“Perhaps you’re a man who grabs life by the cuff. You live life your way. And it shows…in the clothes you wear…in the women you love…and in the car you drive The Subaru GL Coupe is waiting for you. Sleek. Agile. The sculptured lines of the one piece body invite you in. With front wheel drive she’s different. A step ahead of the others. Go to her. Let her cradle you in the softness of her highback reclining bucket seats. Surround yourself with the lushness of her interior appointments. The GL Coupe is ready. Now. Turn her on. Lead her to the open road. This is where the Subaru GL Coupe wants to be. Unleash the relentless power of her 1400cc quadrozontal engine. Control the Coupe’s every movement — her every twist and turn — as you take hold of her rack and pinion steering. She’ll make it smooth with her four wheel independent suspension. She’ll carry you away as she peaks to the red line of her tach. The Subaru GL Coupe is yours. Waiting for you. And one more good thing, she costs so little to keep happy.”
While many wonder about the manner in which porn’s marketed, and it’s assumptions about how we perceive women, it’s worth remembering that in 1973 ‘women taming’ wasn’t even considered funny.
Taylor Lane Typography (who probably didn’t inspire Taylor Rain to choose her moniker - but let’s not underestimate her, it’s possible) produced a calendar in 2005 which combined type, sex and cleverness to increase turnover by 25%
Sex + Clever sells. Who’s going to tell the pornographers?
The best of this weeks blogs by the bloggers who blog them.
This Week’s Picks Me, Her, and Him 3 (http://erotischism.blogspot.com)
“But as sexually satisfied as he kept Kendall — or as satisfied as one man could — she was yearning for another kind of action.”
Polyamory vs. Polyfuckery (http://perverselypoly.blogspot.com)
“I admire Rachel’s altruism, despite her saying it’s a practical matter of what it takes to get her wet.”
A is for Abandon (http://redvelvetropeburn.com)
“The hands pressed into her lower back and she wanted to ask Him if He had felt them but her orgasm overtook her and she lost all conscious thought for a few moments.”
When I’m not apologizing, traveling or blogging I spend my time trying to spot the trends which make my input worth putting me on a plane for, giving me the opportunity to mess up and then blog about.
As YouTube gets crushed under a weight of nearly-nude pornography (which isn’t a conceptual pile-up if you acknowledge porn’s defined as anything designed to arouse) I’m noticing an increasing abercrombieandfitchification (real word) in the world of porn photography.
Finger Bang, is a good example. A tiny hardback book, designed to arouse and amuse, it looks like porn made by people with some talent and no knowledge of Sydnee Steele, Jenna J or Buttman. More refreshingly it’s hasn’t sailed up the dead-end alley represented by ‘alt’ porn, trapped inside a gallery of its own cliches and crushed creatively by ‘alt’er than thou’ posturing.
The cleverest trick of all this ‘2nd Wave’ porn? Convincing people it’s not porn at all…
The debateaboutrevenues in the adult industry is everywhere and Christ-on-a-dildo is it wrong. Too many smart people with too little experience of major adult websites are dismissing the value of the internet.
Newspaper hacks can’t do much better. Websites, as private concerns, don’t publish books and are thus impervious to journalist driven forensic accounting. Given the big companies aversion to being investigated by the tax authorities (though I’ve watched it happen to zero effect - my porn guys are the good guys) the only people able to honestly discuss the income of the web-industry are insiders who’ve seen the books and even one of those isn’t enough.
To asses the web business you have to know about the workings of more than one company, and the only people fitting that description have been inside the handful of billing companies which handle transaction processing for the big websites. Your ideal informant has worked within a major billing company and has had board level access to companies on every side of the online adult industry, content sites, TGP and video-chat.
That’d be me then.
Forbes are quoting Playboy (which is like interviewing Huell Howser for a piece on ‘The best paid people on TV’) and everyone else has assumed the video retail industry is the bulk of modern porn because they don’t know any better. I do. As someone who’s seen the subscriber and revenue numbers for more of the major adult companies than any-one else writing on the subject, I can tell you that there are billions missing from the current debate.
