I’m getting a lot of questions about launching porn websites from people who don’t know where to start. The answer is a content based pay-site. I’ll explain why.
Adult websites can be broadly divided into two camps.
Push-me websites don’t produce content. They are where you’re used to finding ‘free’ porn.They specialize in telling people where they can find adult material by linking to free samples. They make their money by selling advertising, and are normally paid a chunk of the subscription fees their surfers generate via an ‘affiliate program’.
Pull-you websites produce content (e.g. Playboy.com). They’re the sites that ask you for money. They make their money by selling subscriptions and they normally share a portion of their income with affiliates who run Push-me websites.
The biggest sites, in terms of numbers of visitors, are Push-me. A really big one, like Sublime Directory, can see 200-300,000 visitors an hour. Technically speaking that’s a fucking ton of people (and puts Sublime Directory among the top 2,000 websites worldwide - a large Pull-you website would be lucky to see than many visitors in a day.)
Push-me seems easy. No content to produce, you just throw up some links and get paid by other people who do the hard work of producing photos and movies, it’s obvious right?
Obvious but wrong. Despite the hassles of maintaining a subscription website, 2257 record keeping and hiring models (or modeling), Pull-you is where the money is. It’s all about conversion.
Conversion rates, normally expressed per thousand visitors, determine how many people seeing a webpage do what the page designer wants them to. I.e. click on a link, provide their email address or subscribe to a website.
Therefore, a website that ‘converts’ at a rate of two-per-thousand selling subscriptions, will on average sell two subscriptions to each thousand visitors that arrive.
If you run a Push-me website you have to convert customers three times:
Once to get them from wherever they are to your site
A second time to get them from your site to one of the websites you’re advertising
A third time on the website they visit (because if they don’t spend money there, you won’t get paid as an affiliate)
That explains why Push-me sites need such vast quantities of visitors.
Assuming a conversion rate of 10 per thousand (which is high), if a site receives 100,000 visitors, 1,000 of those people will click links on their site (conversion two above) and 10 of those people will actually make a purchase on the site they visit (conversion three).
Assuming the site owner is paid $40 for each sale, they’ll make $400 out of the 100,000 visitors that they started with.
The catch is, in order to get that 100,000 visitors, they will have had to advertise to 1,000,000 people, assuming a conversion rate of 10 per thousand in response to their ads.
Getting that volume of visitors (’traffic’ as webmasters refer to it) requires skill if you don’t have the number one spot at Google, or the money to buy a lot of advertising. Even if you have the money to buy ads, once you spend more than $400 you’re running at a loss.
Those facts are why it’s almost impossible to successfully run a small Push-me website which relies on advertising revenue.
If you run a Pull-you website in the same environment what happens?
Firstly, you only need two conversions:
Once to get people to visit your website
A second time to get them to make a purchase
As before, 100,000 visitors converting at a rate of 10 per thousand gives you 1,000 conversions, but this time each conversion is a sale. At a value of $40 each, you’ve got $40,000 in the bank for exactly the same amount of incoming traffic as before.
That’s $40,000 (Pull-you with content) instead of $400 (Push-me to content). You’re a hundred times (a couple of orders of magnitude) ahead financially as a content producer.
Even factoring in $10,000 in production expenses, and another $10,000 in advertising costs (to put your site in front of a million people to get your initial 100,000 visitors) the numbers aren’t even close.
That’s why it’s crazy to launch a Push-me site, unless you have access to vast quantities of high-quality, low cost traffic. All other thing being equal, a Pull-you site produces the same rewards as a Push-me site with 1% of the traffic (all other things being equal).
If you’re thinking of starting a site, I hope that makes your decision a little easier. Content is king.
As my grandfather used to say “There’s no ‘let’s spend the afternoon filming people fucking’ in team,” and as a child I believed him but now, thanks to Xplicit Porn School, I know he’s wrong (then again, he was right about me not investing his life-savings in Pets.com stock back in ‘99.)
At Xplicit Porn School, companies lacking the special bond that only hot fuck action can bring, finally have a place to solve their problems in a safe, pornographic, environment. It’s been a long time cumming. How could paint-balling ever compete with balling as a way of building team spirit?
The day at Xplicit starts with a champagne reception (non-drinkers may opt to pour the champagne over their tits and tell anyone watching how nasty they like it), followed by a brief look at the history of porn. Then your team hits the set.
Prices vary, depending on the mix of male and female performers your company chooses to work with, and start at $6,500 which includes a full crew and one female performer. That’s not cheap, especially when you factor in tickets to England and lawsuits, but sure to produce memories of nursing an aching erection with colleagues that’ll last decades.
