Understanding AltPorn Popularity Contests

Blue Blood dot comIf you want exposure for yourself or your projects or you are seeking expertise, then it matters how busy or influential a web property is. There are many third party tools to assist internet professionals in ascertaining a site’s true size, beyond its hype. As a site surfer, most people respond to how interesting the site is to them personally, taking into account aspects such as ease of use, subject matter, quality, wit, visual appeal, production values, and just how generally entertaining or informative a site strikes them as being. For getting the word out there and for believing what you read, it is important to consider the source, not just for agenda, but for overall accuracy and reach. The bigger a site’s audience, the more I feel it has a responsibility to present quality journalism.

When I hear a new idea, I like to familiarize myself with the source, so I can assess the extent to which I should integrate that new idea into my own worldview. Every time I’ve been a guest speaker at the SXSW festival, I’ve also attended a ton of other speakers’ interactive media panels because I love learning and part of the point of professional conventions is to become even more expert in one’s field. SXSW is fun for me, not only because a lot of friends of mine are there, but because it has exposed me to a lot of interesting new ideas and people.

When there was a panelist speaking or site mentioned I was unfamiliar with, I felt the itch of a phantom limb, wanting to check out the stats on sites he or she was presenting as examples. When I work online normally, I have an array of professional tools at my fingertips to research a source and assess how popular and influential a particular site is. A lot of people do SXSW with laptops or extremely web-enabled cell phones (I just have a regular Blackberry I am not a power-user of.) and look stuff up online constantly and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Now none of the dozens of tools for checking how popular a site is are perfect. Each one is helpful to a point and they tend to each weigh different factors. While none should be taken as gospel, utilizing multiple benchmarks tends to give an excellent ballpark metric for size of audience. Realistically, even if you had a login to a particular site’s stats, you still only get a ballpark idea because different log analyzers parse unique visits, raw visits, types of data viewed, and referrals differently. Back in 2006, Beeker the StatsNrrd, over at AltPorn.net started doing an Altporn ‘A’ List Alexa Rankings chart. Over time, as some sites went under and some were added to the chart, that list grew to twenty-some-odd sites. It is not precisely the list I would select in a Sesame Street game of “Which one of these things is not like the others?”, but it is a pretty good resource for comprehensive accurate measures of sites within the altporn genre. Sometimes I wish APN would count all of Blue Blood’s sites aggregated together because I feel that would better demonstrate Blue Blood’s market position, but the way APN does it is certainly reasonable. I wish a site like BrokenDollz were higher up in the rankings because I like chatting with webmaster Judas, but the numbers just are what they are.

As a longtime reader of the Fleshbot sex blog, I know that, like me, Fleshbot is familiar with the AltPorn.net list because they have referenced it. So I was surprised when new Fleshbot editor, and former That Strange Girl webmaster, Lux Alptraum picked up the most bizarre toplist of altporn sites by someone named Sean Adamz whose site ranks . . . well, the numbers just are what they are and the site Fleshbot pulled the list from ranks low. Honestly, I was surprised that anyone at Fleshbot would use such a poor source, but I was shocked that Lux Alptraum would. Although I understand Lux Alptraum’s major at Columbia was urban studies, Columbia does boast one of the finest journalism schools in the world. So Lux must know better than to source information that way and she either, having recently started a new gig, didn’t realize how seriously people take Fleshbot, thought everyone would read the fine print and just view it as humorous, or, as some disenchanted Fleshbot readers commented on this article, maybe she was having an off day. Perhaps she was busy packing for her trip to Vegas and just had a word count she had to meet; Fleshbot’s increasing focus on quantity over quality may be reducing . . . quality and accuracy.

The term altporn didn’t come about until 2001, nine years after Blue Blood launched. I believe the expression was coined by SuicideGirls CEO Sean Suhl and some porn video director, who had shot for SG and for Killshot’s EroticBPM, or perhaps an unheralded PR rep of theirs came up with the altporn term. I prefer the term counterculture erotica to altporn because I founded Blue Blood in print in 1992 and I feel the cohesive lifestyle aspect is larger than the sex aspect. (What I like is erotica; what the other guy likes is porn.)

Burning AngelSo I hesitate to call anything I do altporn, but, if everything were still on dead trees and a magazine distributor asked me what publications to shelve Blue Blood with, I would be familiar enough with the marketplace to know the answer is to rack Blue Blood with SuicideGirls, EroticBPM, GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and Burning Angel. A funny thing about web browsing vs. bookstore or newsstand browsing is that, although a journalist writing on the topic of altporn should be aware of all these web properties to be credible, many BlueBlood.net readers may have never heard of any of those sites.

