upside.com
The Naked Truth
July 20, 1998
By David Futrelle
Those cheering on the Nasdaq's 2,000-point run
should take a moment to thank the dirty old men--and
dirty young men--of the Web. These online smut
sellers' and smut viewers' dollars have quietly made it
possible for tech stocks to reach dizzying heights,
purchasing Web technologies and attracting users.
These unsung heroes of the wired world have sacrificed more than you
think. If the dirty secret of the Web is that sex sells, the dirty secret of
the adult Web is that it doesn't sell quite as well as the hype might lead
you to think. Failure, not success, is the real hallmark of the adult
Web. Yes, successful adult Web sites do a hell of a business--the
common figure thrown about is around $1 billion a year. And a few big
Webmasters, the more famous being Persian Kitty's Beth Mansfield
and Seth Warshavsky of the Internet Entertainment Group, have
created virtual empires from scratch.
But, increasingly, these stories are the exceptions to the rule. Because
of the tremendous successes of some of the adult Web pioneers,
making money on the adult Web is no longer as easy as posting a few
pictures of Pam Anderson on your site and waiting for the money to
roll in. Reliable statistics on industry turnover rates are impossible to
come by, but conversations with adult Webmasters suggest that many
of those who enter the business leave it shortly afterwards, tail
between their legs, perhaps thousands of dollars poorer than they went
in. And all indications are that the business is getting rougher by the
day.
"The turnover now is unbelievable," says Dan Parisi, Webmaster of the
(in)famous porn megasite whitehouse.com (not to be confused with the
non-pornographic home page of Bill and Hillary at whitehouse.gov).
"People are coming and going. They're starting sites, burning through
their five or 10 grand, going out of business in a couple of months."
Their money goes into the hands of hosting companies and porn site
design firms--some of which, Parisi alleges, charge around $5,000 to
"custom" design sites, when in fact all they are doing is modifying adult
site templates and putting a new site name on the package.
"I had a booth at the Adult Internet Show [in Seacaucus, N.J.] in
June," Parisi says. "I had so many people come up to me asking how
they could set up sites and make money, and I pretty much told them
to go into a different line of work. The easy money is gone." Indeed,
Parisi shelled out well over $200,000 on whitehouse.com before he
saw a penny in profits.
Of course, he is showing a profit -- which is more than most Web sites
can say. Indeed, by the standards of the non-adult Web, adult
Webmasters are spoiled. Most non-adult Web publications don't
expect to be profitable until a year or two into the next millennium, if
then. Even Amazon.com, despite its incredible buzz and a stock price
that's gone through the roof, isn't making a profit yet. By contrast, any
reasonably well-run adult site with enough money to wait out the lean
months will find itself profitable within, say, a year. Whitehouse.com,
Parisi reports, reached the break-even point after only eight months
online. On the popular adult Webmaster chat boards of the YNOT
Network, there has been considerable talk amongst the Net
smutmongers on the promises and perils of going "legit"--leveraging
their successes on the adult Web into careers in the non-adult Web.
The general consensus? It's a hell of a lot harder to make a buck
selling anything other than sex.
Still, those who go into the adult online business with expectations of
instant success are likely to face something of a shock. Unless they
have reserve cash to survive the months it takes to build traffic and
work out kinks in smut-selling strategies, their initial investment is as
good as gone. Those beguiled by the success stories of the good old
days--how the proprietor of the Persian Kitty adult directory turned a
personal hotlist into a personal fortune--need to realize they're entering
a very different business today. Size counts. And so does seniority. "I
do not see how any new site could compete against an entrenched site
like whitehouse.com without spending hundreds of thousands of
dollars," Parisi says.
In fact, many adult Webmasters suggest, the odds are becoming a little
less even every day. "Everything is getting harder," says "Dokk," a
former strip club DJ now running a live video site called Web X Cam.
"Sites without an established traffic base . have huge obstacles to
overcome [in] gaining access to eyeballs. There are so many free sites
and so many people spamming the [search] engines [with lists of dirty
keywords] for [those] extra few clicks. The money is spread very thin.
New pay sites are struggling just to find Webmasters willing to risk
flying their banners."
Meanwhile, the established megasites are getting bigger all the time.
Whitehouse.com now has 15,000 video feeds to choose from, offering
everything from simulated lesbian sex to an allegedly hidden "pee cam"
in a women's bathroom. Club Love, the flagship site of Warshavsky's
Internet Entertainment Group, recently dropped its membership fees,
becoming the free site to beat all free sites. Warshavsky can afford to
give away endless content for free. Your average Webmaster can't.
You may recall the difficulty Netscape had in competing against the
free Internet Explorer. The same principle applies to porn as well.
Unless you have a lot of money to back you up, you're going to have
to be pretty darn original to capture any attention at all.
"Most people seem to think that since [Persian Kitty] has a million hits
a day, then if they throw up a link list they too will receive a million hits
a day," writes "Ed," the Webmaster at Homey Dog's Haven. "It just
ain't gonna happen! There are a million examples of people copying
ideas (or whole site designs) with the belief that they will be as big as
the originator ... Wrong! This business is not easy, it takes a lot of
work! Most of the 'big boys' are full time Webmasters so they can
afford to devote 24 hours a day to their sites. Some of the "newbies"
seem to think they can spend two hours a night on link trades or
building a fancy banner and traffic/money will come ... it just ain't so."
Still, Ed says, he's not going to surrender to the big boys any time
soon. "I will never give this up until I am forced out!" he tells me. "How
many other jobs can someone get where they can sit in their
underwear drinking beer at midnight and still get paid for it?"
He's got a point. And if that's your definition of success, then, heck,
the adult Web is still the right place for you. That or writing. |
