Four years ago, a guy named Steve found a girl he called Tawnee, took some pictures of her, and watched the phenomenon that is TawneeStone.com turn them into adult Internet legends.
It wasn’t the first single-girl site, but it set the standard for success and in some minds, proved that such sites could make money.
Fast-forward to today. Everyone has a single-girl site – or at least it seems that way.
Large programs took note and started creating them. Girls are being discovered in places like Ohio and Nebraska. Affiliate programs are losing girls only to see them turn up elsewhere with new sites. Single-girl sites are being used as the lifeblood of new affiliate programs like BiminiBucks, Teen Revenue, and AspheriCash.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen it like this,” the aforementioned Steve, last name Lightspeed, founder of LightspeedCash, says. “We’re seeing a new girl being launched almost every day now.”
It’s a certifiable craze, perpetuated by a bunch of questionably sane individuals.
The last time something like this happened, some guys were rolling around in a bus or a van or a boat. They were hunting MILFs or teens or sending out chicks to pick up other chicks. They were getting someone to try something for the first time or pretending to be pimps or turning everyday scenarios into wild sex romps.
And then, somewhere along the line, someone remembered that porn wasn’t about concocting highfalutin scenarios in which people engage in sex. They remembered that porn was about hot chicks.
Eureka!
OK, OK, they also realized this reality crap is expensive to produce and decided it was time for something new.
“Those sites are expensive as hell,” says SilverCash founder and one-time reality site maven Mike Price. “A reality site was costing us $50,000 to $80,000 a site, depending on who shot it. It just wasn’t worth it.”
Price’s next move? Single-girl sites, seven in all, including Sara Sexton, Hot Haley, and the delectable Dream Kelly.
The beauty of single-girl sites, other than the fact that they’re actually about girls, is they keep the best tenant of reality sites – exclusive content – and do away with half the cost.
Whereas a reality site typically requires multiple models and a half day of shooting time per scene, content for a single-girl site can be turned out much faster. Lightspeed, for instance, usually shoots his girls once a month, producing five to 10 site updates per shoot.
While it’s cheaper for large companies to enter the single-girl realm, it also has become easier for the smaller fish to enter the pool.
David and Goliath
Set aside SilverCash and other large, multiniche affiliate programs for a moment. Such companies can afford to base their content on what the market dictates. “It was just another market to tap, and we’re doing well with it,” Price says.
So are the “independents.” These are the girls who set out to make it on their own, albeit sometimes with a little help. Melissa Midwest, Raven Riley, Arika Ames, Ashley Brookes, Aimee Sweet, and Kirsten are but a few of this breed, and their ranks are being joined daily by like-minded babes with an entrepreneurial spirit.
RavenRiley.com launched last December, after her then-photographer and current business partner, jaYMan, discovered Riley while shooting another girl. Through heavy promotion, a lot involving Riley herself, RavenRiley.com has become something of a phenomenon.
Lightspeed has credited Tawnee Stone with putting him on the map. Similarly, Riley has certainly proved lucrative for her business partners. In July, her site spawned the affiliate program jaYManCash and a new company, Third Pentacle, of which Riley, jaYMan, and the site’s third partner, Tom Leach, are owners.
While some have pointed to marketing and connections (jaYMan is a longtime admin at webmaster forum Netpond) exclusively as the reason for Riley’s success, they’re overlooking one factor.
“It was clear to me from the very beginning that Raven knew what she wanted, and she had the personality, looks, and motivation to obtain it,” jaYMan says. “All our connections and marketing did was speed up an inevitable process. She was going to the top either by rocket ship or flip-flops. We just happen to own a rocket ship.”
On the other hand, you have girls without rocket ships, like Arika Ames, who started ArikaAmes.com with her then-husband in June 2004.
Although the site is popular, Ames believes she’s been hurt by not having more muscle behind her. “Not being with any program, things have gone a little slower,” she admits, adding that she hopes to incorporate two more sites and form her own affiliate program by year’s end.
That is, if she has time. Ames is not only the content, but also runs her site while trying to find time for a social life.
“It’s difficult at times, but it all works out,” she says. “For the first year or so my entire life was the site. I just started getting my social life back a little. I’m planning on going back to school in the spring, so that will take some time out, but I will come up with some sort of balance between the two.”
Despite her modest success, which she says adds to her motivation, operating an independent site is more work than anything else.
“I do what I do,” Ames says. “I stick with it and try not to get discouraged. It is tough at times, but if you work at it, good things come.”
Another of the varied success stories in the independent ranks comes from Aimee Sweet. Along with her husband, John, Sweet built AimeeSweet.com into a brand and later developed the ModelCash affiliate program, which also houses sites for Angel Cassidy and Avy Scott.
While success stories of independent single-girl sites vary, overall they are relatively few. As any successful independent will you, it’s a lot of hard work, and as anyone else will tell you, you’d better have something amazing starting out.
“A single-girl site that isn’t part of a program can still succeed, but it’s rare,” Lightspeed says. “The girl better be smokin’ hot and the content amazing.”
The bastardization of the single girl
Most people wouldn’t call it a bastardization at all. They’d call it the introduction of some much-needed diversity, but that’s not as catchy a title.
Take a look around: 99 out of 100 single-girl sites feature teenage, Caucasian blondes or brunettes who only do softcore.
That’s all about to change.
In fact, in some cases, it’s already started to change. Take a look at 69G’s KissPromise.com, JoinRightNow’s GayaPatel.com, IACash’s CuteLatina.com, or WildWestCash’s ExtremeHolly.com.
Those sites feature girls who are black, Indian, Latin, and a girl who loves gonzo-extreme hardcore action, respectively.
With the influx of new sites, the single-girl market is changing.