I am not classifying these sites necessarily as a recommendation but as simple basic understanding of genre. From an artistic or punk or feminist activism standpoint, I feel Blue Blood is the polar opposite of some of these sites. There are a few sites by individual photographers I might like more and prefer to recommend, but a photographer site is simply a different niche, in the same way a photo book would be shelved in a different part of the bookstore, and, like it or not, this is what the same shelf holds from a marketing standpoint. A Blue Blood print reader would have most likely also been familiar with On Our Backs, Skin Two, O, Tattoo Savage, Taste of Latex, Future Sex, Propaganda, Ghastly, and the various other demographically similar mags, such as boing-boing or Axcess, likely to be shelved next to Blue Blood. The structure of print caused related products to be viewable together.

If there were not enough magazines in a genre, then there was no rackspace for them, so it was desirable not to be the only one. If an adult newsstand or liquor store didn’t really stock alternative press, then Blue Blood got shelved with the Hustler publications, Swank, Club, Penthouse, Playboy, and suchlike. But it sold through best in locations where the other magazines had more in common. Fast forward to the online world and there seems to be a bit of a Highlander mentality where many people who run sites seem to believe there can only be one site of any particular sort. Because of the way web media is structured differently from printed media, it is actually possible for someone who loves one “altporn” site to be utterly unfamiliar with another. Coming from a magazine background myself, I have a decidedly inclusive and non-destructive bias in my approach to the marketplace.

Some of the impetus for this feature article on web traffic rankings in altporn stemmed from what should have been a really minor interaction Forrest Black had on Twitter. Having been involved with Blue Blood from the beginning and actively involved since the third print issue, Forrest Black is familiar with the reasons for being aware of genre. Feel free to call Forrest Black Blue Blood’s CTO or Art Director, but he is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and he sometimes plays on Twitter when he doesn’t feel like working on all that. So, because someone named Sean Adamz had friended Forrest on Twitter, Forrest noticed the initial flawed toplist authored by this Sean guy and immediately pointed out that he had only included one of the Blue Blood sites and had entirely left off GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM. Sean replied that he counted Blue Blood as a network (even though he had only listed the stats for GothicSluts), continued to leave serious players GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM off his list, got surreally aggro, and then messaged Forrest asking for instructions on how to do the stats on aggregating a network. Apparently Forrest had been generous with answering questions from this guy in the past, but I really don’t think someone should put together a purportedly definitive list if they just don’t have the skills or expertise to do so.

Speaking of Twitter, one of the people I first became acquainted with at SXSW is Weblogs entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who has pretty much the most entertaining Twitter on the site. Now I don’t need to see the specific benchmarks to have an idea that any project Jason Calacanis is involved in is probably influential. He is best known for selling the blog network he co-founded to AOL for $30 million. But, lest anyone think that the world of “altporn” is somehow more bitchy or petty than other areas of internet business, some of his recent Tweets regarding quantifying site popularity read:

“techcrunch please stop using Comscores bulls$%^t numbers. Quantcast Quantified numbers speak–everything else is sample based garbage. can people please stop quoting comScore’s b.s. numbers–they are garbage. Quantcast’s quantified program is the only accurate one out there. Alexa, Comscore, and Compete are sample based,gamed & totally inaccurate–do NOT use them please. put Quantcast on your site or zip it! :-) also,why doesn’t google analytics let you publish/certify some of your stats like Quantcast does? that would put an end to comscore nonsense.”

Full disclosure: I do not feel I am biased by Jason Calacanis having plied me (and a lot of people) with beer and pizza. I think all of this would be a lot more fun if everyone got together more often for beer and pizza. Or water and sushi for the carb-conscious. Or just more things which are IRL and friendly or at least professionally cordial. People get all spun out and just plain wrong on the internet 24/7. Then again, I could be at the adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas right now, but I decided that the ROI, on $9,000 worth of beer for the press coverage and affiliate marketing teams and business associates, wasn’t really good enough.

