Bacchaus, who correctly concluded being a pornographer would garner more respect than being a lawyer, is close to closing ErosBlog.
At Wired Bruce Sterling is incorrectly hailing the change as a portent of doom for porn in general. You and I know porn’s weak because it’s mostly rubbish. It will be strong again when it stops losing ground to non-porn-sexy-stuff which doesn’t assault you with ugliness and stupidity.
Bacchaus’s full, pro-chicken, rant is here. He gets it exactly right when he pegs his problem as having nothing to sell. I worked that out at the beginning of 2008. Now I’m working to fix that.
If you’re a sex-blogger without a product, how are you making money? Anyone clearing four figures on ad links alone?
(Apologies getting to this embarrassingly late. Wired’s uncomfortably thick RSS feed has lain neglected by me to the tune of 300 posts.)
Popularity: unranked [?]
I suspect ErosBlog’s situation is doubly difficult. That kind of straight-up, softly-spoken blogging is bleeding profusely in just about every sector, sad as that may be.
Which makes sense, I suppose. If you look at ErosBlog in 2009, well, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in 2003. Blogging “success” today requires buzz on Twitter and Friendfeed, not from the usual suspects in your blogroll. ErosBlog has had twelve mentions on Friendfeed since the beginning of the year, and a quick search on Twitter’s notoriously shitty search returns exactly one result: this post. (Google turned up another couple from the last couple months.)
Next, I scrolled through a month’s worth of EB posts, and the most popular had eight comments. Eight. I’m impressed that Bacchaus has held out as long as he has with that lack of engagement.
(PLEASE NOTE: This is not a critique of ErosBlog or its style of blogging, both of which are just dandy. I’m speaking purely in terms of blogging-as-commercial-effort, and ignoring any cultural or artistic value.)
At this point, I only see a few ways to “make it” without pushing a product: create a cult of personality (ala Perez), learn to snark with flair (tough for a sex-positive blog to pull off), or settle for non-monetary recompense (in terms of access to people or experiences).
@ Roger. You’re right. Some people seem to blog entirely on Twitter now, though I think that it’s not really blogging. Fact is, micro-posts are easier than bigger ones and people who have trouble blogging traditionally find twitter easy. Nothing’s too inane for twitter, or too personal.
I hope there’s a bifurcation. Blogs get a little heavier and the “This is my breakfast” crowd embrace Twitter et al, publishing less crap via blogs.
Ultimately, if you’re not producing content your options are: a) Shockingly brilliant repackaging [or...] b) Insightful commentary/journalism.
You want sex-positive fuckwit-negative porn snark? I’m trying…
A blog is still a neccesary evil and its good to see you back up and online.
For me, it’s not about selling. If I get advertising,it’s a bonus. If not, then whatever. I just do it to vent, get the energy out, and be a literary tart in general, just for fun.
I’m probably not one to speak, because direct opinions are never appreciated in the sex blogosphere, but Eros Blog is just reproducing content that’s out there, and the only reason it gets the traffic it does is because it’s been online the longest, then there are the links and so on. To tune in, and see one ’sexy’ image with two sentences, is quite astoundingly boring. EB doesn’t even have content that can be classified as original, let alone interesting, and to be blunt (I’m probably saying what many bloggers are thinking, as in ‘why the hell is this blog popular’ or ‘why does it deserve a mention in Wired?’), I wouldn’t miss it if it was gone.
Come to think of it, sexblogging is now becoming so passe and boring, even among the popular bloggers. Many of which use big words to make out like they’re literary folk.