CYBERSPACE—We couldn't help but notice that a lot of tube sites that were regularly called out for hosting pirated material have now cleaned up their acts and are actually trying to be socially conscious—and one of the ways that RedTube, a MindGeek subsidiary, is hoping to do that is by sponsoring a New York City subway station.
As anyone who's familiar with The City knows, it's experiencing a bit of a subway crisis: Not enough trains; trains not running on time; cars overstuffed with commuters causing additional delays—the list goes on, to the point where one of the proposals being seriously considered is buying new subway cars with no seats, so everyone will have to be a straphanger.
To alleviate some of the overcrowding, New York pushed ahead with its long-planned Second Avenue Line, one segment of which, between 96th and 63rd Streets, opened on January 1, and the plans are eventually to extend the line north to 125th Street and south to Hanover Square—but that'll take a lot of bucks, and there's currently a bit of a battle taking place over how it will be funded and who will fund it: the city or the state.
Enter RedTube, whose VP Alex Taylor recently sent a letter to NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo offering at least $600,000 to "adopt" a subway station, which it would decorate with RedTube ads and red-themed artwork. And since the site reportedly gets 20 million visitors daily, they can probably afford it.
"We here at RedTube are eager to lend a hand and give back to our loyal New York fans and would like to officially submit our application for consideration to sponsor a subway station for an annual fee," Taylor wrote in his letter proposing the "adoption." "Should we make it through the application process, we were thinking we could literally adorn the station we sponsor as well as a number of trains in red/RedTube branding so people could actually ride a red tube."
The letter was in response to the governor's plan, first floated in July, to create a sort of public/private partnership to fund the subway system, called the Subway Partnership Program. Cuomo hopes to attract a number of New York corporations to invest in the subway system, which after all carries most of their employees to work each day. The plan involves 72 subway stations, an equal number in each of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens boroughs. According to the website Metro.us, the stations "were selected based on several factors including the highest number of customer complaints regarding station condition, high volume of traffic (ridership and tourist destinations) and intersections with several lines at transfer points."
However, as NBC4-TV in New York cautioned, "It was not clear whether the authorities intended to take the application seriously (and adult sites are well known for publicly stunts like this one)."
But the company doesn't seem to be short on innovative ideas. Just a couple of months ago, it announced that it was opening an online greeting card shop (which so far only has a landing page with a link to the XXX material) and that it was also sponsoring an amateur soccer team, Washington Square FC, whose players now sport RedTube's SFW logo on their jerseys.
Pictured: RedTube's idea of what its adopted subway station might look like.
