UNITED KINGDOM—You know the state of mainstream paparazzi abuse has reached yet another all-time low when the British press is comparing them unfavorably to porn sites, but that is exactly the case in the aftermath of the release of topless, and now bottomless, photos of Kate Middleton. It would seem that a threshold for violation of privacy may have finally been breached.
To be fair, the article in question by The Telegraph outlines how the global appetite for compromising photos of celebrities like Middleton feeds a food chain of revenue that also includes porn sites. In that regard, sites like FreeOnes, which is mentioned throughout the article, are themselves held up as partially, if indirectly, complicit in the relentless attempts by paparazzi to get the golden photo, which can reap veritable fortunes for the shooter.
"We all know there's a huge market for celebrity snaps—and especially for nude or racy celeb pictures," wrote Willard Foxton for the paper. "What I didn't realise before writing on this topic was just how much money is available for intimate pictures of the famous. While the photographers can make hundreds of thousands, there is a vast ecology of sites—places like TMZ—who will report and repost any new images, then sit back and let the traffic and the money roll in. Closer magazine may have paid for the [Middleton] pictures, but it's others who have made the real money from them."
As the article notes, sites like FreeOnes, which contains a plethora of links to other adult sites featuring both soft- and hardcore images of mostly adult performers, also gain when people start searching for scandalous images of a Kate Middleton.
"As you can see from the following safe for work (but still sleazy) graph," wrote Foxton, "the publication of the original pictures generated a huge spike in traffic from people looking for the nude pictures of Kate, which undoubtedly channeled a huge amount of cash into the pockets of a huge amount of people making their living on the internet.
"The hosts of Freeones," he continued, "who are based in the Netherlands, will have taken a cut, as will have the sites they link to, which offer scans of the pictures from Closer magazine at 99p a time. Indeed, I feel a little guilty writing this piece, as my own disapproving piece on the Middleton nudes generated 300,000 hits for the Telegraph."
Foxton does a pretty good job of explaining the ecosystem of celebrity content, and then somewhat surprisingly adds a comment explaining why the porn sites get more of a pass than the TMZs of the world.
"The thing that really disturbs me in all of this is that the women's consent doesn't seem to matter—quite the opposite. All that matters is because there's a market for the pictures, they should expect to have their privacy grossly violated. ... That's the difference between this sort of thing and regular pornography. The women who are at number one and number two on the Freeones 'Babe list' have chosen to get naked for the cameras. They're getting paid for what they do, and are often doing it under an assumed name. They're getting nude on their own terms, and manifestly enjoying it, which makes the whole thing above board, in my book, at least."
Not only that, but in decrying the fact that the sizeable amounts of money that drive the paparazzi probably means that the worst forms of abuse are likely to continue, Foxton proposes a highly civilized solution: "If you like looking at pictures of naked women, may I humbly suggest you only view the free-range ones?"
