The Porning Report

Deep Inside Porn Web Marketing

A new trend has emerged in the adult film and video world: marketing porn movies via exclusive Websites, signifying a new age in online marketing and promotion for adult productions. In the past, a production company used their Website to house advertising and marketing tools for each title. So at Adam & Eve Productions' Website, you might find individual web pages for each of their titles. Now, a cadre of porn studios are launching individual Websites for their priority titles, where tons of exclusive information, content and marketing tools can be found.

Studios like Private North America, The Simon Wolf Organization, Adam & Eve Productions, Wicked Pictures and Gwen Media are among the companies delving into title-specific sites. For instance, Simon Wolf Organization promoted "Naughty Bedtime Stories 2" at www.naughtybedtime.com, and "E-Love Wanted" at www.E-LoveWanted.com, while Private's Cleopatra (www.private.com/cleopatra), "Scottish Loveknot" (www.private.com/scottish) and the gay epic "Marc Anthony" (www.man-size.com/marcanthony) all have their own sites too.

"The sites are completely devoted to one feature," Private Media Group Press Officer Richard Sharp told me recently. "The visitor can access, with absolutely no charge, a whole range of information and material related to the movie. With screensaver, PC wallpaper, production notes, interviews, photos, and other downloads including the movie trailer, it is a unique virtual space providing a wealth of information that offer a huge added value for fans."

The purpose of the site is the sell the feature by putting enough content into the site to stimulate a demand for buyers to see the feature.

Another way to promote porn on the Web is by encouraging deep linking (get your mind out of the gutter, people!) Deep linking is the practice one site providing a direct link to specific content on another Website, which often has the effect of making the surfer think that a Webmaster is actually hosting the trailer when they are actually only linking to it. This way, Webmasters can avoid the sometimes-prohibitive costs of bandwidth that often goes with promoting video projects, but still "provide" the video that surfers are looking for. Digital Playground is promoting Robby D's new feature "Repo Girl" by releasing a trailer that they are offering as a deep link to for all distributors, retailers, affiliate and fan Websites.

So be it via title specific site or deep linking, porn makers continue to develop interesting ways to sell their product on the Net. Take that, music industry!

For Women, By Women

In the world of pornography there is little ground that has not been covered. Practically every genre or fetish one could imagine has been captured on film or video at one point or another. Yet, amazingly, one area that has barely been tapped by porn is women! Don't get me wrong, MANY women have been "tapped" by porn, but as performers, not as an audience demographic. Who is making porn movies for the ladies? Why is there not a bigger market for adult cinema aimed at what women want? Surely most women don't want to see themselves degraded and humiliated on screen as is the case in many porn movies, especially in the gonzo and anal genres. There must be porn meant for the ladies that is softer, sexier and more passionate, right?

There is, it's just that until now the genre has been only quietly making headway, with female directors like Veronica Hart, Chloe, Candida Royalle, Toni English and Anita Rinaldi creating hardcore vids for the opposite sex. They've been doing it for years, but only recently has the trend garnered some genuine heat.

"It's still the boys club," Hart admits. "But there's a couple of us out there who are throwing wrenches in their spokes. It's about being a smart enough woman and being able to find a place for yourself and work well."

Hart is a torchbearer in a growing group of women who are selling "female-empowered" adult entertainment to other women — the kind with plots, foreplay and cuddling that focuses on women's tastes and pleasure.

Likewise, Simon Wolf Productions recently announced they will be producing a line of adult videos aimed for the female audience in response to the success of their title For Women Only. The first in this new line, Woman’s World, will street March 16.

"For Women Only is our third or fourth biggest selling title and it was targeted directly at women," Simon Wolf Productions owner John Chambliss told AVN.com. "And re-orders today are phenomenal on the show, because as the female audience grows … There is a lot of intimacy, especially with eye contact. The sex is hard, very dynamic, but there is much more kissing and fondling and playing."

But what about the ladies who shudder at the thought of seeing women degraded, yet don't like the kissy-kissy romance stuff and do want to see hardcore, even anally-charged, sex? Well, female auteurs such as Brittney Foster have that area covered as well.

