SEE Magazine
Copyright © 1999. All Rights Reserved
At The Back
My Messy Bedroom
BY JOSEY VOGELS"People pay up to a million dollars a year to see people popping balloons?! You must be joking."
"Nope, I know another site that charges $19 a month for pictures of fat, hairy men."
Meet the pioneers of the Internet, the folks in the porn industry. Sorry, that’s "adult entertainment on the Internet," thank you very much.
"We don’t like the word porn," says Fay Sharp, affectionately known as Gramma, thanks to a local news article that described her as a "grandmotherly porn peddler."
Sharp and her partner brought their porn peddlin’ friends to Montreal last month for XWebExpo ’99, a trade show for adult website owners and companies that make money off them. Where else are you gonna find content like videos of pregnant/lactating women for your website. You gotta network.
And trust me, it’s worth it. "It’s the gold rush of the ‘90s," as one young porn entrepreneur described to me. Some say porn on the Web is a multimillion, and some say billion-dollar-a-year industry.
"It accounts for about 90 per cent of the commercial traffic on the Internet," says Ron Cadwell, president of CWIE, one of the largest hosting companies on the Internet, and the guy who enlightened me about the balloon poppers. Cadwell describes himself as the landlord of adult websites.
At least they’re sharing the wealth. Practically every booth that covered the downtown hotel room floor featured a buxom blonde in a short skirt giving away free stuff. I am now the proud owner of a foam de-stresser boob, a muscle boy mouse pad and a Watch More Porn tank top.
But it’s not just big boys raking in the dough. Amber Black started out running her own amateur site when she saw all these naked pictures of women on the Internet and, as she says in her charming British accent, thought it would be "really horny" to take some pictures of herself like that.
"My boyfriend took the pictures, and I was shy at first. That lasted about ten minutes."
Next thing you know Amber’s spraying herself with whipped cream and getting creative with veggies. She doesn’t do hardcore but has just done her first girl/girl shoot. She loves the positive feedback from the men who come to see her.
"They like that I’m not a porno star with fake tits. It’s a great way to lose your sexual inhibitions. I like to think of the guys looking at me and getting off."
No doubt she also likes the beach house in Antigua where she now lives and runs her very lucrative business from.
Not all the women at the show are making money by providing "content," as it is referred to in the industry. There are plenty of women working behind the scenes. Like 22-year-old Kia. She is the creative director of The Sex Tracker, a year-old company that’s made a successful business out of monitoring traffic to adult sites to help those in the industry maximize profits. Like so many people in this industry, Kia came out of the corporate computer world. Some friends started Sex Tracker in someone’s basement and eventually they all quit their day jobs to run the company full-time.
The number of young people making big bucks in this industry is quite astounding. At the People’s Choice awards on Friday night, Pushrod, who was seated at our table, pointed out that the guy who just won the award for best Niche Pay Site (Web’s Youngest Women) is a 22-year-old making $15 million a year. "But he’s finishing his college degree anyway. He’s got a good head on his shoulders."
Pushrod was with his wife, a lovely woman who has her own website, www.sexysquirter.com.
"See this vase on the table? On a good day, she could fill it."
You can see how you’d get a little desensitized after a while in this business.
"When you’re looking at porn all day and Photoshopping butt zits off porn star after porn star, a naked person could walk by and you don’t even notice," admits Kia.
Colin Rowntree, who won an award for his fetish website, Wasteland.com, was in the middle of shooting an abduction scene in one of the hotel rooms upstairs when someone called him down to talk to me. He told me nothing really shocks him anymore, though a recent request for images of inflatable pool toys did get a raised eyebrow out of him.
It’s amazing what you can justify when you’re making money hand over fist. Of course, everyone in the room is an expert at this.
All of them claim their sites to be more artistic, of higher quality, and classier, than all the others. But really now, how classy can you make sites with names like See Me Pee and Screw U.
Rowntree, originally a glamour photographer who describes Wasteland as, "Time magazine in latex," says he tries to keep images artistic. That is, "as artistic as nipple clips and rubber balls in your mouth can get."
Whether you take moral issue with the material or not, a bigger concern for most people is the accessibility of adult content, especially to children. Then again, as the owner of one site said to me in a smooth southern drawl, "You can have films full of blood and violence and people bein’ blown away by an Uzi but you show one boob and it’s, ‘Good god, call your governor.’"
Still, folks in the industry are concerned about kids having access to porn. It’s in their interest to be concerned says Ron Cadwell, who is married and trying to start a family.
"Concerns about kids seeing this stuff draws attention to the industry and invites government regulation. The industry doesn’t want this. They also don’t want kids on their sites because they don’t pay. If a kid charges something to his parent’s credit card, we’ll likely never see that money because the parent will cancel the charge."
And while Cadwell says there is a certain amount of responsibility on the part of parents to keep their kids away from Internet porn, he would like to see some measures put in place to deal with accessibility. For example, he says, "Websites could be rated according to how explicit they are."
Colin Rowntree would like to go even further. "Adult sites could include some kind of tag that browser software like Netscape would recognize. The software companies would need to co-operate in doing this but it could very easily be put in place and would put an end to this whole debate."
Like it or not, porn on the Internet is here to stay. Some believe it is what will drive the commercial success of the Internet.
Just as porn went from film to video and launched the whole home video business, some say porn is driving the future of commerce on the Internet.
In fact, many of the companies I spoke to already have a non-adult corporate side that is taking advantage of what they’re learning from their adult sites. Then they can make money off all of us.
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