“The market is going to segment — in niche, language, sex, etc.,” says Fred Valiquette, owner of BrainCash, which is home to seven single-girl sites. “In the end, we’re returning to what made the Web popular in the first place: the amateur market.”
“We’re already seeing a new push into making extreme solo-girl sites, which is a huge departure from the ‘aren’t I cute stripping out of my panties’-type sites that exist now,” Lightspeed says.
Extreme single-girl sites start with ExtremeHolly.com, who truly lives up to her name. If it’s filthy, Holly does it — and with a hyperbolic fervor that borders on mania.
WildWestCash owner Easton (like Madonna, only one name needed) made ExtremeHolly.com his program’s first pay site. He’s been rewarded with an increase in sales each month since its December 2004 launch.
“There aren’t too many hardcore single-girl sites, but I think that trend will change as the market oversaturates itself in one sector. Additionally, a lot of sub-niches are still desperate for more choice as far as pay sites in general go,” he says. “We have three other sites besides our single-girl sites, but I went with a single-girl site as my first pay site because I knew the potential was tremendous, and this market is far less saturated than the general market.”
Easton followed up Holly with ExtremeAlex.com in November.
Similar to the success of Extreme Holly, IACash has struck gold with CuteLatina.com. IACash has several garden-variety single-girl sites, and then they have Talia – a curvy Latin beauty who does just about everything – though perhaps not quite as extremely as Holly.
Since its launch in June 2000, CuteLatina.com has been IACash’s top performer. That is, until September of this year, when the company launched Lactalia.com, featuring the same model, pregnant. “I’m really seeing the power of promoting single girls in targeted niches, and I think we’re going to see even more of this in the future,” says IACash owner Kenny B.
Diverting from the set path for a second, there’s a market that hasn’t been considered — the gay market, where single-boy sites, if you will, are just starting to pop up.
Lightspeed, for one, called the gay market untapped terrain for single-model sites.
“I’m positive solo-boy sites will do great,” he says.
One of the first is JoshTucker.com, the brainchild of AlleyBucks founder John Paul, who says the lack of single-boy sites is a microcosm of the gay market itself.
“I have yet to see an innovation originate in the gay market,” he says. “And honestly, I see very few companies in the gay market quickly adapting innovations that are coming from the straight market.”
Paul points to one of the initial promotions he did with Tucker – offering other webmasters fan signs – as an example.
“We were the first to do fan signs with a male model. That amazes me, considering you see fan signs being done for single-girl sites every day,” he says. “When we announced Josh would be making them, we got dozens of requests on [straight webmaster forum] GFY and only a couple on the gay webmaster forums. The gay webmasters had never heard of fan signs before and were asking us, ‘What can we use these for? What is their purpose?’ They didn’t understand how powerful a marketing tool they were.”
Since the initial launch of JoshTucker.com, Paul has been educating and adding affiliates hand over fist, and has two more single-model sites in development.
Despite these success stories, not everyone is sold on the power of the sub-niche, at least in the straight marketplace. For the voice of dissention, we turn to Price: “I don’t see people joining those sites. Whether it be blond or brunette, I still think it’s the young, white girl that converts.”
Saturation and then some
Almost everyone thinks the single-girl site market will shake out at some point, which begs the question, what gives a single-girl site staying power?
It’s the girl, stupid.
“The single-girl market is growing because personality converts and retains,” Kenny B says.
Looking at RavenRiley.com, jaYMan largely credits Raven’s personality and member interaction as the defining factors in the site’s success. Braincash’s Valiquette, who counts 3-year-old ChristineYoung.com as his top-rated site, agrees with that recipe for success. “The main difference between the successful single-girl sites and the others is that the girls are really there to answer email and do live shows,” he says.
One shining example from the amateur site market is NaughtyAllie.com, which is known for member interaction — five cam shows a week, voyeur cams, personal email, etc.
“I guess you could say she’s kind of a surrogate girlfriend,” says Jake Chase, Allie’s husband and co-owner of the NaughtyAllie.com affiliate program, NaughtyBank.
With everyone equating site interactivity with success in the single-girl marketplace, the maestro himself remains a bit of an anomaly. None of the Lightspeed Girls ever have broadcast a live cam show, and none of them ever have answered a member’s email.
So what gives a single-girl site staying power, Steve?
“That’s like asking how long is a ball of string. There are so many girls, and for the most part they are hot, so there’s got to be something extra to make the site unique,” Lightspeed says.
“One of the things that really defines all the top sites is they have full-time professional marketing teams with good-sized budgets dedicated to promoting the girls. The hottest girl in the world’s site won’t make a dime if it isn’t marketed well.”
Movement? Trend? Fad? All of the above?
Movements in porn come and go. Mega sites are a thing of the past. The reality site market is left with only a few big players. Single-girl sites ….
“I see it as another fad. It will eventually dissipate, and the few hot girls here and there will survive,” Price says. “The problem with single-girl sites from a surfer’s point of view is, you can only look at so many pictures of one girl before you get bored with it.”
Kind of like you can only watch so many boy/girl videos before you move on to double anal? While everyone needs variety, surfers are undoubtedly gravitating to specific girls and program owners are making big bucks off the Next Door Nikki, Little Aprils, and Tiffany Teens of the porn world.
“I think the rush is on because people have only heard about the success stories, but soon there will be floods of failure horror stories too,” Lightspeed says. “That will probably make a few people rethink.”
The content agrees.
“It’s a trend,” Ames says. “Something else will come along, and that will be the next big thing.”
Of course, that’s not going to stop anybody, is it?
“I think a lot of people think that they can pump out a few solo girls and make millions,” Valiquette says. “I’m sorry, but it will not happen.”
Undoubtedly, someone is going to make millions though. Trend or not, thankfully, online porn is once again all about the girls.
