ST. PETERSBURG – It was an unlikely place for a vision.
Inside a video store in Hollywood, Todd Miller eyed the curtained “Adult” section.
He didn’t see anyone going back there. There should be a better way to buy pornography, he thought.
Miller, 27, had moved to Los Angeles to make it as an actor. After three years, he would return home to St. Petersburg to pursue an entirely different venture.
Today, from a modest two-bedroom cottage in a quiet northeast St. Petersburg neighborhood, Miller sends pornography across the country.
He and David Gnage, 27, founded an online company they based on the model of Netflix, which mails DVDs to customers who can keep them for as long as they wish. Their venture, which sends pornographic DVDs to customers in 46 states, is called GetNakedMovies.com.
The partners are tapping into an industry estimated by Forbes magazine to pull in anywhere from $6-billion to $10-billion per year from Americans.
Miller has secured $100,000 from private investors and hopes to begin making a profit by year’s end.
“It’s no different than selling Viagra – it’s a business,” Miller said. “Sex sells, everybody knows that.”
The two St. Petersburg natives know they’ve chosen a controversial venture.
Their company address is unlisted. Their mostly elderly neighbors and the neighborhood association had no clue what the two tenants do.
“Porn is not something we want in our neighborhood; we’re pretty conservative here,” said Dennis Shea, the president of the Five Points Neighborhood Association.
“I’m not sure we’d protest in front of the house, or take legal action to run them out, but I think we’d want to know about it so we can monitor and make sure that’s all that’s going on.”
Miller and Gnage launched GetNakedMovies.com in December. In July, they held a coming out party at Don Leoncio Cigar Lounge, at 340 1st Ave. N. On the walls were posters of their site’s most popular titles, including the infamous Pirates, a top-selling porn filmed without the city’s knowledge last year at the St. Petersburg Pier.
Miller and Gnage are familiar faces at their local post office, where they send out about 30 DVD rentals a day. But when they were asked once what they were mailing, they replied “digital media,” Gnage said.
Miller and Gnage offer 5,000 titles on their site, divided into 50 separate categories.
“If the industry wasn’t as strong, I wouldn’t be interested,” Miller said. “But there’s a demand. There’s stores all over the Tampa Bay and they’re not going out of business.”
They have 265 customers, most of them Floridians and about 35 percent who are women.
Their aim is to lure those who want to watch DVD’s on their TV but are weary of the sectioned-off “Adult” area of regular video stores, Miller said, or big box triple-X mega-stores with sleazy atmospheres.
Miller said he believes attitudes about porn have evolved.
“People are getting more liberal about porn,” he said. “It would be exciting to see the stigma around it completely disappear.”