Allow me to break it down:
The average tier-1 adult website charges $20 a month and has 20-40K subscribers. That’s $400k a month per site, or $4.8M a year, and a conservative estimate puts the number of sites on that level world wide at 100. That’s $500M a year of business without looking at the talented amateurs, the top tier of whom are also clearing $1M per anum and who number in the hundreds.
Video-chat sites (iFriends, IMLive, CamContacts, LiveJasmin etc) charge an average of $1.50 a minute and the biggest players have an an average total take of about $150 a minute. That’s $216K a day which, even when split 50/50 with chat-hosts and minus running costs provide $100K a day, or $3M a month (yes, there are the costs of running an affiliate program to factor in, but I’m being conservative in my other assumptions and accounting for that expense by underestimating in other areas. E.g. Most companies don’t split 50/50 with chathosts, and 100 active conversations at $1.50 a minute is less than the big guys are averaging - most of them handling fewer chats but at significantly greater average revenue). There are roughly 10 sites of that size and, though the drop-off is sharp, the top 3 are all making over $100M a year and the #1 player is bringing in well over $300M. These figures are not guesses and the top 10 live video-chat sites thus represent over $1B in revenue.
More philosophically, can our definition of ‘porn’ remain rational while including Playboy and excluding Nuts and Loaded, while all three publish identical photos with identical intentions. If porn is defined by content, not the press releases put out by fearful publishers, we should include everything that’s designed as sexual entertainment and include NN (nearly nude) sites too (tell me this nudity-free site isn’t porn). ‘Demi-porn’ is a growing sector which isn’t being counted by anyone but which can only be left out of industry discussions using the same blinkers the video guys use to ignore the web.
Jenna Jameson doesn’t make as much hard-cash as some of the biggest amateurs in Canada and she’s at the top of the performer tree (though she performs so little it’s get-ting hard to put her in that category). Though the average porn-performer makes more than the average adult webmaster, there are just a few hundred working adult performers on the planet, there are tens of thousands of webmasters. Sites you’ve never heard of are making $1M a month and many more in the $10-$100K range operate completely under the radar. No one who understands the difference between gross and net would rather own Vivid Pictures than The Hun because in porn a sole-trader with a PC and a basement can easily out-perform a corporation with product in every adult store in America.
Yes, the porn industry’s smaller than the $10-12B so often bandied about and enthusiastically swatted down, but video, TV and cable are just the public face of a very private enterprise. The global internet business is worth billions, even if estimates are limited to the conservative back-of-the-envelope sketches presented here. Factoring in the long-tail and demi-porn you’d have to double those estimates. Suddenly those ridiculous numbers don’t look as off as some are suggesting - and the web looks a hell of a lot bigger than the video market. Amazingly, in 2006, this seems to be news.
This trailer… has all the hot group-sex, Milla Jovovich, cum as face cream action you could ask for.
The ‘original’ movie version of Caligula, written by Gore Vidal, was famous for being funded by Penthouse owner Bob Guccione. He assembled a crew of 1st rate actors, shot the movie, and then inserted scenes of hard-core porn designed to ‘punch it up’ in the editing room. Classic, and worth seeig for Helen Mirren’s breasts alone.
This trailer, which seems attached to a remake, is actually an art piece made for the 2005 Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale) and has all the hot group-sex, Milla Jovovich, cum as face cream action you could ask for.
Don’t panic. The art’s pretty odourless and the porn in this parody’s intact.
PS. Please stop sending this to me. Send me other stuff instead.
Last year I, and my penis, fell in love with Tuuli.
I didn’t know this diplomats daughter, raised in Russia, was also Rankin’s muse at the time, but she did do enough to the normally calm environs of my underwear to prompt me to post these photos of her having sex from Arena. Pure demi-porn.
Today I received a copy of ‘Tuulitastic‘ - a “photographic love letter” to the woman Rankin can’t stop shooting. If you have ever thought a blonde was attactive this book will turn your mind to shit. It’s like being inside Brian de Palma’s head after it’s been filled with fembots and flashlights.
Every time I look at this book I want to shoot Tuuli’s face too. Rankin’s a lucky boy.
