Cnet is reporting that Sex.com will be going up for auction next month as part of a foreclosure.  The current owner paid $14 million for it and claimed to have grand plans for it, but nothing really happened.

Sex.com was originally registered by the founder of Match.com and in the early days was bringing in $100 million a year.  A long court battle ensued when somehow the name got transfered to a con artist and by the time it was resolved and sold, the Internet had vastly changed.

Of course a good name is important for any business, and sex.com is a short, easy to remember name.  But how many people have heard of sex.com or been to sex.com?  Not many in recent years.  In the content business, you need to have good content associated with your good name.  Otherwise, your name and website become very forgettable and the money you spent on a great name has gone to waste.

It amazes me when I look at all the sites that have sold for 6 and 7 figure numbers.  So many of them have turned into absolutely nothing.  When I cruise industry forums and I am amazed at how many people just focus on getting a shell of a website up with no real substance and then try to get as many visitors as possible to it for the least amount of money.  Just the other day I found this whole network of alt porn TGP’s where it took me at least 20 clicks before I got to an actual gallery.  Each thumbnail click led me to another TGP.  It was a giant incestuous traffic trade and everyone involved forgot they are supposed to be providing something of value to the user.

I have a hope that with the new decade and a further maturation of the Internet people will realize that the best way to make money with content is to stop spending resources on expensive names, trading junk traffic and tricking people and actually putting some effort into doing real development and coming up with creative ideas.

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Recently after reading FleshBot’s  interview with Joanna Angel in the last decade of porn, I sent in the below email.

I wanted to post it here because I want to share my thoughts on the changes happening in the industry in this post and others.

I really enjoyed Fleshbot’s interview with Joanna Angel on the last
decade of porn.  She she was pretty spot on and in sharing the alt
porn scene with her, I can relate to her experience.

I have been looking back on the last decade myself, but mostly I have
been thinking about the future.  I haven’t had to do much to keep up
with changes in the industry over the last decade, because like
Joanna, I was part of that change.  I got involved in ’99.  Magazines
were out and the big shakeup was everything moved online.  Anyone who
didn’t adapt quickly ran into big trouble, just look at what happened
to Al Goldstein.  Now things are changing again, and we need to adapt.

Those of us who sit around and bemoan all the free porn out there and
hope for some sort of “solution” or “regulation” will quickly find
themselves irrelevant and out of business just as is happening to so
many in the music, magazine, and news industries now.

Don’t get me wrong, I know how much it sucks to work hard and spend a
lot of money on something only to see it passed around for free, or to
bust your ass to try and convince a few people that they should stop
browsing the TGP’s and the tubes and come pull out their credit card
for you.

The subscription model will not work for much longer if all that you
are offering is porn.  People will need to get something from you that
can not be obtained anywhere else for free or very cheap if they are
going to give you money.  Be it an experience or something tangible,
it can not just be the lure of tits and ass, no matter what flavor
they come in.

The next decade will not be about “finding a solution” to “get out of
this hole.”  The next decade will be ruled by some very creative
people who will find success by staying on their toes and constantly
coming up with cool innovative ideas rather than simply trying to add
their own flavor or twist to the same recipe used by everyone else.

I don’t have all the answers yet, but I am working on some fresh ideas

and am very excited about the next decade.  :)

I thought it was interesting that in a different interview in the same series, this time with Digital Playground, Adella had this to say about the next decade of porn.

“Porn will be regulated, centralized and easy to obtain anonymously in any format, on demand.”

I kinda laughed at this because porn is already easy to obtain anonymously in any format, on demand.  It is called the Internet.  The Internet was a bigger thing for porn than VHS.  People no longer had to leave their homes and go to an adult bookstore.  My thought (and I could be interpreting this wrong) is that Adella, like many others in the industry are hoping for a way to distribute porn in a way that gives them more control over their content meaning less free porn, less piracy, more pay porn.  This simply is not going to work.  If they are hinting at a “solution” they are looking in entirely the wrong direction.  When your business model falls apart because the market changes, you need to come up with a new business model.  Period.  Trying to fight off the change to prop up your existing model only serves to slightly delay the inevitable.

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I recently started reading LuckIsBack.com to keep up on what is happening in the mainstream porn industry.

I read a series of posts about Michelle Avanti’s story on being a troubled young girl who gets into porn, gets addicted to drugs and alcohol, is tricked by her agent into doing scenes she didn’t want to do, is injured, beaten, catches multiple STD’s and finally finds Jesus, gets out of the industry and is currently getting ready to have a baby.

Read the whole story here
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

This got me thinking about ethics in porn and the perception of Altporn being more ethical than mainstream porn.

When I started this raverporn (eroticbpm), I did not sit down and think about ethics. It was just a creative project started from a silly idea. There was no plan with rules and a code of conduct, but as a person with strong personal ethics and ideals, what would become my full time job and business would be a direct reflection of my ethics.

Aside from their appearance, how I represented the models would arguably become one of the biggest marketing gimmicks for the alt porn industry. However, at the time it was more out of necessity than any big ethical choice.

I found rave & club girls attractive, I figured other people found them attractive, and in building a porn site around a community based on that scene. It only made sense to let the girls express themselves and let them be who they were in the photos. Girls who had any modeling experience found it refreshing to not need to take out their piercings, cover their tattoos and wear stupid outfits.

Along with this came models ability to choose how much or how little they wanted to show.
The little known ethical choice I soon made in connection with this was paying models the same no matter how much or how little they decided to display. The girl who doesn’t spread her legs gets the same amount as the girl who has anal sex with her boyfriend. This ensured that models were never being coerced into doing something they were not comfortable with, simply because they needed or wanted the money.