"The girl-girl videos that I've seen only get hardcore to a certain extent, they are usually too soft" says Foster of her ultra-hardcore, all-girl, fetish-themed Britney Foster's Disturbed. "So I'm taking it to the next level. There's fisting, double anal, double vag. It's has a fetish look and is extremely hardcore."

Meanwhile, you have male directors like Andrew Blake and Michael Ninn, who are making high-fashion, glossy porn that combines hardcore sex with a slicker, more artsy look.

Many women are beginning to see the sex industry as a viable area to make a legitimate living. Experts say demand by heterosexual and lesbian women is driving the growth of many sex-related ventures, from stores to catalogs to sex toy companies to adult Websites, porno films and cable TV programs.

In fact, there is even a movement of female porn Webmasters. Carlin Ross and Christina Head, a lawyer and a documentary filmmaker in New York, recently teamed up to plot new careers as Webmasters of a soon-to-be launched site that features "sex and love from a woman's perspective."

"It's all about empowering and educating women and, of course, I enjoy sex," the ironically named Head told the NY Times. "We're women. We enjoy sex."

The Rise of Cell-Porn

In recent months, there has been a heated debate in the UK over the issue of cell phone porn. Should it be okay for people to access or download pornographic images through their cell phones? To porn or not to porn, that is indeed the question.

New advances in handset technology have resulted in better visual capabilities for mobile devices, which has lead to a greater content demand among cell users (especially the younger ones). And guess what these hip, young people want access to on their phones? Why, porn of course! This does not sit well with the telecoms industry though, as operators and service providers comprehend the potential for adult content to get into the hands of minors. This new-found sense of social responsibility is a terrific stance to take … that is until they realize that (according to data analyst Visiongain) adult content transmitted to mobile phones will reach an annual $4 billion by 2006, out of a total annual adult market of $70 billion. You think the cell phone companies are gonna pass up on a piece of that action just to stay on moral high ground? I think not…

Last month, a Mobile Adult Content Responsibly conference was held in London to discuss these very issues. While no firm resolution was reached at the meetings, the very fact that this gathering was even held just goes to show how serious the issue is.

How do you protect kids from getting porn on their cell phones? I could have saved these folks a lot of time a money by providing the answer. Put this in your pipe and smoke it: DO NOT BUY YOUR KID A CELL PHONE! Wow! What a concept, eh? What the heck does a 13 year old need a cell for anyways? Is there anything more annoying than standing in line with a group of dorky teens yammering away on their cells at top volume? Don't they get enough gossip time at school and at home? Do they absolutely need to have a cell so they can talk every other breathing minute too? It's the same answer I'd give these overprotective conservatives in the FCC and at Clear Channel too. If you don't like what you are hearing or watching, just turn off your TV or radio. But don't you dare reach over and turn MINE off just because YOU can't handle a fart joke, a boobie or the N-word.

MYDoom Damns Spam

As Internet users around the world scramble to avoid catching the dreaded MyDoom virus, one interesting result of this cyber disease has manifested: the effect it's having on porn spammers. As many of us know from getting penis enlargement ads in our email Inbox, many adult-related companied use spam as a method of marketing and promotion. These companies send out mass emails to lists they have built up, acquired or purchased to adevrtise their site, porn movie, affiliate program or products.

Well, now that the MyDoom worm has system administrators on ultra high alert and email boxes at their fullest, many folks are drastically modifying their filtering systems to their most sensitive, or least discriminating, depending on how you look at it. And many folks are avoiding the risk, or can't handle the volume, of checking through these quarantined messages to confirm if they are viruses or not. All this is having a dire effect of adult Webmasters in the spam promo biz.

One such victim was 420Times.com and 420Girls.com owner Rob Smith. Smith, who runs a pro-hemp adult site that features girls and rock stars revealing their love of marijuana and (in the girls' cases) being photographed nude. Smith was hit with the MyDoom virus (formally called W32.Novarg.A@mm) last Wednesday, and suddenly found his business had ground to a halt. The virus infected his computer and sent itself out by email to his entire contact database. In other words, his email list of 50,000 was sent the virus with his personal name on it. Doh!