On a serious note, it’s a great idea for forward looking companies. When your supervisor asks you to work Saturday in order to fix your TPS reports, imagine being able to say, “Remember on set, when those guy’s balls kept touching during the cluster? Well you’re making me feel like those balls sir.”
I’ve never been scared of complaining but I normally try to limit my rants to things that I know can be changed, like my pants and the weather (I control the weather).
Talking about billing is controversial, because a lot of people think there aren’t any easy solutions for the problems I’m going to highlight.
They’re right - but there is a point to make about a smarter way forward. Trust me and I’ll explain everything at the end of this (which is exactly what Uncle Pete said the first time we played truth-or-dare.)
This started out as one post but got a bit huge. I’m going to break it up over a few days and throw some other posts up in-between to prevent any reader suicides due to a complete lack of interest in billing.
Instead of providing us with what we want, a secure and flexible form of electronic cash, the banks behind VISA have focused on devising new ways to keep people in debt.
Are you sitting comfortably? I’ll begin…
We all know adult websites are too expensive - $35 a month for some sites makes them more expensive than the DSL line used to view them. The reason for this isn’t just the greed of pornographers, it’s a side-effect of inadequate billing solutions (can you hear me Google?)
When people launch websites they traditionally copy what they see making the people around them happy (this also explains George W’s private list of Texan coke dealers, and the size of Bill Clinton’s porn stash.) Adult websites all cost about $20-30 a month because, well, that’s what most people charge for a porn site. It’s a tautology (definition: the science of torte, or cakes as many people call them) which has turned the jizz-bizz into a poorly organized cartel where mindless price-fixing keeps revenues down.
Like other products people want desperately, porn can be poorly marketed and still make the people selling it rich. The success of bad models, has made website owners blind to the money traditional billing systems force them to leave on the table. Ironically, if they picked this cash up, most people would feel they were getting more for their porn dollar.
How it got to be this way concerns credit cards. It’s an historical problem and, for once, the people responsible aren’t English.
Credit cards
Credit cards were invented in 1950 when a bunch of fatties calling themselves the Diners Club decided that they needed a way to buy food on credit. Soon afterwards, American Express and Bank of America’s BankAmericard appeared, providing more ways for people to spend money they didn’t actually have, and over time BankAmericard became VISA. (for the purpose of this article I’ll use ‘VISA’ to refer to all credit card networks unless I’m highlighting specific differences)
VISA was a true credit card as, unlike Dinners Club and American Express, it allowed people to borrow money over periods of more than one month. Money for nothing was an immediately popular idea, broke people everywhere rejoiced, and as Satan saddled his horses, people came to believe that buying things with borrowed money and living deeply in debt was smarter than actually having money and buying things with it.
In 2005 VISA international are about as powerful as SkyNet (a sentient computer network from the Terminator movies bent on the subjugation of humankind.) The main difference between VISA and SkyNet is that in the movies humans, with the help of Arnold Schwarzenegger (translation Arnold - ‘eater of’ Schwarzenegger - ‘tasty black people’), kick SkyNet’s ass.
Despite the hype, credit cards are primitive - particularly in the US where current technology is still bumpy numbers and a magnetic strip (in Europe almost every card has an embedded microchip and can talk back to you like KITT in Knightrider).
This lack of technology makes the VISA network dumber than twins shooting mock-incest pictorials for Playboy. (Don’t believe me? VISA don’t have a list of the credit card numbers they’ve issued, which is why thieves can generate ‘valid’ card numbers and use them to steal from unwitting companies online.)
Instead of providing us with what we want, a secure and flexible form of electronic cash, the banks behind VISA have focused on devising new ways to keep people in debt. Chances to make credit cards more versatile, secure and useful have been ignored and, fifteen years into the Internet revolution, they have come up with nothing more impressive than ‘Verified by VISA’ - which is a pin number.
Making purchases online without a signature is not what credit cards were designed for and VISA’s complacency has meant they are no better at it now than they were two decades ago.
Notably, the system doesn’t allow for small purchases, because the banks won’t reduce the processing fees that go along with each transaction, which makes small purchases (micropayments) unprofitable. That’s why it’s hard to find anyone selling anything for under about $3 on the web.
(If you’re Apple of course the rules are different. With over a million transactions running through the iTunes store each day, they access economies of scale smaller companies can’t. That’s how they can charge $.99 cents a song - though even they admit it’s not very profitable).
Adult websites are caught in this trap. The only internationally accepted way to pay for adult content online is with a credit card, and charging less than about $5 is impossible. $5 is way too much to charge for individual photos and movies so everyone bundles their content together and sells subscriptions.
