Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

A while back, I was appalled to learn that my pal Halcyon had taken a gig assisting with promo for Experian’s FreeCreditReport.com. Halcyon has always struck me as someone, who not only has a beautiful soul, but someone who usually strives to better the world around him, rather than polluting it. He and I made plans to do an interview on the topic of Experian and FreeCreditReport.com before it fully launched, but the interview never came to pass. As we were having the conversation about what he was doing with Experian and what I found disturbing about that on Twitter, there was only so much detail we could each go into in 140 characters or less.

From Halcyon’s comments on my NWA article, I think he may have thought that my objection to FreeCreditReport.com was solely that Experian as a larger company has done some sucky things. Most of you probably know that Experian is a credit reporting bureau. I found FreeCreditReport.com’s youth market targeted commercials really offensive. I felt that their commercials came across like Experian’s marketing department was sitting around laughing about how their version of a permanent record can totally ruin people’s lives. The commercials strongly implied that maybe hipster loser types should be demanding credit reports from their dates and housemates, just in case any of them had bad credit which might be an inconvenience down the road, whether the black marks on their credit were accurate or identity theft or whatever. There even seemed to be an undertone of implication that, if your friends and lovers didn’t feel like handing over their credit reports to drinking buddies, it might be smart to secretly enter info on people you know into FreeCreditReport.com. (I believe this would be a felony, as it should be.) Experian seemed to be congratulating themselves on connecting with the youth market via calling them both hip and losers. The value proposition put forth in their commercials is that you should use a service Experian provides so you can see how much false data Experian is keeping on file which might ruin your life. Every American is legally entitled to at least one free credit report a year, so I thought it was borderline extortionist for Experian to try to pry extra data from consumers, via FreeCreditReport.com, to give them the same free credit report information they would be legally entitled to without having to provide quite so much personal information.

What most marketing businesspeople and social scientists know, but the average person may not, is that Experian is not just a credit bureau, but a multi-faceted data mining corporation. For example, a number of years ago, Experian launched another site aimed at gathering data on people in various cool subcultures. It was called Thirsty.com and Sean Suhl, who is now head of much-derided punk porn site SuicideGirls, was then in charge of content for Thirsty.com. I had never heard of Sean Suhl at the time, but Forrest Black and I got really bummed out about updating BlueBlood.net for a while because someone over at Thirsty.com kept copy/pasting articles we wrote without attribution. At first, we thought maybe they were just getting the same press releases we were, although the coincidences seemed extreme. Then we posted an article I wrote about Godhead when they were sign by Marilyn Manson where we included a line about how we, knowing them personally, wished them well. Thirsty.com immediately followed with an article about Godhead which included a line about wishing them well, which is not the most common turn of phrase to find in rock journalism.

The funniest Thirsty.com copy/pasting from BlueBlood.net moment was when Forrest Black wrote an article about Roman Dirge’s Lenore. Forrest accidentally linked SpookLand.com instead of SpookyLand.com. He later corrected the link on BlueBlood.net, but it ran as the wrong link in the nearly identical article on Thirsty.com. As I recall, SpookLand.com had a lot more spy stuff than cute gothic comic book girl stuff. At any rate, Experian’s Thirsty.com is what mined the consumer data Hot Topic used to shut down all the independent punk rock stores which were the cornerstone cultural centers of so many local scenes. It is reasonable to assume that, as Sean Suhl held a management position at Thirsty.com, he, like Hot Topic, was also able to utilize Experian’s data mining to found SuicideGirls, with all the havoc that project has wrought on what was once a cool, vibrant, artistic, genuinely feminist and progressive community.

So it would be reasonable to dislike Experian for acknowledging that much of their negative data is bad and using that as a reason people should give them more data. It would be reasonable to dislike Experian for having mined data which made being a gothic, punk, coffeehouse, nightclub etc. sort of person a heck of a lot less fun and a lot more sanitized and homogenized. It would be reasonable to dislike Experian because the commercials for FreeCreditReport.com are so disrespectful of their target market and the jingle is so annoying. However, there is one more reason to dislike them: FreeCreditReport.com apparently is not free.

Boing-Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder wrote an article for PC.com called When is a free credit report not a free credit report?. Some highlights of what Mark Frauenfelder wrote include:

I noticed a $14.95 charge from a company called CIC*Triple Advantage. I didn’t recall buying anything from a company with that name, so I entered “CIC*Triple Advantage” into Google. The search results made my eyes bug out of my head. This was the name of the billing entity for freecreditreport.com. The thousands of search results were full of words like “deceptive practices,” “scam,” “ripoff,” “unauthorized billing!” and “beware!” In fact, all the top results were either from people complaining that they’d been conned into signing up for a $14.95 monthly credit monitoring service without their permission, or they were about how to cancel the service.

