There's something about old-time porn and erotica. For some, it's nostalgia, a crush on a model or actress, or remembering a secret youth. But it's also a fascination with what's come in the past; the models, the performers, the look and style of and era; how it was shot, whether on film or photographed.
The recently launched VintageErotica.com taps into all of those elements, featuring adult content spanning much of the last century.
The site was launched by industry veterans Howie Klein and Cass Paley. Two years ago, former Caballero owner Klein purchased vintage video site Blue Vanities and Vintage Erotica mines its treasure trove, offering adult content from the turn of the century through the ‘80s.
The site features more than 8,000 movies, with new movie updates every day, and also provides 200,000 images, video streaming, 100 percent downloadable movies, a custom music player and a fully searchable database.
"It's the largest vintage library in the world," Klein proudly told AVN Online. "We hooked up with Webquest to put it together and it's been a year in the making.
The site boasts thousand of films, strung together by the decades.
"It's still a work in progress," Klein said. "It's so large, there's so much; it took so long to get everything up, taking it from film to DVD to digitizing it. There's a ton up stuff not up yet; we're doing it everyday."
Klein expects the membership site to appeal to a cross-generational audience, tapping into dreamy nostalgia and a curiosity for porn and erotica history over the past century.
"From the old Blue Vanities, we have customers from all over the world," Klein said. "People like the older stuff — the ‘70s and ‘80s is really popular. My taste is like that — I like those girls best. I'm from that era, when they were all natural."
The site includes superstars of the day such as the late Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace.
"This is before she ever did Deep Throat," Klein said.
Stepping back further, one will find strippers and pin-up girls of the '40s and ‘50s, such as Betty Page and Lilly St. Cyr.
"Or Candy Barr," he continued. "She was a famous stripper and made just one hardcore movie. And we have that."
"You'll find the first porno movie ever made, in Italy in 1911, and the first American porno ever made, around 1918," he added.
Klein and partner Paley plan greater expansion and additions to the site.
VintageErotica.com is part of the ColdHardCash affiliate program and since the sites launch in mid-April, traffic growth has been considerable.
"We're seeing a huge jump as the word get out about the site and we also locked in some great advertising and the conversions are through the roof," ColdHardCash Program Manager Christian Amico told AVN Online.
"Affiliates seem to love the site and the ad tool as we took a different approach to the tour them most classic erotica sites," Amico said.
The sites also features a blog and user-generated comments in the members area, sees a lot of enthusiastic exchanges.
"The fans of this niche are definitely true fans. We get comments like, 'you guys have truly put together a huge collection of erotic porn,' and 'Wow, I had no idea there was some much content available from the earlier decades. Thanks guys,'" Amico said.
Creating the site was something of a daunting task when it came to processing material spanning a good part of the 20th century.
"The real challenge was dealing with the large amount of content, we had over 15,000 videos to encode, categorize, name and move around," Amico told AVN Online. "But the huge amount of content allows us to have multiple daily updates, so no problems there."
Amico said, the site will have some new content additions coming up soon, including digitally re-mastered content, right now the team is mainly concentrating on webmasters and traffic right now.
"VintageErotica.com was built with a vision of creating a truly unique and compelling site that will provide real value to our surfers and offer amazing revenue opportunities to our affiliates," Amico said. "With the amount of content this site has and will continue to be updated with, it's just a huge online powerhouse. Our initial traffic conversion ratios are the lowest I have seen in my 15 years in this industry. Our webmasters will be offered all sorts of promo material and anything custom they may need to make this site one of the top vintage sites on the Web. Look for a lot more to follow from ColdHardCash.com."
This article originally appeared in the August 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