That, in short, is why you have to join porn websites and can’t just buy a PDF of the latest Hustler.
If you’re asking yourself, “If $5 a month is possible, why is the average subscription four or five times that?” I’ll tell you in part 2, ‘The Psychology of Subscriptions’.
I have no problem with explicit sexuality - in fact I once forced it on a bear that wandered into my camp
This NSFW (not safe for work) clip is a great example of the blurred line between acceptability and pornography, as filtered through a post feminist progressive mindset.
It’s also a clip of Chloe Sevigny blowing Vincent Gallo.
Sure ‘The Brown Bunny‘ came out in 2003, but I’ve just found this mpeg and it ties in nicely to a point I raised here. Besides - who actually saw ‘The Brown Bunny’ and which marketing genius came up with the title? It sounds like the kind of children’s book serial killers write on the walls of their cells in semen.
I have no problem with explicit sexuality - in fact I once forced it on a bear that wandered into my camp - but does describing this scene as anything but hardcore pornography make you a hypocrite? No idea, I’m too busy masturbating.
SugarBank is maturing like a fine cheese (which probably goes some way to explaining the smell.) After less than two months there are lots of regular readers (okay - about ten) and I’m getting a lot of smart email from you gorgeous people (okay - one smart email which turned out to be an offer to ‘Buy! Ci@l1$’).
I know some of you run blogs of your own and I’d like to know who you are, what you’re up to, and possibly trade links (if you have other offers to make, I’m open to swinging, most fetishes and role-play).
I’m about to re-vamp (Re-vamp: to replace the vampires in) my links page, and bring them to a more prominent part of the site. Now’s a good time for me to put your blog on it. Obviously blogs which reference sex, porn or otherwise make me hard (i.e. stuff about trains and people dressed up as cartoon animals) are especially welcome.
General suggestions on things to check out are also cool. I want to reach out to you (especially those of you wear little and know where the good parties are). Write to me here.
In part 1, I discussed the problems presented by the failings of the credit card billing system. In this installment I’ll discuss the limitations of subscriptions.
As we discovered, although credit cards allow charges of under five dollars to be made profitably, adult websites routinely charge $20 plus. As I’ll explain, the reasons for this are poor website design and psychology.
I’m aroused already.
The subscription model (let’s call her Angela) assumes that the total amount of money a website gets from each customer is a multiple of the subscription cost. I.e. if the monthly charge is $20, Angela says you should earn a multiple of that, on average, from every person who joins your site.
Angela then explains that, if you need $20 per customer to remain profitable, you can charge $5 a month as long as each subscriber stays an average of 4 months or more.
Angela’s a little condescending but she’s hot, so it’s okay.
Common sense - and a good deal of research - says a lower initial cost will result in more business overall, making it smart to charge the lowest monthly amount you can profitably. What you lose in profit per-subscriber, you’ll more than get back in volume.
The reason adult sites don’t do this is because they can’t, and that’s where design and psychology come in.
For most porn sites, 40-60% of subscribers cancel within their first month of membership. Given that many large sites have more content than anyone could look at in a couple of weeks without risking a friction burn, that’s odd.
It’s due to poor design.
If a website’s well designed, as its archives grow, subscribers have more content to explore and stay members longer. However, if a website looks as if it was designed by a colorblind tweaker and finding older content is a chore, archives are ignored and subscribers focus on what’s easiest to find - which tends to be what’s newest.
At sites like these, if new content isn’t added fast enough, member’s get bored - thinking they’ve exhausted the archives, when in reality they haven’t seen them.
This bleak view is idealized. I’m assuming that the website in question lives up to its marketing. If not, and it’s what a marketing professional would describe as ’shit’, or it’s marketing is a lie, member cancellations can be explained without any further analysis.
Unfortunately, bad websites and bad design are standard in the adult industry (and outside it) and the average length of subscription is less than three months. The exceptions to the rule, who use smart design and produce great content, can see average subscription lengths measured in years.
With so many webmasters only collecting a single subscription fee from a significant proportion of their customers, what’s presented to buyers as a monthly subscription is in fact a one-time charge. That charge, which has to be enough to make each customer profitable even if they cancel immediately, is responsible for the $20 charges we’re so used to seeing.
Of course, with everyone doing it, even the few sites that can afford not to exploit the weakness of their competition and make more for themselves as a result. With most webmasters
simply copying sites they know, the chances of new webmasters getting it right, or getting good advice, are
Lindsey Lohan thin.
This sucks for customers and pushes webmasters into a money-losing feedback loop. Subscription costs are inversely linked to the average length of membership and as they rise, profits decline, and confused webmasters raise prices.