The expressive freedom and choice enjoyed by the models created content that was appealing to not just men but also women, and not just women, but feminists. Getting the seal of approval from feminists was not too common in the porn industry and the media loved this angle. Women were taking off their clothes because they wanted to express themselves, not because they were troubled young drug addicts being coerced into doing unspeakable things. Thus, altporn became ethical porn. Or so it appeared.

As the altporn scene began to take shape, appearing feminist was a priority among new sites and any females involved became the face of new sites with male partners taking less public roles. I think that people felt it was essential in order to get press and credibility. Oddly, it seemed the sites which were actually run by women got less attention for being feminist because they didn’t get involved in the contest of running around declaring that they too are women. I too failed to play this game and probably lost out on some attention because of it.

As droves of amateur models came out to participate in these altporn sites, many quickly found that their experiences varied widely with each site having its own set of rules, expectations, pay rates, even penalties. Many models somehow expected that a good experience on one alt site would equal a good experience on another alt site. Alt porn it turned out, was not homogeneous.

With alt porn growing closer to mainstream porn just as alternative subculture finds its way into mainstream culture. The importance of appearing feminist has died off. Instead, more and more hardcore alt is making an appearance and more sites are being started purely as a business choice and less as a DIY project.

When it is no longer a collaboration between model, photographer, and creator. The model simply becomes a product. This is not inherently bad, but it leaves far more opportunity for ethics to be thrown out in favor of maximum profit.

The same booking agent that got an unwilling Michelle Avanti to do a 75 man bukakke scene 2 weeks into her career could tomorrow be pressuring a fresh alt model to do a gangbang scene for an alt film.

At this point, what even defines alt?
I honestly don’t know.
Lux Alptraum said goodbye to alt on fleshbot last year. Maybe she is right, but Ebpm isn’t going anywhere yet. So get your altporn here like it’s 1999!

I’ve continued to make what I feel are important ethical choices over the years, like not selling out to a mainstream company because I didn’t think it would be fair to the models, and even today deciding to keep my pay rates the same despite rates falling through the floor on numerous other sites.

I have a feeling that the other good alt webmasters I know are not going to change their ethics, but new up and coming models should be aware that Alt does not automatically mean ethical, it does not automatically mean feminist, and just like in mainstream porn, you should do your research. Separate the good from the bad, and choose who you work with carefully.

Alt Porn · Ethics

Lately I have been hearing more and more about Zivity, a new adult site that pretends not to be an adult site. I largely ignored it even after seeing a few mentions by some members here at Ebpm.
Then I heard some more details from a friend and started to check into it more.

I signed up for a beta account and got access a couple days later. I looked around a bit and was not really impressed because parts of it as even fleshbot noticed seemed pretty similar to what I did with spiceplay. (Sharing revenue with models based on members giving credits to models or each other.) And they even have a patent pending on that.

Yeah there are some pretty girls, some of them are naked, some of them are not, and there is all the basic social features you can expect to have. But nothing else really notable.

The thing that caught my eye the most was the fact that they take paypal. Most people wouldn’t think twice about that. But talk to anyone in the adult biz and you will probably hear the same story about their account getting banned. Or you may even hear stories about paypal once upon a time courting the business of adult websites (myself included) only to ban them all a few months later when Ebay bought them out.

So why does Zivity get a free pass?
Well, it turns out that Founders Fund and Blue Run Ventures put up the $8 Million in VC funding to get Zivity started. The same people behind paypal and numerous other tech startups.
And the people behind Zivity is quite impressive.

Jon Elvekrog – CEO
According to his bio on Zivity, he has worked for HP, TIBCO, Volex, and helped build LinkExchange

Scott Banister – Chairman and Co-Founder
Founder of ListBot which sold to Microsoft
VP of Idealab – sold to AOL
Co-Founder of Ironport – Sold to Cisco for $830 million

Cyan Banister – Co Founder and Editor in Chief
Scott Banister’s wife – Details on her background are lacking
*edit* Cyan was kind enough to link me to her linkedin profile. She was a senior manager at IronPort and has had a successful career in recruiting for bay area startups. */edit*

Jeffrey Wescott – Co Founder
Former Ironport engineer

Jordan Ritter – CTO
Napster Co Founder
Cloudmark CTO
Columbia Music Entertainment CTO

John Manoogian III – Director of User Experience and Product Design
Worked at Organic Inc
Designed Yahoo’s homepage and UI
Claims to have invented social bookmarking

So why is this a big deal to me?

The fact that they can use paypal and no other adult company can is only a minor annoyance.

The fact that they are attempting to patent something that is neither new or innovative is a little more concerning and makes sense coming from an industry that is increasingly patenting anything obvous just for the sake of having a large patent portfolio and then suing people.

Non Obivous innovations that took hard work to develop certainly deserve to be patented for a period of time. Obvious patents only serve to stifle innovation and end up doing far more harm than good.

However, the biggest thing that has me going is why are they doing this? Why would all these people decide to get into the adult business? If the VC investors hope to see their money back. Zivity would likely need to maintain a paid membership of over 100,000 users. I really don’t see them lasting long.

However, if they are successful. I feel that it will be another sad day for all the creative people out there who don’t have access to piles of money but have plenty of amazing ideas.

Part of what makes the internet great is the ability to share ideas, art, and collaborate with other people to create new things. When big companies and big money comes along and lock down ideas with patents and further stifle creativity by throwing so much money at their project that other people do not even get noticed. Well, it makes the internet less diverse, it puts a lot of money in the hands of a few people, and it certainly takes away a lot of the fun.

Maybe I would feel better if Zivity had come along and done something truly different. But I just don’t see it.

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