At any rate, the initial Sean Adamz posting nonsense to Twitter would have just been a situation where one expresses an informed opinion, has a 140 character conversation, and/or removes a troublemaker from the Twitter read list and forgets about it, except high traffic website Fleshbot reprinted the flawed list as Your Definitive Guide To The Web’s Top Ten Altporn Sites. The source list was so poorly-researched that it failed, even from a data entry perspective, transposing digits on the SuicideGirls ranking to make SG appear to be a few hundred slots less popular than it is. Now Fleshbot’s Lux Alptraum was quick to point out that she thought this was in no way a definitive list and, unlike the original author of this inaccurate list who had no words or explanation with his chart, Lux, being an actual writer, wrote something about each site and included sample pictures she selected from each one. (One slightly off-topic note on this is that (a) there is no period after the G in my name and (b) although Forrest Black and I did shoot the particular image selected, Blue Blood has published dozens of awesome photographers and I wouldn’t want anyone to think Forrest Black or I were trying to take credit for all photos Blue Blood ever put out, when Blue Blood has published practically a who’s who of such work, including Chad Michael Ward, Kelly Lind, Lori Mann, Christine Kessler, Justice Howard, Gunter Blum, Ashley Fontenot, Jim Hancock, Carlos Batts, Roman Sluka, Richard Kadrey, and many many more.)

I asked the folks who were left out for their thoughts on the matter, as well as the folks at AltPorn.net. APN could not be reached for comment, possibly because they are all getting drunk doing business at the aforementioned adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas this week. Scott Owens aka Killshot of EroticBPM was somewhere between resigned and sanguine, saying:

“It’s no big deal. I see it kinda like how kids these days try to make lists of all time greatest bands but don’t include anything before 1990. Ebpm is just like the classic rock of alt porn”

Chad Grant of DeviantNation hadn’t seen the article yet and thus had perhaps a bit more of a visceral gut reaction, as he initially said some rather unprintable things but expressed a desire to avoid “drama” with the potentially unbalanced. I would generally agree with him, but I had dismissed the original Sean Adamz altporn toplist as not worth a lot of attention and then it got picked up by Fleshbot which, according to web traffic benchmarks mentioned here, appears to have a lot of readers. I’m a big believer in education and sometimes I feel it is important to bring accuracy. DeviantNation’s Chad Grant made the important point that the concept of alternative is going to mean different things to different people, saying:

“i dont really see those other sites even remotely relevant because they’re so late to the party and non existant in terms of an actual site (community, members and content) . . . we all have very different interests though, we’re in a very wide group of “alt porn” but that means different things to everyone . . . DN obviously conveys what we think “alternative” should stand for, but that doesnt mean we are better than anyone else that wants to have their interpretation of it. its a very all encompassing word . . . The author it is attributed too Lux … that’s the old owner of “That Strange Girl” that claimed her alt site never made [it] for every reason under the sun except her or it’s own shortcomings”

Gods GirlsIn initial response to the Fleshbot piece, annaliese nielsen of GodsGirls had feelings largely similar to my own, telling me:

“i did see the article and i think it was pretty irresponsible of fleshbot to post that piece. i know that godsgirls is still the new kid on the block in the eyes of many long time producers such as yourself and maybe i am being a conspiracy theorist but i felt that that list was nothing but an attempt by sean to make himself look far more relevant than he is and to make us look irrelevant. i saw that the editor wrote that the title was intended as comedy and if that is truly the case i don’t think that was clear at all. as a long time fleshbot reader who often links to their articles i feel a little bit insulted that sean’s piece was published there, to be frank.”

As I actually do have the skills to aggregate traffic data to ballpark a network, I’m going to share the actual rankings with you all here. Keep in mind that these are rankings which are current this week but likely to change if you are reading this article in 2010. The web is always shifting traffic patterns. An “altporn” entity generally consists of a number of component parts, including a members area with photos and sometimes video and sometimes erotic writing. There is also a community, a news section of some sort, a way for models and possibly other contributors to apply, one or more tours, an affiliate program for professional webmasters to use to get paid for linking, and sometimes a merch shop. It is possible for all these components to be on one domain or spread out across many domains. For example, GodsGirls might put their model application on their primary domain, while Blue Blood has it on BlueBloodPhoto.com. Burning Angel might put their community and entertainment news on the same domain with their primary adult content, while Blue Blood splits the non-nude news and community aspects off to BlueBlood.net and keeps the NSFW stuff on other domains. GodsGirls keeps all their video on their primary domain, while BurningAngel breaks it out onto multiple domains. Although Blue Blood and EroticBPM both run solo girl sites distinct from the primary membership areas, I did not include those in the overall stats for Blue Blood or EroticBPM, but I did count the Joanna Angel solo girl site in benchmarking the BurningAngel network because I feel like that is more integral to their branding. Because it would not be possible to isolate just the relevant data, I did not count billing processors such as CCBill or MerchLackey in these stats. I also did not count personal portfolios or sites such as SpookyLinks (produced by Blue Blood) or MakeOutClub (produced by 3Jane) which may have some of the same ownership as what is being benchmarked, but are really distinct web properties.