Is the solution better content and design that would enable cheap subscriptions to work? Not entirely.
Subscriptions have an important role in reducing costs to customers in
return for a commitment and, in that way, they’ll always work well for
big sites with great material. For those sites responsive customer
service couples to great design and content are the way to increase
subscription lengths.
However well managed they are, subscriptions are a one-size-fits-all solution. They don’t allow a millionaire who wants a custom video to pay $10,000 for it, and prevent a minimum wage Walmart employee from buying the photosets she wants, for a few cents, whenever she wants them? Angela forces sites to guess at a price that fits everyone and then delivers an idential product to every consumer. It’s the closest the jizz-bizz gets to communism. Selling items, not subscriptions, is the future.
Are there any reasons, aside from the inability to make small charges on credit cards, that adult sites working outside the subscription model aren’t more common? That’s what I’ll discuss in the next installment where I take on Pay-Per-View-Porn (oiled-up and stripped to the waist in a pit of deadly vipers - how exciting does that sound eh?)
This is the third and final part of this short series on adult website billing. Read part one here, and part two here.
Pay-Per-Download (PPD) pricing is the way forward for the adult industry. I’ve bet a couple of years on it. In this post I’ll explain why, and why current attempts to use it aren’t working because the pricing and psychology are wrong, right now.
Now.
Okay - I’m starting now.
Most currently available PPD items being sold are video clips or movies. They sell in low quantities for three reasons:
Low quality
DRM
Price
Hollywood spends $20M, at the absolute minimum, on a movie and sells DVD’s for $20 (of which $11 is pure profit). Is pricing a downloaded movie, which most people won’t know how to watch on their TV even if you allow them to (and is therefore ‘not as good’ regardless of video quality), at $2-3 fair? Of course it is.
Quality has long been a limiting factor for online video distribution. People selling movies trumpet streams and downloads which, if they appeared on your TV, would inspire you to kick your TV set. Streams are difficult to watch and vulnerable to small variations in connection quality. Downloads are deliberately crippled by studios trying to protect DVD sales.
DRM (Digital Rights Management), regardless of how it’s implemented has two problems. First - it doesn’t work. Second - it offers customers zero benefit. Requiring people to connect to the internet each time they watch a file is a hassle. Offering files as online ‘rentals’, limited timewise, or to a set number of viewings, is doomed when online rental prices are equal to offline DVD rentals, and geeks can download everything P2P for free with a little hassle.
Price is the key. Online sales - and even rentals - would work if the price of downloads reflected content’s value and quality.
You can buy music online for $.99 cents a song. Why $.99? Well with 12-15 tracks on most CD’s, that makes buying an album online the same price as buying it in a store. Isn’t the music industry wonderful?
Let’s pretend that’s a fair price (it’s not - when prices on songs were dropped by a half in tests sales went up well over 3 times). You can buy a song (okay license a song. Thanks RIAA, we pay and you still own it? Great!) written and recorded at vast expense (The Neptunes and an iPod full of coke don’t come cheap you know) for $.99. Compared to that how much is a single naked photo worth?
$.05 my friends.
How much is a 2hr DVD quality download worth?
$2.
Before your start writing me hateful emails think it through (then print those emails out, roll them real tight and stick them…)
If, conservatively, it costs $1M to produce and record a #1 single, and you sell a single image for twenty times less than that, your image represents $50,000 of investment on the same scale. More than fair. How many pornographic images cost that much to produce?
Who’s selling single images? No one - yet. We’ve done a great job of learning to give them away and, in most cases, a single image isn’t that valuable. However, a high-resolution image of a beautiful woman doing something sincerely naughty might be worth buying and a photoset of the same sexy, naughty lady made up of thirty images, is almost certainly worth $0.20-$0.50 to people who willingly pay $6 for adult magazines with 8-10 photosets in them.
The same logic can be applied to movies. Hollywood spends $20M, at the absolute minimum, on a movie and sells DVD’s for $20 (of which $11 is pure profit). Is pricing a downloaded movie, which most people won’t know how to watch on their TV even if you allow them to (and is therefore ‘not as good’ regardless of video quality), at $2-3 fair? Of course it is. You can put downloads online a lot faster than Hollywood can churn out sequels, and you can produce an hour of video for the cost of the tape in the camera. How many porn movies have a budget of $2M? Exactly no-one.
This is why adult video on demand services are failing to take off.
I can download a porn movie from a P2P network for free. The ‘costs’ to me are the time it takes to find what I want, the possibility of downloading a bogus, corrupted or virus laden file, having to wait for new releases to be uploaded by other users and the poor quality of some files.