In the unlikely event you are not familiar with Mark Frauenfelder, he is one of the few people to come out of the zine explosion really successfully and more importantly regarding FreeCreditReport.com, he is one of the most highly respected web tech journalists on the planet. Yet he was taken in by FreeCreditReport.com’s offer and ended up getting unexpected charges on his credit card from them. So it turns out the free credit reports those willing to give up extra data get from FreeCreditReport.com are not always free.

If 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.)

So 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”

In 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.

Aside 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.

I watched the Rock Docs: NWA: The World’s Most Dangerous Group documentary about NWA last night. Surprisingly, it made me think and actually somewhat changed my view on some things, most notably Ice Cube. I know, if something on VH1 made me think, apparently intentionally, then WTF is up with the universe?

I loathed Ice Cube the first time I heard his solo music. I first heard it at a time when the hip hop industry was working overtime at making it acceptable for white people to buy rap albums. Longtime Blue Blood readers may recall an article I wrote for the print magazine about my love of Ice T, which I called “I Shot the Sheriff and the Deputy”. (I’m a witty girl.) But the first stuff I heard by Ice Cube was not about the things I could relate to in an Ice T record. If there was anything about rage, disenfranchisement, and reaching for power on there, it was most definitely not for me. Ice Cube went on and on and on about how much white people overall suck and Asian people are this and Jewish people are this and white women are all ugly and blah blah blah. Apart from the deliberately alienating lyrics, this was also a time when rappers didn’t really tend to be that good-looking. Music television was around and MTV was instrumental in popularizing NWA, but let’s just say Ice Cube didn’t really have the good looks of LL Cool J, Nelly, or 50 Cent. Ice Cube looked like the pissed off guy who, if you had a party at your house, would get drunk and start breaking stuff as soon as his friends started having fun or getting laid. Like he should talk about what anybody else looks like. Hmph.

Then, at some point, Ice Cube appeared to have had politician-level quantities of Botox injected into his head and he started appearing in family-friendly comedies. I thought that maybe the deities of irony think that’s funny. But Ice Cube was appearing in exactly the kind of movies which are offensively wholesome. I’m not opposed to wholesome, but I am opposed to the kind of wholesome which makes you believe someone is just hiding most of who they really are. I am opposed to the kind of wholesome which is intended to make regular people feel terrible about themselves. And I thought Ice Cube was, by now, not only a racist misogynist, but a sell-out racist misogynist tool of the overculture.

Watching this VH1 special made me rethink my opinion that NWA was really just an example of Dr. Dre being great and taking a few guys from his neighborhood with him, folks who were just in the right place at the right time with the right friend. Taking nothing away from Dr. Dre’s brilliance, NWA may have been able to be what it was for more of a group synergy than I would previously have credited. Notably, Ice Cube actually wrote a number of raps, but I’ve never seen press coverage of the group talk about that before.

I can see why Ice Cube might have furrowed his brow like that, if he wrote some of NWA’s angriest words and then he saw Eazy-E being all about grabbing all the dough and having sex with as many groupies as possible. And he saw his bandmates settling into making something he saw as important and political into a business. As the seed money for the band and the studio they recorded in came from Eazy-E and much of the band’s street cred came from Eazy-E, he probably deserved a bigger slice of the money pie and, if he was more of a hit with the ladies than the others, maybe he was just plain sexier. He was certainly hotter than Ice Cube. And Eazy-E did die of AIDS from having so much random unprotected sex, so not that there wasn’t, ya know, a downside to being attractive that way.

Knowing that Dr. Dre went on to tap talents including Snoop Dogg, Eminem, and 50 Cent, I just kinda thought he was the brains of the operation. I’m not sure what MC Ren went on to, besides a few solo efforts, at least one of which did very well. DJ Yella went on to direct for mainstream adult video companies. I obviously believe that porn can be political, but calling a gonzo porn series DJ Yella’s Str8 Outta Compton really seems to show a certain willingness to overlook the importance, strength, and pride of NWA’s Straight Outta Compton record.

I feel a certain sympathy and understanding for Ice Cube now, that I did not before. If those words were his and he truly believed in what NWA had to say and changing the world and it was not about the money or the groupies, then it must have been gut-wrenching for him when those around him started talking like it was just business. I don’t know what year he legally changed his name to be Ice Cube, but it seems like he really wanted to be that guy, not just play a character to sell stuff.

