The legend is an old one, but worth repeating. Sometime in the mid-1960s, as the 20th century “sexual revolution” was getting underway, a big-ticket Washington, D.C., callgirl reputedly complained how “all the Goddamn amateurs are ruining it for us professionals.” The reason I dredge up the time-honored remark, is because the adult online industry could shortly be singing a variation on the same tune, wondering if all the free sex bloggers across the Internet will hijack subscription-based customers.
For the past couple years, the mainstream news media have been asking a similar question. Upstart blogs and websites have been actively usurping the functions of traditional print and TV news. Online political gossip mills like The Drudge Report were able to break stories ahead of the “CBS Evening News” and The New York Times, and that presented a problem. At first, the professionals snubbed the bloggers, calling them “partisan,” “uninformed,” “irresponsible,” and accusing them of being “without accountability” and working in their underwear. However, very quickly, Internet pressure came into play, and now every opinion writer and cable news anchor is either blogging or having an intern do it for him.
The furor at the end of 2005, when it was discovered that underage boys who were running their own webcam operations from their bedrooms, was the porn industry’s equivalent of The Drudge Report—only a great deal more alarming. For an industry that has always walked on eggshells regarding the protection of children, the news that kids were doing it for themselves could only come as a serious jolt. Without an adult to aid and abet them, these jailbait entrepreneurs had even short circuited the limitations of PayPal and credit card authorization by demanding gifts from Amazon.com for their services, thus keeping themselves in iPods and XBoxes—well under the banking and credit card record radar. They were, of course, extreme cases. Most of the amateurs online resemble the anonymous fan boys who run JennaFatigue.blogspot.com – an exhaustive journal of everything Jenna Jameson – or the obsessive collector of 1960s print soft porn who displays his best stuff at NakedHippies.blogspot.com, or the lady who keeps an explicit, and photographically illustrated, record of her oral adventures at ACumWhoreDiary.com. On a slightly different level, every fetish photographer now has a premium gallery on his or her website and expects to collect subscriptions for minimal content. The point ultimately comes when the consumer – no matter how prurient and dedicated – has to declare a saturation point, when enough is enough and he can’t handle another link or credit card hit.
So far, the mainstream media have coped with their online crisis by adapting and co-opting. The latter tactic was greatly aided by some 1990s-style dot-com innovators like blog mogul Nick Denton, who had the idea of bundling blogs with similar themes, maximizing visitor hits by aggressive cross promotion, and then – equally aggressively – selling advertising for the whole bundle. Denton chose the gossip business and packaged a number of metropolitan insider blogs like Gawker of New York, Wonkette of Washington, D.C., and Defamer in Los Angeles under the collective umbrella of Gawker Media. Denton hit pay dirt when, at the end of 2005, The New York Times bought Gawker Media for a reported $32 million.
Gossip and porn are far from being one and the same, and it’s doubtful that the Gawker, blog-bundle business model, would work in adult entertainment. But Denton’s innovative thinking has to be worth checking out. The online world is a place of constant change, motion, and growth. Techno-evolution is at work, and everything changes from one moment to the next. Death and taxes may be guaranteed in the real world, but in cyberspace, progress and adaptation rule supreme. Just like the proverbial shark, we swim forward or die.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com