Why would I download a porn movie for $15 which is going to stop working after 30 days when my costs for taking a chance on a P2P network are that low? Netflix will mail me unlimited quantities of DVD’s for $10-20 a month and Amazon will sell them to me for $5-30. Online downloads have to fit those pricing expectations.
For a couple of bucks I’ll happily pay for DRM free downloads if they’re easy to find and the quality’s good. But for $10? I’d rather zip up my pants, take off my clown mask, wash the yoghurt off my hands and head to ‘Manny’s Special Video Emporium’. Or fire up my computer and start scouring the P2P sites.
If there was an easy way to make a $0.50 charge, and photosets could be charged at that level, what would that mean to the average pornographer?
Assuming100 people bought that set a week for a year, that hardworking photoset would make it’s owner $2,600 per anum. If she had two hundred photosets on her website (400-600 images total) they could be making over $500,000 a year, on an amount of content that wouldn’t support a subscription website, without selling subscriptions.
This is the future.
Even better, when prices are low ’stealing’ from P2P networks stops making sense. In return for a few cents the buyer gets access to a site which removes the hassle of finding what they want, and ensures their download is quick and of decent quality. It’s worth paying a few cents for and kills the illegal market by competing with it intelligently.
Low prices also mean that you’ll sell to many more people. Price and sales volume have an inverse-square relationship. Without understanding ‘inverse-square relationships’ (it’s basically defined as hot black chick dating a geeky white guy) everyone knows that most strangers will give you $0.10 if you just ask them nicely. Try getting them to give you $5 (without stabbing them in the face. Stabbed people are totally easy to convince).
For every person who’s paying $5 for a website subscription now, there are a hundred who’d pay you $0.05. That means, even if your prices are twenty times lower, you’ll see $5 instead of $1 all other things being equal. I.e. by dropping your prices from dollar to cents you can make five times the profit.
To make this smart pricing model work, all you need is the traffic to sell to (you’ve got it already - less than 10% of people who visit any website ever subscribe), and a way of charging tiny amounts.
There are ways of doing this and it’s about to begin here. I’ve spent the past couple of years building a system than makes cheap subscriptions to vast archives, and sub-dollar downloads possible. If you’ve ever wanted to sell adult material online SugarBank (do you like the name?) will make you richer than the evil spawn of Paris Hilton and an arms dealer shipping magnate.
That’s my point. The online adult market as it exists today is a tiny fraction of the market that will open up when tools exist which get round the limitations of old-school credit card processing. We’re at the same point now that Wall Street was in before the first Internet boom. Everyone thought the eighties were the golden years because none of the analysts could see the web coming.
SugarBank’s coming to change the adult internet and it’s going to be Netscape in ‘95 all over again (without the mismanagement and the crash obviously). I’ll keep you posted.
Some of you may be familiar with the 9Rules network. It’s a group of blogs who’ve decided they’re great, and have got together to revel in mutual admiration.
If they have meetings, I bet they’re all like, “No seriously - your blog is amaaaazing,” or “You’re such a clear thinker. Why aren’t the corporations listening to bloggers?” Then they all do each other with tofu dildos.
Actually, 9Rules is pretty smart. They have built a network of blogs where quality’s guaranteed. Members swear some sort of blood-oath to share traffic through the central hub, and then benefit from the attention being ’special’ brings.
They recently took on their second wave of blogs (and when I say Second Wave I don’t mean the Arab terrorist group who tried to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, only to be thwarted by the amazingly tenacious Jack Bauer and his comrades at LA’s Counter Terrorist Unit.)
…do you think there’s any demand for a network of quality, no-filler sexblogs?
I read a number of blogs by 9Rules members, and there’s nothing adult (or even vaguely sexy) in there at all. That’s a pity - I’ve been looking for decent sexblogs to link too and there’s no easy way to find them.
So here’s my question - if 9Rules aren’t going to get into porn, do you think there’s any demand for a network of quality, no-filler sexblogs? (I do) A blog you could visit to find the best sexblogs online without wading though organic fertilizer? If you do - who should be in it?
(NB: I’m not referring to blogs like Fleshbot and Eros which find sexy stuff online. I mean a blog that would help you find quality sites like Fleshbot and Eros to start with).
Surf enough porn and you’ll need to use one of these.
I’ve been around.
I’ve pitched ideas in clubs where the dancing’s so dirty the floor’s sticky, and you can smell the VD. I’ve got drunk on Microsoft’s dime, surrounded by women who clearly know more about the workings of men’s minds, than the products they’re supposed to be demonstrating. I’ve stopped selling (and it’s all selling), mid-sentence, on the floor of the AVN expo because a porn-star’s crawled across the floor behind me to reach up and grab my junk (thank you Kerry).
