Where on the Web is the "world's largest online sexual encounter arena?" If you're drawing a blank, put your monocle away, detective, because Consumption Junction is the answer and the place. That's because with just 28 little keystrokes, you can access the erotic fantasies of more than 110,000 women.
So say goodbye to those tired fantasy scenarios that involve priapic pizza delivery guys, mechanics, and pool cleaners. Say hello to having sex in an alley, y'know, "dirty, but really good." Or how ?bout "full penetration in the supermarket, in the freezer section?" If those romantic situations are more up your alley and you want to feed nearly any fantasy your sick cranium can dream up, Consumption Junction is the place for you.
But before discounting the power of brazen witticisms, it's important to note the site's traffic numbers. Consumption Junction, or "C-Junction" as it's often called, serves an average of 3.5 billion advertisements each month through banners, text links, and content sponsorships. According to one of the company's principals, the site averages 7 million unique visitors every month, with 4 million page impressions daily.
C-Junction offers a plethora of downloadable games, sex clips, sound bites, and enough tricks and treats to please any jack o'lantern with eyes and a pulse. Unique editorials on bodily functions, secretions, and other pressing issues are also thoroughly discussed by cogent writers armed with senses of humor.
"The editorials were conceived as a place to inform C-Junction visitors of the latest happenings on the site, new functionality, new posts, etcetera," says Paul Dinin, the site's self-proclaimed editor grande, "but eventually they mutated into an outlet for screwy rants and ruminations on topics as far flung as ?The Social Relevance of the Spice Girls: Critiquing Duality in Modern Consumer Culture' and ?Dude, My Vomit was Orange Last Night.'
"Though we've been labeled as champions of the First Amendment," adds Dinin, "I don't know that the editorials push the limits of free speech quite as much as they test the boundaries of good taste. But, hey, if the Pulitzer Prize committee is running low on candidates this year, we can certainly clear some space in our trophy room."
There's an impressive degree of hardware and software behind it all: A combination of 25 Unix and Windows 2000-based servers, capable of pushing 250 megabytes of sustained bandwidth, broadcast the company's wisdom to the masses. This includes five load-balanced Windows 2000 servers, each a dual Pentium 4 box with a half-gig of RAM and 318-gigabyte SCSCI drives in a RAID 5 array. These servers extract data from a clustered Microsoft SQL solution made up of a trio of servers with hardware configurations identical to the servers.
"Most of the C-Junction site is created by the SQL servers," says Rick Latona, the Atlanta-based company's president and CEO. "They take the input from our content company and generate static HTML pages that are culled from the ASP of our live site. The pages are generated every night and propagated out to our live servers." The redundant process cuts server load on the SQL servers as well as the site's eventual upload onto a surfer's browser.
All updates to the site's code and content updates are performed by a staging server. "Once the updates have been tested, they're moved to a folder that's constantly monitored by RoboCopy software. The software notices any changes and automatically propagates the changed files to the five live Web servers," Latona says.
Two redundant active directories handle all user permissions on the system's servers, to enable centralized management of users and permissions from a single interface across the quintet of Windows servers. An extra pair of active directory servers also oversees redundant DNS services.
"We have an additional server whose sole purpose is to run our LiveStats reporting software. Each Web server is set up to create daily log files. LiveStats accesses the previous day's log files from each of the servers, incorporates that data into its internal SQL database, eventually deleting the old log files. The software also accesses the current day's log files to provide up to the minute statistics reports," Latona says.
Since the company's primary platform is based on Microsoft Windows, NationalNet manages and maintains most of the company's Unix-based servers. "These servers have the same hardware configuration of our Windows servers and handle all of the pay sites for our CJBucks.com affiliate program," Latona says.
In early March, the company added the services of "Jimmy3way" to help administer its affiliate program, CJBucks.com. The former marketing director of TopCash/TopBucks runs Jimmy3way.com. "One of the reasons we brought Jimmy in is because of his unique combination of experience on both sides of the affiliate program, as both a Webmaster and as part of a program," Latona says.
CJBucks runs Mansion Productions' MPA2 affiliate program software from a Unix platform; its server is hosted via NationalNet, but managed and maintained by Mansion. The Macintosh OS operating system found on the servers is a proprietary version of FreeBSD from NationalNet.
"For four years we've been sending traffic and sign-ups to sponsor programs. Starting our own Webmaster sponsorship program was the next logical step," says Latona. "Don't take it the wrong way; we've no intention to replace all of the advertisements on our various traffic sites with our own ads. Quite to the contrary, we now can offer reciprocal sign-ups.
"For the programs willing to send traffic to C-Junction," he continues, "we can guarantee sending traffic and sign-ups to them. We've also increased our traffic base by having e-mail collection boxes on tours and exit consoles. Most importantly, we're creating excellent sites for our Webmasters to promote and make money.
"Our pay sites all have excellent domains, the best content and many have original content," Latona says. "We've used best of bread technologies and partners for development of the graphics, content, software and hosting. We use three processors on a cascading system as well as dialers and cross sells to maximize how much can be made."
Staying focused on the endgame helps keep Latona and his crew motivated while executing such a labor-intensive regimen necessitated by the running of such a successful site. Of course, a keen eye on the bottom line also helps.
"There is a lot of money to be made in this business. I hope that ConsumptionJunction.com will still have its fans visit the site in 30 years," Latona says.
As far as his views on chargebacks, issuing credits, and recurring billing, Latona prefers to cross that bridge when his horse gets thirsty. "Ask me again in a few months," he says. "For now, I can only say that we are going to kiss our customer's asses [to accommodate them] and use Epoch Systems for our processing."
Latona freely volunteers that he's yet to learn HTML and couldn't design anything to save his life. "But I'm quite good at creating profitable business relationships between multiple parties," he says.
For newbie Webmasters out in Cyberland, Latona's advice can be summed up in a concise mantra: "Work hard and automate whenever possible."
"Personally," he says, "I don't like business ideas that involve tricks of the moment. I don't want to start each month trying to figure out how I'm going to get traffic. Instead, we focus on building products that create long-term, recurring, loyal traffic." He questions how search engine optimization experts plan to maintain steady amounts of traffic in the future. "How about spyware experts? Will they get the same long-term traffic base?"
Marc Womack, the company's COO, welcomes any opportunity for publicity, treating it as an invaluable business tool and commodity. The often-controversial fare found on the site reflects this.
"Documented violence and sensational news stories are good for our business," says Womack. "C-Junction is, at its core, a place for people to come and see the depths of mankind's depravity. Unfortunately, 9/11 was a great time for our business because we were one of the few sites that had footage of the attack and managed to keep our site up and running. And we were one of the few sites out there to post the entire Daniel Pearl video."
The late Pearl was the reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was abducted and executed by terrorist sympathizers last year while on assignment in Karachi, Pakistan. His fate was confirmed in late February 2002, and the controversial videotape footage made by Pearl's abductors stunned and saddened viewers worldwide with its graphic depiction of the last moments of their victim's life.
Womack sees his Web portal as a refuge for those seeking shocking and irreverent entertainment with uncensored content, a detour from everyday life's complacency.
"Whenever people are shooting and killing one another, we're posting the content for millions to see," he says. "Often, all people see of war is a candy-coated, propaganda version of the events. We show the brains splattered on the sidewalk. Our content shows what war, or anything else in this twisted life, is really like. It's up to our visitors to decide how to react to this. You may not like the content we post. That's fine. We're not here to give everyone a warm and snuggly feeling."