On one level, I’m pleased that the internet facilitated the financial viability of my previously costly art project for my scene and community. Money can facilitate freedom and I like freedom. But money can be a really polluting influence as well, one which really brings out the wolves. I know I find it gut-wrenching when I hear “just business” from my peers and compatriots, some of whom are (or at least were) people I deeply believed in. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a data mining corporation like Experian simultaneously strip mine our culture and destroy any remaining privacy or control over our lives we might have. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream adult video corporation like Vivid recruit others I would have considered members of my tribe, while paying them far less than they would ever offer someone they considered a full-fledged member of society. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream porn site like SuicideGirls turn once vital sexual and feminist activism into bickering competitions which would be unseemly even in junior high school girls. There are people, I would have considered members of my tribe, who help a mainstream clothing corporation like Hot Topic cheapen our style and make it something for children.

Maybe they have given up on true empowerment and feel like playing the clown is the only option left for them. If they can no longer recall what was supposed to be empowering about what they chose to do, then, in my opinion, they need to check themselves.

I’m not interested in being the court jester with the funny-colored hair in a disrespectful ruler’s kingdom. I’m thoroughly capable of putting on an Izod and having a nice salon do something more natural. I was bad at golf the last time I played at my grandparents country club, before being banned for punk rock behavior. But I could learn. And I love to eat, so I am ahead of the curve in knowing which fork to use.

If I decide to switch things up, it will not be to play the Pied Piper in leading people to work for Experian for free (while giving away their personal data) or Vivid for less than standard wages. I absolutely reject the notion that I should accept second class citizen status because of how I like to have sex or my gender or what I like to wear or what I like to listen to or having an artistic temperament. There is no obvious word for the kind of disenfranchised I am. But I won’t accept working for a corporate master on lesser terms because of it, any more than Ice Cube would for the color of his skin or where he is from.

All I’m saying is that Ice Cube made a reported thirteen million dollars last year and I no longer begrudge him it.

So I guess this is just weird sex trial coverage week at BlueBlood.net. First Max Hardcore gets convicted, then Ira Isaacs gets a stay, and then R. Kelly got acquitted. Now it appears that notoriously litigious, Hot Topic-esque, altporn, membership site SuicideGirls (aka SG) has settled their most recent lawsuit. It is hard to keep track of all their legal scuffles, but this was the one against their former contractor fetish photographer Philip Warner and his collaborator altmodel Apnea.

The initial dispute between SuicideGirls and Apnea appeared to arise because she modeled with a girl named Katie for a forthcoming site, which had offered her and Katie disproportionately large sums of money for a simple nude photo shoot. Even though this new site had not launched yet and most planned sites never do launch, SG was particularly bent out of shape about the Apnea and Katie photos because Katie had also reportedly worked as SG’s accountant. This presumably meant that she was privy to very proprietary information. SG went so ballistic over this that they not only took away Apnea’s complimentary site membership, but they put a stop payment on a check they had already written to her.

The dispute between comically psycho-competitive SuicideGirls and their staff photographer Philip Warner appeared to arise when Philip posted on the internet that he was going to be adding community features to his own web site, basically making it a lot more like SG. According to AltPorn.net’s exclusive interview with Apnea, SG handed Philip a new and more exclusionary contract one day after he announced his web site intentions. He refused to sign the new more controlling contract, so one day later SG made a public break with him. SG then apparently had the hubris to inform Philip that “alternative images of beauty (dyed hair, piercing and tattoos)” were their sort of trademark and therefor his work was a violation of his noncompete and he fired back publicly saying that the images

“you describe reflect the same style that I photographed [Apnea] in prior to our participation and awareness of the suicidegirls.com site. SG has no ownership of this broad genre, it is clearly in the public domain and has been around on web sites like BlueBlood since before SG was created.”

Five weeks later, without bothering to reply to his publicly-posted letter, SG filed suit against Philip Warner.