"It totally screwed me up and cost me about $3,000 in lost work and time and everything," Smith told me for AVN Online. "People were threatening lawsuits for sending the virus to them. They didn't know what was going on or what it was."

Yet once Smith relived himself of the actual virus, he realized his troubles had only just begun.

"The problem now is that lots of people aren't getting business emails because the spam filters from their hosts and ISPs," said Smith. "So people are losing deals because a spam filter grabs a legitimize business email and considers it a virus spam."

According to Reuters, the worm infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and has been sent to millions of people. Another variant of the virus has already started spreading. No word from pornographers as to how many were hurt by the virus in one way or another, or how many porn spam recipients wept with joy when they realized that MyDoom inadvertently resulted in a deliverance from porn spam....

For more information on the virus and how to remove it, please visit http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.novarg.a@mm.html

Already got the virus? Check out Microsoft's MyDoom response and fix: http://www.microsoft.com/security

HDT&A

Briana Banks

On MSN.com, columnist Brendan Koerner muses about the ins and outs of High Definition TV and raises some good points about how it will affect the pornography trade.

It seems that DirecTV announced last week that it would be broadcasting pay-per-view adult movies in HDTV. One of the many allures to HDTV is that it's a warts-and-all experience. You get to see EVERYTHING in full, revealing detail... which may be to its detriment when it comes to porn.

Porn performers are NOT the kind of guys and gals you see on the streets. Gals like busty Briana Banks and guys like well-hung stallion Nick Manning are not the average person. They look larger than life and have sex like one imagines superheroes might. From the viewer's point of view, these folks are superior specimens of beauty (albeit, often in a sleazy way) in peak physical shape. So imagine the nationwide groan of displeasure when HDTV reveals the pimples, blemishes, bruises, scars and other such imperfections that don't show up on regular TV.

Yes, if you make your living being naked on television screens, than HDTV may not be your friend -- newscasters are already becoming aware of this.

Sure, the studios could spend lots of money in post production trying to airbrush every frame so their objects of desire retain their otherworldliness, but that would be expensive and porn films are not known for big special effects budgets -- or big budgets in general. Besides, the return on that investment may not be so obvious. It may take years of subtle sales decline as HDTV sets are adopted before the studios realize their business is being negatively affected by HDTV. On the other hand, maybe no one really cares about these performers being perfect, the evidence for this is the rising popularity in low-fi gonzo porn and internet amateur sites, and the clamoring demand for grainy home vids of celebrities in scandalous situations.

Either way, it seems that High Definition pornography is coming, and the question is, will the future be airbrushed?

Peer-to-Peer Porn

Adult video producer Titan Media (NSFW) lodged a complaint with Congress this week that Internet file-trading service Kazaa is not blocking users from downloading its films, even though they have the technology to do so.

Millions use Kazaa to copy music, films and computer files from each others' hard drives, without paying royalties to artists, producers or labels for the copyrighted material. According to Titan, Kazaa's owner, Sharman Networks, can monitor activity on the network through spyware installed on users' computers and can therefore use that capability to block the downloading of copyrighted files. Titan claims Kazaa is not doing so when it comes to porn, despite the video producer's request to stop unauthorized copying of their videos over its network.

Sharman stands by its contention that it cannot control what users share over Kazaa.

"Sharman Networks does not want to interrupt the flow of adult materials through its network because its existence is a primary factor in the growth and profitability of (the) company," Titan vice president Keith Ruoff wrote the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the same latter, Ruoff stated that pornography accounts for more than 40 percent of the material on Kazaa.

"Interrupt the flow of adult materials" sounds a little icky, but what's more interesting is "its existence is a primary factor in the growth and profitability of (the) company."

The RIAA has represented the file sharing business as being mostly music driven, but perhaps they're taking the wrong tack: to discourage file sharing, how about co-operating with Titan to block the flow of copyrighted porn and see how that effects participation in the sharing networks. If the fear of being sued doesn't stop illegal usage, what about the fear of your mom finding out what you're trading?

