Japan’s largest porn company wants to help you get it up – on Kickstarter

Photo credit: Pixabay.

DMM may have made its fortune off porn, but lately chairman Keishi Kameyama has his hands in a lot of cookie jars.

DMM operates several businesses from adult entertainment to English education, robots, and securities.

On Wednesday, it announced that its creative lab, DMM.make, is partnering with several companies to support Japanese projects on crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.

The new program, DMM Starter, will help people apply and promote their projects on non-Japanese crowdfunding sites. DMM will also offer consulting and support after the campaign, with sales and distribution through their platform or additional fundraising.

Full body motion instrument Kagura will be one of the first projects supported.

Crowdfunding hasn’t fully taken off yet in Japan. DMM stated that the total amount of money raised through successful campaigns in the US was nearly US$3 billion compared to Japan’s US$34 million.

A key partner for DMM Starter is Awesome Japan, which focuses on bringing Japanese content, particularly pop culture, abroad. Awesome Japan already has a few success stories such as the anime Coluboccoro reaching its funding goal on Kickstarter.

The support does not come free. In addition to a fee of around US$3,600 per month, DMM will charge an extra 15 percent of the total raised for successful campaigns. Domestic users might not mind the additional costs though as local crowdfunding tends to hover around 15 to 20 percent for fees. However, it does seem like a lot when none of the partner companies are American. In a follow-up statement DMM clarified that while there are also additional costs for marketing, the target users are more medium and large enterprises than small businesses and individuals.

Regardless of the high cost for projects, if it means we will be seeing more cute, crazy, and advanced technology coming out of Japan, then bring it on. One of the first projects to be supported is Kagura, which uses motion capture software to let you use your body as an instrument.

Although over 60 percent of Kickstarters fail to be funded, and 14 percent never even receive a single pledge, chairman Kameyama is serious. “Since founding DMM.make last year, we are about US$10 million in the red,” he says in an interview with TechWave. “It starts from here. I want to make things you can’t buy on Amazon.”