Here is where it gets weird. First of all, Philip did not stop working with SG when they put a stop payment on the check to Apnea, but, as soon as he had a problem with them, he started asking other people to donate to his legal defense. As far as he was concerned, while Apnea’s problem might not have been his problem, his problem was apparently supposed to be everyone else’s problem. The second weird thing was that Philip presented like SG was trying to take away his livelihood, yet the gossip sites claimed he actually made his living by owning and operating rental properties in Texas and court documents assert that SG, over all the years he worked for them, paid out a bit over ten grand total. This works out to a little over $2,000 a year. That is not exactly enough to live on. The third weird thing is that the court documents for the initial complaint nowhere mention that Philip appeared to have been planning a competitive site targeted directly at SG’s slice of the marketplace. Instead they named Apnea’s solo girl site in the suit as what they were concerned about competing with. Yes, the Apneatic site domain was registered to Philip and he shot a significant portion of the content on it and he probably ran it in partnership with her. But why mention her site, especially when Philip claims his contract specifically permitted him to shoot for solo girl sites, and not mention the planned multi-girl site which seemed to trigger the falling-out? Somewhere in here, SG also licensed a bunch of their own unretouched photos of Apnea to a number of adult internet companies with the condition that they were not permitted to use a name Apnea wished to be called. Eventually SG apparently also named Apnea in their suit which was initially just vs. Philip.

Here is where it gets really weird. For the past year and a half, Philip and Apnea have been aggressively campaigning for charity and donations from the creative community for their legal defense. Photographers have been told they are not allowed to participate in art shows unless they promise to donate any proceeds from their own work to Philip’s defense. Models worked for free to make anti-SG legal defense posters. Philip made T-shirts and prints promoting his lawsuit and asked people to buy them in support of his legal defense. Site owners and other clients all felt like maybe they should pay Philip and Apnea slightly higher rates to help with their legal plight. Every time Philip or Apnea sold an unwanted piece of photo equipment or an old dress on eBay, they reminded everyone that all this was to pay for their legal defense and that everyone who hates SuicideGirls should contribute to their legal defense fund. I do not know exactly just how many people gave them money or exactly how much money they were given because, unlike what one would expect from a charity, there has never been any kind of public accounting of donations nor the expenses those funds covered. Certainly, a lot of people championed Philip and Apnea’s cause and tried to be as supportive as their personal situations permitted.

Here is where is gets really really weird. Today, Philip Warner and Apnea issued a joint statement, apparently written by Philip but signed by both, which said in part,

“We want to make it clear that we 100% have no hostilities towards SuicideGirls in anyway anymore, we all came to a really fair agreement over this dispute, and there were no bad people here, just mistakes and misunderstandings. If you’ve boycotted SG on our behalf, you helped us come to this agreement, so thank you but the battle is over, and we’re all friends again.”

They state that there will be new SG product authored by Philip and they include a link for anyone who wishes to join SuicideGirls. The link is an affiliate link which they explain saying,

“To help offset our legal expenses, when you sign up with SuicideGirls, please use this affiliate code so that we can use the money to pay off our lawyers and focus on Apnea’s modeling and my photography!”

Did they seriously keep beating the dead horse of their legal expenses, while asking people to join the very site they were fighting and telling everyone to boycott for its evil ways and lameness just one day ago? The very reason Philip and Apnea were able to get so much support for their legal defense was that a lot of people truly believe that SG is an evil company.

According to Apnea’s MySpace, she is currently, in 2008, twenty-two-years-old. The first nude photo set featuring her posted to the SuicideGirls site in 2003. I think people should take responsibility for their actions, no matter what their age, but I do have some sympathy for a teenage girl who entered into business with a predatory corporation. Philip’s MySpace, on the other hand, puts his current age at thirty-nine-years-old. He is a grown-ass man, and he knew what he was getting into with SG, and he still chose to lie down with dogs, and then ask everyone else to help with his flea problem. He supported SG aggressively when many other people complained of all manner of mistreatment. He asked for a hand-out when he had a problem, and now he is telling everyone it is all good because he is getting back in bed with SG. I can’t find it in my heart to have the same sympathy for him that I might for Apnea. They are still supporting SG, which is still an organization that is a blight on our scene.

I believe that SG head honcho Sean Suhl is pretty much personally responsible for most of what has gone horribly wrong with the counterculture in recent years. He helped collect alt demographics for secretive data mining corporation Experian, and they sold that info to Hot Topic, so Hot Topic could effectively shut down all the independent punk rock stores which were the cornerstone cultural centers of so many local scenes. And don’t even get me started on how Sean Suhl’s projects have made every effort to inhibit the creation of art, disempower men, and turn women into jokes.

Now, to be fair, despite the fact that I feel this way, I actually think SG had a totally legitimate complaint if they signed a photographer and a model to an exclusive agreement, promoted that photographer and model, made that photographer and model privy to a lot of proprietary information, and then the photographer and model both violated their contracts. Then again, SG was unable to win a legal case against hacker Chad Grant, even when he admitted to hacking SG’s server and having every intention of competing with SG in the marketplace in a way which he hoped would put them out of business. The court transcripts from that trial are truly hilarious and maybe SG settled this case to avoid creating another laugh riot at their own expense.