According to Alexa Reach rankings, the serious players in this currently rank as follows:

1. SuicideGirls .00913%
2. Blue Blood Network .006866%
3. BurningAngel Network .005989%
4. GodsGirls .00203%
5. DeviantNation .00066%
6. EroticBPM Network .00062%

Alexa Reach numbers are an extrapolated percentage of all global web traffic, sampled from a combination of ISP data and toolbar users who have visited a site during an average day. To give you a couple of comparatives, according to Alexa, MySpace gets 5.717% of global internet users in an average day. Google receives 28.092%. Or to put it another way, Lux, who had a certain journalistic responsibility writing for a site with a reach of .0198%, sourced the egregiously misleading list she posted from a site with a reach of .0003%.

Another measure I like to use of a site’s importance is how many other sites link in to it, according to an aggregation of data from most popular search engines. I prefer to combine data from all major SERPS, but Yahoo appears to be in crazy flux today, and I don’t want to drown you all in numbers, so I’m only going to attempt Google which is not currently dancing and counts links the same with or without the www. This ranking is an example of how quickly the web changes. Last time I ran these numbers the Blue Blood network was solidly in the #1 position and by today, January 9, 2009, when I am running these numbers, it has slid down to the #3 slot. Here are the current rankings by this measure for Google:

1. SuicideGirls 2,220
2. BurningAngel Network 713
(Good job, Alex Chechs!)
3. Blue Blood Network 620
4. GodsGirls 406
5. EBPM Network 88
6. DeviantNation 42

Blue Blood’s server stats show no major difference. If anything, traffic is up, but that doesn’t matter because this is just an example of how third parties can benchmark website traffic. Blue Blood could stay exactly the same for number of visitors and links in and another related site could go up and that would change the rankings. That seems obvious to me, but I felt it needed to be spelled out if anyone could attempt to make a definitive list which left off kind of more than half the major players. A more comprehensive list than this is possible and AltPorn.net has done many of them, but this is a list of the top of the field in terms of traffic. I do not feel that anyone else’s success diminishes my own, so feel free to point out if you think there are any serious players I forgot. I want to stress that I am using standard industry tools to measure who the players are and I am not leaving anyone out here.

Erotic BPMAside from truth and accuracy, why is it important how many visitors a web property gets? I know that, whenever someone wants to publish my writing or photography, unless it is a heck of a paycheck, it is more important to me, as an artist, to know that my work will be seen. Even for mainstream models, modeling is very much about exposure, about the joy of being fabulous in front of the right people, about being remembered in great photos. For anyone who cares about either exposure for something they do, or responses from the most basic acknowledgement to of course real fame online or IRL, it really does matter how many people are looking. Sending a book or CD for review to a site with three visitors a month isn’t going to be very helpful to an author or a band, but a positive write-up from a site with three million readers can make a real difference. Modeling for a site with a lot of eyes on it can lead to magazine covers, television appearances, dating rock stars, and various other enjoyable activities, desired by people with mohawks, tattoos, multi-colored hair, and unusual modes of dress. Experience points and paychecks count too, but a well-informed creative person also wants to know who is watching and how many people are watching.

To recap, it is grossly inaccurate to leave certain sites off any definitive list of web properties in the goth, punk, altporn, counterculture erotica or whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre. If such a chart in 2009 does not include most of the Blue Blood network and does not include EroticBPM, GodsGirls, or DeviantNation at all, it is simply a defective chart and one has to wonder about either the expertise or the agenda of whoever created it. Even if calling a defective list definitive in the title is intended to be facetious, it is irresponsible for a high traffic site not to perform due diligence on the facts it presents. It would also behoove anyone attempting to start a site to learn to crunch these sorts of numbers. It would be a plus if those, with no idea how to quantify site data, did not mislead audiences by putting out toplists, before learning how to do so. Numbers are not a matter of opinion.

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Posted by on January 13, 2009. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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