totally the Website of the Year Award. When running the numbers for that the winner didn’t come out to be who I thought it would be and it turns out the two top porn stars were only 1 point away from each other. It was without a doubt the closest call.

Two other categories I like are the two I most recently added, which is for the Publicist of the Year and the Adult Industry Blog of the Year. I added these categories after getting a press release one day from Josh, Teagan Presley’s husband about some project they were working on.

I just realized how little attention we give to the people behind the scenes. These are the guys or girls doing the leg work, putting in the hours and the effort that help to make our stars famous.

A porn star can only go so far on her own. A really top porn star will tell you that it takes a team to keep her life together and one very valuable member of that team is her publicist. A good publicist can really make the career of a star.

The same concept applies to adult industry blogs. They really don’t get the attention from the other award shows for some reason and they really should. The people who run those blogs dedicate hours and hours each and every day posting stories for fans about their favorite porn stars. They are the source of news for the fans out there and without them, where would the industry be? How would those die hard fan boys know where their favorite porn stars will be appearing at one week or what movie is coming out?

Adult industry blogs are an important, yet often overlooked part of our industry, and that is why I chose to honor them with an award.

Has there been a significant amount of interest in the awards amongst fans via emails, more Twitter followers, increased traffic on the FR website, or other vehicles?
Way more than I would have even expected. I’ve gotten several emails thanking me for running the site, which is always nice, and the other day we had 9,804 unique visitors to the website. How crazy is that? Normally the site gets about 1,500 unique visitors a day on average so seeing that skyrocket to 9804 was really great. I love seeing numbers like that.

In addition to owning and operating Fame Registry, you also run Kelli Internet Services (www.Kelli.net), a collection of adult websites. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yes, that is actually how I got my start in the business some 14 years ago this August. Basically I run "fan" sites dedicated to specific porn stars, mostly former Vivid girls. At first I was only doing websites for Vivid, going back since 1998. I would create the fan site and in return for promoting what was back then their VHS movies, I would get free photos and exclusive interviews and sometimes movie trailers.

It was great. I would work hard at creating a quality free website and the results paid off because I have had some great success with those websites. I try and always focus on quality over making money. I try very hard to keep things like ads to a very, very minimum. When you visit one of my websites you get a site about that girl, not a bunch of horrid ads like you find at most of those sites. As a result I enjoy an unusually fabulous affiliate sales ratio. In some cases my sites send traffic to sites that perform as good as 1:50. If you are familiar with sales ratios with affiliate programs you’ll know just how great that number really is.

For the most part I do the same thing some many years later, only now I just don’t limit myself to Vivid girls. Don’t get me wrong, I still totally love Vivid and enjoy a great financial results from promoting their movies, but well, to be honest, a new company took over running their website and they have been kind of mean to me, so I just focus my efforts on people who do appreciate me like Tori Black. I work closely with the people who run her official website. They share with me photos and movie clips to add to my site and in return I send them the traffic from those pages to her official site.

Are you involved in any other projects pertaining to the adult industry?
Oh, yes! I’m so glad you asked. This year I produced my first adult movie called Hocus Pocus XXX. I wrote the script, picked the what turned out to be huge cast and picked out all the costumes. You can learn more about that at www.HocusPocusXXX.com.

I’m also in the process of writing what will soon be a downloadable e-book called The Fame Registry’s Guide to Being Famous. Basically it will be as the title says, a guide to being famous, some do’s and don’t if you want to be a famous porn star. Ideally I want it to cover everything a porn star would need to know about what it takes to be THE biggest porn star in the world and make a bazillion bucks doing it.

Then there is the work I do with studios like Amateur District and All For You Entertainment. I help producers get the scenes they shoot on DVD through these two labels. The economy has changed, even from just a year ago. Studios and website owners aren’t really buying new scenes like they were. So I help them take the work they’ve already done and get them on DVD and make some money so they aren’t out the money. It really just started with one guy, helping him out and then before long helping one guy turned into 5 and then 10 and now even some porn stars. We have some great movies coming out like The Love Twins XXX Home Movies. It is the actual footage shot by the Love Twins themselves. There is also I Love Renee Perez, one of the only boy/girl movies Renee Perez has ever done. Oh and there is an entire series of movies coming out with this guy Uncle Jesse. He’s this older gentleman that back in his hay day was a mainstream Hollywood stuntman

He was even a stuntman in that Ghostbusters movie. He was the stuntman for Dan Aykroyd. Well, instead of facing retirement as he aged like everyone else, he decided to start doing porn. He shot enough footage for like 5 or 6 movies and we will be putting them out over the next year.

Besides all of that I also have some things in the works with Briana Banks, Nina Mercedez, and Jay-Rock, who you may remember as the guy who originally discovered Vivid girl Meggan Mallone. I can’t go into any details right now about what things I am working on with them other than to just say I am so totally excited about these projects!

What advice would you give to someone looking to enter the porn business independently in an online capacity?
Always be honest and always have good manners. I can’t say this enough, but seriously have good manners, have good manners, have good manners. LOL.

There is no reason to go on Twitter and start trashing people. There is no reason to go on industry message boards and say mean things to people. There is never an excuse for having bad manners because you never know how that person you were rude to might hurt your career later on.

There is a man who I won’t name, but anyway, he got screwed out of about $20,000 by a guy. The guy who got screwed out of the money happened to know someone from a really big company and cost the guy who screwed him a $60,000 job. On the other hand, I didn’t know who the guy was either, but I felt bad he got treated like that by someone and I offered to help him with some promotion for his next movie and gave him some marketing tips I’ve learned.

He was so grateful he helped me by hooking me up with his friend who just recently bought a chain of adult retail stores to help sell Hocus Pocus XXX. How great is that?

I could have sat back and did nothing because it wasn’t my business that someone screwed him, but instead I went out of my way to help him and in the end it helped me.

I know you think I’m talking about karma but I’m really not. I’m actually talking about networking. You have to put yourself out there and chat it up with others in the same industry at sites like XBIZ.net and the like, and in doing so build your reputation as a good person.

Fall over yourself to help other people because you would be surprised just how small our industry really is. So many people know so many others and if you are fabulous to one person, that will come back to you later on. People make not brag about who they know but you know what? Every single person in this business knows at least one person and that could be the one person you need to help you with something in the future.

One last question: Luke Is Back is going to win the Fame Registry award for Adult Industry Blog of the Year, right? (Laughs)
LOL.

You never know who will win the award for the most popular adult industry blog, but I promise you this … when it comes time to announce the winner, which is my birthday by the way (August 30th), I will be sure to call you out by name and say, “HEY ADAM, THIS IS FOR YOU! Whoooo hoooo!”
Thank you, Kelli. We appreciate your time.
Thanks for your time. I’m sorry if I rambled on too much. LOL. I so tend to do that.