Now Philip and Apnea are having their joint statement with its affiliate link spam posted to all sorts of sites which generally never allow that sort of blatant commercial promotion. The responses so far indicate that SG may have laid off on a case they could have won, but they also managed to give Philip enough rope to hang himself. Here are a few of the responses Philip and Apnea’s incredibly sell-out and self-centered statement has received so far.

On MM, photographer Chris Keeling sums it up nicely, saying,

“wtf? I thought we had been trained over the last year or so to Hate SG? Now the OP is spamming the Forums to get us to go join SG to go see his earlier work with them? It makes me think this whole fundraising thing was just a carefully orchestrated piece of shit! I’m pissed off. They are either vile despicable people or they are not. Just because the OP can make money again doesn’t make them okay now.”

The beautiful blogger Baby Sinead adds,

“Seriously, I didn’t even send money or anything but I feel like a tool. I guess everyone has this time where they choose to sell out or keep up the fight.”

Photographer Carl J Speed II says in part,

“I’ve been a staunch defender all over the internets and my social circles, spent a lot of time convincing people to stay away from SG (members and perspective models alike), wore my Vive La Picnic shirt (that I bought) , and this just feels dirty. Lying in bed with the bad guys now doesn’t give any sense of justice about this scenario … I’m still angry. I don’t care what arrangement was reached of “what had to be said”, SG are not “okay”, this wasn’t just a fucking misunderstanding, and maybe I have no room to point a finger as I’m not in the position, but going back to those that bent you over for the last two years, where’s the principle? HOw could someone lay back in bed with the bad guys?”

Photographer Visions Of Excess posts,

“I was one of those folks who hosted an LP fundraiser – money that it seems could have been more well spent paying my rent. The OP aside, I am reminded of the charge that SG is still selling its content to porn sites. Now why would I want to support that?”

Shortly after this, because MM mods always hide SG spam threads if they get too negative about SG, the thread got locked down.

Over on LJ, there is some energetic conversation going on still where people like Baby Sinead are able to visibly post, “Honestly if it was all a “misunderstanding” people should be refunded,” without having her words immediately locked. User bunnie_page writes,

“Realistically, I’m thinking it’s part of the settlement that they had to retract all of the bad things they said about “Worst Website Ever”…all of that shiftiness with them not able to say WHO was suing Apnea really makes it seem like SG was suffering from all of LP’s support, and had a gag order (which obviously didn’t help), and now their trying this. If the agreement *was* actually fair I would think SG would’ve ended up covering all of his legal bills. I’m sure there’s more here that we will just never get to know. But whatever, I still hate SG.”

In Apnea’s personal journal, mxa_photo writes,

“After all the crap you guys have claimed to have been through with this case it sure looks like you are now pimping out sign ups to SG??? Congratulations on suckering everyone in with your superbly run publicity campaign and congratulations on your seemingly total lack of moral fibre.”

My favorite LJ post about the settlement so far comes from user slutbunwalla, who wrote,

“Maybe it was just a long con and there was no real lawsuit to begin with! They all drummed up a bunch of business and donations and support and sympathy but the whole time there was already an implicit agreement between everyone to keep the drama going!!! Or maybe I just watch too much LOST.”

The most tragic posts come from redchickpoet who writes,

“Me (who couldn’t afford it in the first place, but thought I was helping to support a worthy cause) —–> BIG FOOLISH IDIOT … The funny thing is, me and my guy JUST got our “Free Lithium Picnic” shirts. Well, at least I can sleep at night knowing we helped to pay for their new tattoos. *kicks myself and becomes just a bit more cynical*”

This last post breaks my heart because it gets to the core of why Sean Suhl’s projects like SuicideGirls have been so damaging to the soul of counterculture. Everything he touches seems to spew out a lot of rhetoric about things people want to believe in, yet everything he is involved in seems to end up being a disillusioning smoke and mirrors sham. Once someone like redchickpoet is disillusioned like this, she may just walk away from the whole scene. Heck, I’ve been a part of this world since before I founded Blue Blood fifteen years ago. And this sort of disillusioning nonsense gives me pause.

My father is an attorney who has never lost a single litigation, yet he still always says that the only people who win lawsuits are the lawyers. I don’t know who won the $G vs LP lawsuit, but I know that all of us in the larger community are the ones who really paid the price.