What all of these experiences have in common, excluding me and my turgid love-gun, is they were all situations designed to weaken my resolve by distracting me sexually.
Sex appeal exists when an attraction is so powerful it becomes a distraction (that rhymed, I must be channeling Johnny Cochran). Nine times out of ten, attraction starts with the visual and, for men, that mean’s we’re normally most attracted to the women we can see the most of.
If you want people to look at something, kill the flashing neon arrows, and put it in it’s own empty space. Less is more.
What’s odd is that most adult websites don’t apply this universal truth to their designs. Hot people look hottest when wearing smiles and sweat. Yet most adult websites are dripping in graphic junk. They’re more like Honda’s covered in ‘go-faster’ gear than the stripped down Ferrari’s they’re supposed to be.
Real sports cars don’t have cup-holders because going to the drive-through isn’t what they’re for (they do have little pockets for condoms though). Take the cup-holders off your web-pages and focus your visitors on the job of finding your content. Websites shouldn’t compete with the content they’re trying to promote.
Websites are like stores - the architecture counts. Walking into Walmart makes me think of minimum wage workers who aren’t allowed to unionize, and US flags made in China, instead of the company’s billionaire owners, because of the way the stores look.
How things are presented is as important as what’s on display. If you’re selling content it should never be obscured by design, however impressive. When it appears to be that way, as it does with so many adult sites, what’s left is an overwhelming impression that you’re being intentionally distracted. That creates unease and bolsters the impression the website in question is a scam.
If I’d known this before my X-Ray specs arrived this morning I’d be $49.95 richer.
Making a page look good with less on it, is harder than filling every gap with graphics. If makes everything you leave more critical, and getting great results takes time and skill.
For an example of how good simple design can be, check out Mark Boulton. You might not find his site exciting (you freak) but it’s certainly clear, fast and intuitive. In my view Boulton’s site is almost perfect - the only issue I have is the shade of green, which might be too light for easy reading on some monitors (not me, I’ve the eyes of a bird of prey). His site is also an excellent design resource.
Ten quick tips for better adult site design (there are books that explain all this but I’m just going to tell you):
If you want people to look at something, kill the flashing neon arrows, and put it in it’s own empty space. Less is more. Let your area’s of white space reach the edges of the page. ‘Trapped’ space looks bad.
Each page on your website has a specific purpose, or message to
send. Think about the simplest way to do that job and take everything
off each page that’s not working to that goal. This includes ads.
Choose a ‘highlight color’ for your site and use nothing brighter
than that anywhere. Limit the use of that color to the most important
features and people’s eyes will naturally fall where you’d like them to.
Red is the most attractive color to people. If you use that, that’s where people will look. It’s also threatening and tiring to stare at. I’d avoid large blocks of it entirely.
Think left to right, top to bottom. That’s how people read. If you have a picture and some text to display, place the text below, or to the right of the image. Otherwise people will skip your text (which they’ll see first) and look at the picture (which natually gains the majority of their attention).
If you’re not a designer but running your own site, learn the basics. No more than three fonts on a page and, ensure there’s always sharp (90%) contrast between text and it’s background. Black text on white is best, reversed type (e.g. white on black) is hard to read because of the way our eyes react to light.
Research shows that about five options in a list are all most people can easily process. More than that and they stop acting immediately and stop to ponder. Any hesitation makes action less likely, so wherever you offer a list of choices, and you care about which choice is made, keep it short. For most people lists of twenty or more items (without a break) are so daunting they may as well be invisible. That means you can use long lists as long as you understand their limitations.
Use valid (X)HTML wherever you can for maximum compatibility. Designs that break-up in browsers might as well not have been designed at all.
Sound is the greatest distraction. Does any website need to ever make a sound unless someone instructs it to?
Copy. Don’t steal people’s designs (or their CSS!) but, if you don’t know how to make things look good, copy the techniques you see and like. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll probably do something right by mistake.
Take a look at your website and think about how it’d look with less on. Make it as naked as you can and it’ll be easier to use and sexier too. As we all know, sex sells.
Porn, and the people who make it, are far from perfect, but there’s a lot of mud thrown about by people who spend their time trying to re-run Roe vs. Wade, The Scopes Trial and other fights lost years ago.
Thanks to Fox News, The Washington Post and talk radio, being involved in pornography means having to defend yourself against the rabid accusations of self-righteous blowhards.
Here are nine answers to nine common accusations it’s not worth losing one of your nine lives over.
Even if you accept that porn is addictive, a porn addiction is benign. You don’t have to break any laws to get porn and you can consume it without any impact on the people around you.