Searching for Sex

Search engines love porn! Or at least that appears to be the case with search giants Google and Yahoo who, according to New York Times writer Saul Hansell, have recently changed policies to "restrict advertisements from unlicensed pharmacies in an attempt to address public concerns about illegal sales of drugs online," yet have not made likeminded restrictions when it comes to porn advertising on the Net, and are making a tidy profit from sex-related advertising.

How did this come about? Well, originally in 2001 Yahoo decided to limit sex ads and listings, and to remove sex merchandise from its shopping section. Yet when it acquired paid search advertising seller Overture Services last year, Yahoo took over search engines that were running sex ads -- Overture, AltaVista and AlltheWeb -- and has not changed those sites' policy. Why mess with a good thing, right?

Meanwhile, Google itself has sponsored links on its site for certain adult keywords (NSFW); as long as adult ads are properly submitted, the only words Google won't allow are "click here" and "visit this link."

At AOL (which is mostly powered by Google results), a search for a sexual term (very NSFW) returns a page noting that the search might generate adult content. This page gives the user two options: an offer to search for the term on Adult Search Fantasy Finder, which is described as "an independent adult search service," or to search using AOL's own search service, which is mainly provided by Google. Both options lead to much hardcore pornography, though the Google search results do not have the usual sponsosred links or produce any revenue for AOL.

However, Adult Search Fantasy Finder charges adult sites a fee to be listed and in turn pays AOL to divert traffic to AFF's search site. In essence, AOL is making money every time they send someone to AFF to find the hardest core porn out there.

Me thinks this is another sign of corporate America eyeing the money to be made off the sex trade and deciding that, hey, sex is legal, we're all adults here, so let's make a buck like everyone.

Niche in a Haystack

In the early days of pornography on the Net it was all "big boobs," "horny young co-eds" and other broad (forgive the pun) categories. But now sites are dedicated to every imaginable (or unimaginable) niche and fetish.

An article on CNN.com posted today describes "a booming online field, fueled by the relatively low costs of setting up shop, fickle consumers in constant search of new thrills and the promise of quick profits."

Want Goth girls? GothicSluts.com. Dig gals with glasses? Pop in the Spec's Appeal video series from Kickasspictures.com. Got a thing for diehard Insane Clown Posse fans willing to take their tops off? Then, by golly, you simply must race over to Juggalettesgonewicked.com. Babes against Bush? You're not alone with Babesagainstbush.com. [None of these are safe for work.]

"It's an enormous business ... There's a lot of money to be made," said Sean Kaldor, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings, to CNN. Nielsen/NetRatings estimated that 34 million visited porn sites in August -- about one in four Internet users in the good ol' US of A.

The article reads, "All that browsing has caused the number of pornography Web pages to soar during the past six years, with over 1.3 million sites serving up about 260 million pages of erotic content, according to a study released in September by the Seattle, Washington-based Web-filtering company N2H2."

Rhapsody on Asia Minor

The Los Angeles Times Calendar section recently featured an article (subscription required) on blogs that quoted adult film star Asia Carrera ("Tripping Through Blogs Of The Stars," Dec. 1, 2003). This is the second time that Carrera has appeared in the Times as source for quotes in an article not related to porn. During the outbreak of fires last October, Carrera commented on how close the blazes came to her Chatsworth Hills home. Now either someone at the Times has a crush on the curvy flesh presser or this is yet another example on how pornography is slowly but surely seeping into mainstream consciousness.

It is remarkable that the L.A. Times is choosing to casually portray porn stars as regular, hard-working people with something to say rather than horrible monsters hell-bent on social destruction of biblical proportions. Nowhere is judgment passed, nor a snide remark made. Nary a distasteful reference taints Carrera's description. Go figure. If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear porn was downright acceptable in mainstream culture (don’t worry, it’s not... yet...).

Another interesting note is that the writer failed to point out that, unlike every other site mentioned in the article, Carrera's site is a paid one and the only way to access much of it is to slap down some cash (via a credit card, of course).* So, like most aspects of adult culture, if you wanna play, you gotta pay.

* Update 12/8: Carrera's blog is in the free area of her site.