Bondage and sex in American porn don’t mix. Juries are traditionally wary of BDSM because restraint makes consent hard to gauge but producers are pushing the boundaries, and scenes of sex and bondage which have until recently been limited to the web (where everyone’s stupid/ignorant/offshore) are now making it onto DVD.
The Mitsubishi Evo IX is the best value performance car you can buy. Capable of getting to sixty miles-an-hour in less than five seconds, using a 2 litre engine, with four passengers, for $30,000. Logic dictates that anyone with a brain would choose the fuel efficient, four-door Mitsubishi over a twice as expensive, two-door, single passenger Porsche 911 which accelerates no faster. They don’t. Porsche is the most profitable car company in the world and Mitsubishi drivers secretly wish they could drive Porsches.
Jesus PhoneApple’s iPhone, the most anticipated product in consumer electronics history, will change how people use the web and in the six months between today and the time it lands in shops we’ll have to remake our websites in anticipation of the shift. If anyone doubts Apple’s ability to sell a $600 phone/PDA/internet device ask yourself if the Apple brand is a Porsche or a Mitsubishi. Cost is not a factor, desirability is everything.
People like me, who’ve resisted the key-laden horror of Blackberry’s, and who are too grown-up to use a sidekick (anything used by Paris Hilton is off the ‘cool’ roll-call forever) now have another option. Apple are pretending they’re selling a phone, though it’s obvious making calls is the least of iPhone’s abilities. It’s a personal media player (iPod) which ships with the highest resolution seen ever seen on a mainstream device. With 480×320 pixels of resolution it matches DVD and given it’s small size will look better than DVD ever did. Everything a Blackberry does, iPhone does too, and better than anything, it allows users to surf the web without recourse to special formats, lost images or geekery.
Apple have also defined how people will get media into their pocket. Instead of messing around with wireless downloads the iPhone will leech media from your computer though iTunes. They understand that even if we could download media to our phones over a super-fast wireless connection we’d want to view it on our other devices so why not download it using the most appropriate device in the house - a computer - and share it with all our other devices as desired. Wireless data transfer is saved for information we need on the move like email.
For website owners iPhone means making sites that play nice on a 480 pixel screen (despite iPhone’s ability to manage larger screens why make it any harder than necessary?) and making media easy to get into iTunes via RSS. It’s not the only way to do things but Apple have a track record, the best marketing on the planet and products people lust after. Even if you think Apple borg are Kool-Aid-and-Nike toting imbeciles, their numbers are growing and Apple’s selling more music than Amazon.
“The iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices—such as an iPod and a phone—and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton—who knew a thing or two about apples—they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It’s a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.”
Del.icio.us, the spike heeled bitch-mother of social bookmarking sites, is by virtue of its construction, naturally resistant to spam. Anyone reading its RSS feeds can be sure they’re seeing a reasonable snapshot of what’s grabbing the attention of blog readers making it a uniquely valuable source of metadata.
Seth Finkelstein "Well, I can’t prove a negative, but it’s hard to see the trademark dispute being treated as any sort of secret or private matter. If it were the cause, Xeni Jardin could just...…" on Violet Blue [more]
B&K "The author, real name Wendi Sullivan, did not warn the actress, it appears, but did brag to friends that she was going to do this. Wendi has pro-bono legal representation, and the actress could not...…" on Violet Blue [more]
Tom B "I would have thought that if it was the full reason Boing Boing took the action they did they’d be public about it as their stance on copyright/etc. seems to be their rallying call. Oh well....…" on Violet Blue [more]
Seth Finkelstein "While for a while I thought the trademark case might indeed be the reason, it doesn’t hold up on further investigation. The “unpublishing” ; took place late July? August?...…" on Violet Blue [more]
rich "I’m confused - why wouldn’t the dissimilar industry clause kick in and allow one Violet Blue who was a writer and another who was a sex performer?…" on Violet Blue [more]
‘ - a “photographic love letter” to the woman Rankin can’t stop shooting. If you have ever thought a blonde was attactive this book will turn your mind to shit. It’s like being inside Brian de Palma’s head after it’s been filled with fembots and flashlights.