1. Porn harms children
This argument takes two forms. Firstly, that children exposed to sexual material are harmed by it. This is doubtful.
Are children harmed by seeing images that distress them? Of course. Are images of sexual pleasure distressing? No. Should any child be seeing images they can’t comprehend and might upset them? Probably not.
When I was six I thought women got pregnant when men took a pee inside them (it made sense at the time). If I’d have seen an image of a man ejaculating I would have asked what all that white stuff was, but the image wouldn’t have distressed me. Why should it?
Of course there’s porn that contains images of degredation and fetish-play that are entirely unsuitable for young kids, but that’s got nothing to do with the sex in the images. A pair of exposed breasts in a picture of bound woman being whipped are probably the least harmful things in the photo.
The other argument is that child pornography is connected to pornography and therefore all pornography somehow promotes the abuse of children. This is fatuous.
Child pornography is a record of child abuse. That most children who suffer abuse aren’t photographed doesn’t make their abuse any more acceptable. Child abuse satisfies the urges of pedophiles, and a pedophile with a camera is no more a pornographer, than a murderer with a camera is a film director.
The idea that pornographers don’t mind seeing children being abused is a myth. The idea that people who film child abuse are the same people who make and sell mainstream porn is a lie.
2. Porn breaks up families
This argument is always supported with anecdotal evidence and anecdotes aren’t worth the paper their written on. They usually concern some ‘good’ father who someone ‘gets sucked in’ to watching porn and then is ‘lost’ until (and here’s the predictable kicker) he finds the ’strength’ to resist through God.
People who tell stories that end with God saving the day are recruiting.
Pastors, do-gooders and nuts make these stories up and put them on the internet. Twenty embellished re-tellings later and they’re fact. They have them for drugs, homosexuality, porn and anything else they’ve decided is ‘evil’. Most ‘anti’ websites are long collections of partisan ‘research’ and anecdotal ‘evidence’.
The idea they being spread is that ‘the family’ is ‘under attack’ from outside forces and that unless we ‘fight back’ the end is nigh. It scares people and that’s its purpose. Organizations that seek to control people know that scared people follow anyone who can show them a way out of the fear they’ve been sold. The National Socialists are the classic example, they argued that Jews are bad, we’ll handle the Jews, now do as you’re told or the Jews are going to get you.
Never believe anyone who’s using psychology that Adolf Hitler was fond of.
3. Porn is immoral
Immoral means ‘failing to adhere to moral standards’ and moral standards are a matter of opinion.
Amoral means ‘without, or not concerned with moral standards’ and most porn is amoral because moral standards are impossible to define.
What is moral depends on your viewpoint. To Vegans, eating meat is immoral. To some Christians not going to church on Sunday is immoral.
To know what prevailing moral standards are you have to look at what people do, not what they pretend they do. If you do you’ll see that most people’s morals are infinitely flexible.
They’ll tell you that observing speed limits near schools, not over-eating and helping people in need are moral, but only behave that way when it’s convenient for them.
Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong where’s the money coming from?
4. Porn is addictive
Anything can be addictive in the wrong hands, which is the clearest proof that many addictions are a choice as much as a need.
Even if you accept that porn is addictive, a porn addiction is benign. You don’t have to break any laws to get porn and you can consume it without any impact on the people around you.
The only way to make a porn addiction seem scary, is to tie it to other behavior which is wholly unacceptable under any circumstance, and has nothing to do with enjoying sexually explicit material.
The people who cite porn as dangerously addictive are more concerned with stopping porn production than helping addicts. Porn addiction is used as an argument to support prohibition by people who are really just upset porn exists at all.
Alcoholics are rightly told not to drink, not to try and stop perfectly healthy people like me from having whiskey for breakfast. Campaigning for prohibition using addiction as an excuse has little to do with helping people with a problem, and everything to do with imposing a particular conservative moral agenda.
5. Porn is the start of a slippery slope
Anti-porn activists try to connect anything with a sexual element, including crimes, to sexual material. If they can do this, they can fantasize a cause and effect connection which justifies their prejudice.
Sexual crimes are particularly horrifying and never to be ignored but paedophilia, which has always been, and continues to be abhorrent, is not on the rise. The high profile arrests of paedophiles using the Internet are notable for almost never involving the commercial sex industry. It’s always Feds arresting men who respond to entrapment operations. They’re not even subtle. The cops email pictures from accounts with names like ‘Horny15bi’ and send messages to people containing lines like “vice is nice but incest is best”.
