If you’re a fan of Petter Hegre, his wife Luba, well-shot, high-res softcore, or wanking – you can join Hegre-Art for 50% less than ususal until October 31st.
Did you know he spells his name with two T’s? Neither did I until just moments ago…
Popularity: 25% [?]
Leave a comment →
Peter Hegre is best known as a purveyor of worryingly nubile nudes. His ability to find perfectly lithe bodies is impressive and means many of his models appear to be so young you have to clear your history and check your shoulder before clicking the next pic. They’re often crazy thin too (he believes you can only be too thin if you’re flat chested. A woman built like an open bra, ‘D’ cups on a piece of string, looks totally healthy.) Borderline Ano-Paedo content aside he’s at the very high end of softcore porn and now, for the first time, is offering a DVD of his shoots called ‘Fantasy Island’.
In 2007 DVDs are nothing but quaint, you can get better quality video online faster than it takes to ship a disc, but there’s doubtless an audience of technophobes, collectors and dial-up users who’ll pay $50 for a couple of hours of mid-res video. On the plus side the normal Hegre quality is on display and unlike much Yank porn there’s no degradation, abuse or bad lighting.
Impossible to watch with your girlfriend (unless she looks like Nella), and not one for fans of fat old angry real women, but that’s not really what it’s for.
Popularity: 31% [?]
4 comments →
Mystique Magazine is a high-budget website devoted to softcore poses of well known models in exotic locales. Their model of the year, decided by online vote, wins a shoot in a glamorous location which, as it’s basically a paid holiday, makes them very popular with talent. In efforts to win the prize many models send Mystique as much traffic as they can.
In the past they’ve been operated in the Playboy mold, apparent in their determination to label what’s basically a web operation as a magazine, but as Playboy fades in profitability they’ve decided to change their approach. While Mystique, like Playboy, used to lock its content away and try to bully browsers into buying, the most successful new adult sites give away a lot of content and hope to persuaded people to join after getting a chance to experience what’s on offer – Kisses and Candlesticks. It works and recognizing this Mystique have ‘borrowed’ a lot of ideas and re-launched with an emphasis on making free content easy to find.
The best thing about their new site is, unsurprisingly, their sole prominent innovation. For their most popular models they’ve posted audio clips, which provide a rare chance to hear what models like… for instance… Kyla Cole – actually sound like.
Kyla Cole audio clips (mid left of page)
Most of their ‘Top Rated Models‘ (just below mid right of page) have audio. As usually these women are only heard pretending to orgasm or reading a script there’s something exciting about just listening to them talk. You feel as if you’re getting to know them in the way you do eavesdropping on strangers at a restaurant. I’m sure there are more but Katia Corriveau, Linda O’Neil, Aria Giovanni, Jennifer Korbin, Divini Rae, Zdenka Podkapova, Rebecca DiPietro, Amiee Rickards and Erica Campbell can all be heard right now and I think they’d be smart to post longer, more podcastable, audio.
Unfortunately in their rush to ape the competition Mystique have started a megapixel race with their competitors. For years Peter “Mr. Luba” Hegre has been advertising images at up to 6000px and Mystique are now posting shots at 3000px (a quarter of Hegre’s size).
The problem is, while Hegre shoots with Medium Format digital back which takes ultra-high resolution 39 megapixel stills, Mystique appear to have simply blown their old content up. E.g. here’s a 100% crop of “Ira Shakira” from Hegre. You can see it’s in focus and shows a wealth of real detail:
As opposed to this from Mystique which is clearly an enlargement/expansion of a smaller file.
There’s no real detail and claiming this is a ‘high resolution’ image is a lie (you can also see the difference in color correction. Kyla’s image is ten shades of brown). If Mystique do have real high-resolution images on the site it’s madness to mix them with enlargements like this which will only upset users and undermine their credibility.
