Last month, adult video chat site RX9.com got a healthy dose of mainstream crossover exposure when it shared audiences and feeds with WXTB Tampa radio station 98 Rock's Bubba The Love Sponge show.
This week, however, Bubba was booted off the air by WXTB-FM 98 Rock owner Clear Channel as part of their brand new zero tolerance policy, thereby ending RX9.com reign of on-air promotion.
After being threatened with a $715,000 fine by the FCC for indecency due to complaints a Jacksonville, FL citizen made against the Bubba, Clear Channel opted to fire Love instead of pay the fine. Days later, Clear Channel yanked Howard Stern off the six major markets that carry his nationally syndicated show and promised he would not return until he cleaned up his act. RX9.com owner and operator Jim Arters decried the recent wave of censorship that nipped his project in the bud in a statement released this afternoon.
"What they forget to tell you," Arters stated, "is that their e-mail and other mailboxes get flooded by people who want personalities like Bubba and Howard Stern on the air."
Arters is upset because the Bubba The Love Sponge show carried RX9.com's feed while simultaneously interviewing an adult model as part of a weekly on-air promotion, which lead to some of the biggest exposure his company has ever had.
"No one has ever done a live video feed from the Internet along with talking to the model in person," noted Arters.
RX9.com is part of a growing network of live video chat sites founded by Canadian-based 2Much.net Internet Services that work outside the reach of the FCC.
"This and the Janet Jackson boob incident are just such silly scandals," said 2Much.net president Mark Prince. "It's too bad, since RX9 and Bubba's approach was so innovative and made for good business. As far as I'm concerned, they can keep squashing the adult business in the U.S., since all those consumers are going to turn outside the country, turn to us."
Bubba, in an effort to free himself of broadcaster shackles, may have been planning ahead when he said, a few days prior to his dismissal, that he'd like to make his show a subscriber-based satellite radio program. While the FCC licenses these forms of communication, they are not bound by the same rules because they are subscriber-based.