People love to see paedophiles busted of course. Parents are being told that the internet is full of sexual predators and it’s easy for journalists to link the use of porn to perversion. The truth is there is no child-porn industry in America. Aside from being utterly revolting it would be impossible to run and there’s not a demand for it which makes the risk worthwhile to those who’d try. The child pornography that is produced is made by and for perverts who’ll use any technology they think will allow them to remain anonymous.
The other crime which porn gets blamed for is rape. This falls down with the understanding that porn doesn’t create desire, it reflects it. If porn could turn people into rapists it could also turn straight men gay and gay men straight. It doesn’t.
Links between rape and pornography are tenuous. The majority of people enjoy porn at some point in their life. Saying that most rapists have used pornography is like saying that most of them have worn jeans and then charging Levi Strauss with crimes against women.
Linking porn to rape is based on the idea that viewing porn leads to sexual thoughts and sexual thoughts lead to rape. You have to be criminally unstable to make that leap. The idea that ‘normal’ people view porn, get sexually frustrated and then rape goes against everything we know about human nature and the mentality of rapists. Rape is a crime rooted in anger, hate and power.
Studies like ‘Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan’ show that a rise in the availability of porn coincides with a decrease in the rate of sex crimes.
6. Porn is for perverts
With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyone’s a pervert.
Paul Fishbein (founder of AVN magazine) said that anti-porn protestors want us to believe that the porn industry serves 800 guys who each rent a million movies a year. He’s right.
People want to enjoy sexual material in every city and state, they spend more on porn in hotels than they do on drinks from the mini-bar. Whatever your thoughts about it, porn’s not a niche interest.
7. Porn can be easily defined
If you assume porn is bad, and has to be eliminated, you need to be able to reliably identify it in order to know what to ban.
A lot of people claim they ‘know it when they see it’ but this isn’t really true. Everyone knows what they consider to be pornographic, and can guess at what other people do. Coming to a concise agreement between people has proved to be impossible in human history. Unfortunately for detractors, if you can’t define porn, you can’t legislate against it.
So can we define it?
The word pornography is derived from Greek, who defined it as ‘writing about prostitutes’. That’s obviously too narrow.
More modern definitions are can be boiled down into two camps.
The American English Dictionary says porn is “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
That’s the kind of definition that anti-porn people favor. It separates erotic feelings from emotional ones, puritanically suggesting orgasm is an erotic feeling but has nothing to do with emotion. It also mandates that porn is explicit, which allows for some clearly sexual art to slip under the wire, and guarantees that almost anything explicit can be defined as pornography.
Conversely, according to the ‘Encyclopedia of Ethics’ porn is “the sexually explicit depiction of persons, in words or images, created with the primary, proximate aim, and reasonable hope, of eliciting significant sexual arousal on the part of the consumer of such materials.”
To quote the great Bill Hicks - “Sounds like every ad on TV to me.”
That’s why defining pornography is a fools errand and we’ll never agree on what it is. Accepting that makes porn a concept based on perspective, which shifts from time to time and culture to culture. To see how quickly things change, compare today’s Maxim magazine to the launch issue of Playboy.
8. Porn spreads STD’s
The rate of STD’s in the porn industry is well documented and below that found in the general population. More impressive given the large number of high-risk unprotected sex acts a portion of performers are involved in.
A lot of hardcore porn is shot without condoms, and some people argue that emulating that behavior puts the public at risk.
Porn fans who favor condom-free material normally say that condoms get in the way of the fantasy, which suggests they know it’s not real, and are no more likely to copy what they see on screen, than they are to kick someone in the face because they saw it in an action movie.
Anyway, if you had a sex life like the kind portrayed in porn movies, without the protections of the porn industry, you’d be a tired fool. Adult performers are less disease ridden than the general population (even though Chlamydia is referred to as ‘porn flu’ by people in the movie trade). The idea that they’re infecting the public with cooties is unfounded.
9. Porn undermines society
The argument favored by people with nothing left to say, is that porn, and the business’ that deal in it, turn people and places ‘bad’.
These arguments are really about zoning laws.
In areas where video stores that carry adult titles are pushed into deserted areas by angry citizens, or in places where the residents are too poor to be bothered about campaigning against a new business opening, crime rates are predictably high.
Depressed, poor and deserted parts of town are where the desperate and criminal congregate. If you want to get mugged anywhere on the planet find out where the poor people live and hang out somewhere industrial nearby late at night. If there’s a reason to be there, like a lonely strip club, even better.
When sexually oriented businesses are allowed to open in decent locations, like the Hustler store on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, or the majority of the clubs in Vegas, no rise in crime or criminality in adjacent areas is noted.
More importantly porn companies, unlike churches which also take in billions of dollars a year, pay taxes.
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