If Mystique give me access to the site I’ll come back with a fuller review and any necessary corrections. For now I’d say enjoy their new library of free material, check out the audio clips and don’t believe the hype. Their content is sadly still no richer than the rapidly aging 800-1000px industry standard.
Popularity: 29% [?]
5 comments →
In the UK the last couple of years has seen the rise of a new type of men’s magazine aimed firmly at teens to twenties and designed to stimulate the smaller of men’s two brains.
Almost unbelievably, by staying shy of pubic hair these titles have managed to avoid being labeled ‘porn’ and enjoy distribution and sales opportunities traditional porn would jizz over.
Now the web’s following suit. The GooTube’s stuffed with teenage girls in micro-mini-is-it-there-kinis ‘dancing’ for our pleasure, and don’t try and tell me I’m the only person who’s filed ‘RocketBoom‘ under sex in their feed aggregator.
While ‘crossing over’ has long been the aim of porn stars, there are already a generation of celebrities in the UK who are only famous thanks to their comfort with sexual nudity, and yet avoid any of the ‘hooker’ stigma that goes along with stuff like this.
In 2006 the easiest way to use your sex to get rich and famous is to keep your panties on. When will America catch on and who’s going to embrace Demi-porn – low brow, high-nudity, humor, no muff – offline?
Popularity: 35% [?]
3 comments →
Google now owns YouTube and is the new undisputed leader in the have-you-seen-this-clip market. Way to spend $1.65B – a ludicrous amount given YouTube’s inability to make any money.
Right?
As an advertising company Google has to see appending video ads to web video as a way of eating into the massive TV advertising market. Viral videos used to be found in a range of places and websites but now are almost exclusively on YouTube (and if not are quickly mirrored there). If Google can build a system to append ads to content automatically, and they can, and devise a way of paying content owners a share of any profit made on their clips with Google wallet, they can earn back their billions fast.
With millions of downloads a day, charging advertisers fractional amounts adds up fast. By tracking the most popular and enduring content – their ‘hit shows’ – they can increase prices for clips in the way they do for keywords and all that technology and experience is already in place.
Assuming I’m right, and I think we’ll all be more comfortable if we do, in a years time every guy-sticks-knob-in-blender funny will come stuck between ads for ‘Coors Lite’ and ‘Band Aids’. For the first time it’ll make more sense to upload your funny videos to the web than send them to a cheesy TV show for a 1 in 3 chance to win $500. Really popular videos will make hundreds of thousands of dollars for their authors and instead of using the web to launch a career in TV, podcasters can enjoy a career online funded by ads they rely on GooTube to sell.
In working out a way to sell more ads, Google will have inadvertently provided the web with the micro-payment system it’s long been crying out for. With each ad impression generating a few cents for each video publisher it’s precisely the payment model best suited to digital content. The clever bit is that consumers pay nothing themselves, which increases the reach of content and with it the profits to be earned. There’s no signing-up, no exchange of personal information and no barrier to entry. Consumers get ‘free’ content, advertisers get eyeballs and performers get paid. Smart.
So where does that leave porn? The short answer is nowhere. Mainstream advertisers are not going to embrace nudity and pay for ads on trailers for ‘Island Fever 27 – Milking It’, but who said sex had to be pornographic or, perhaps more accurately, that porn had to be explicit?
There’s more than one way to skin a mushroom (think about it, I’ll wait…) and Nuts/Maxim style softcore, which which can be shared via GooTube (Yougle? It’s for sale here), will be worth worth more than hardcore material which isn’t.
Could a new golden age of sexually stimulating, non-explicit naughtiness be around the corner? If Micro-payments via ads arrive as I predict, Maxim/Nuts style demi-porn may be the future.
Popularity: 58% [?]
9 comments →
Holy-mother-of-God, these shots of Anita Dark make my tummy feel funny. My porn/art/move-to-Prague-dar are twitching like bastards. Photographers – watch and learn. Models, pray for such good lighting/genes.
Popularity: 39% [?]
17 comments →
