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T A B L E__T A L K What buzzwords do you love to hate? Vent in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Social engineering, Web-style Let's Get This Straight The 21st Challenge No. 14 Results The cookie monster of Putnam Pit Service with an artificial smile - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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The Web professional next door just might be running an adult site. But it's probably not making him rich. BY JANELLE BROWN | "I call it adult entertainment, not porn, because we're not sleazy guys walking around selling chicks," says Andrew Strauss, owner of WallStreetSex.com -- where "outrageous, gorgeous, luscious SexBrokers await your Margin Calls." He gestures vaguely and continues: "I mean, in one sense we are, but we're not in there watching it go on, we're not watching the girls." Envision a porn producer and you'll probably come up with Burt Reynolds in "Boogie Nights" -- a shameless, smarmy lech with excessive hair and a bad mustache. Strauss, on the other hand, is a veteran of the South Park multimedia scene: With his button-down shirt and silver accessories, he oozes San Francisco tech hip, down to the goatee and the motorcycle parked out front. The Web is changing the landscape of the pornography industry -- transforming what once was perceived as a pit of sleaze into something almost respectable and even cool. No longer is the porn world limited to back-room studios in the San Fernando Valley and the red-light districts of metropolitan areas; it's become a do-it-yourself industry that turns up all over the map. Of course, the adult Web offers sleaze aplenty -- home pages for porn stars, creepy marketing gimmicks and come-ons for underage or "barely legal" smut. But it's also increasingly a place where college-educated Web professionals like Strauss are turning their entrepreneurial talents to "Hot Horny Pix." These new purveyors of porn are entering the field not out of passion for their "content" but because they dream of making Web-sized fortunes. But the market they're entering is already wildly overcrowded. And it turns out that the people who are best positioned to make big profits from those "hot pix" online are the same ones who have been profiting from them for ages offline. It's hard to gauge exactly how many nice-boy-next-door newcomers have taken up porn since the advent of the Web, but there are hints that the numbers are growing. Mike Tiarra, whose Tiarra Corp. builds adult Web sites, estimates that at least 70 percent of all Web porn sites are being produced by people who have no experience in the porn industry -- many are one-person operations, he says, run by broke housewives who think they might make some cash by taking their clothes off virtually, but plenty of others are being done by young, college-educated entrepreneurs. A recent survey on a San Francisco developer mailing list with about 400 subscribers turned up 10 Web professionals who are working on adult sites. The lure, unanimously, is money. Forrester analyst reports have pegged the profits for the online adult industry at $185 million for 1998; other observers put the numbers even higher. Many Web entrepreneurs claim to be pulling in millions a year (although many also inflate their numbers). The Wunderkind of Web porn, 24 year-old CEO Seth Warshavsky of the adult network IEG, projects revenues of $50 million this year. Beth Mansfield, the legendary housewife/accountant behind the adult link emporium Persian Kitty, plans to reel in $800,000 in advertising revenues alone this year. Porn is almost hip in the Web world: The Net's "dirty little secret" has been the subject of glowing tributes in trade magazines and business magazines alike. Few other industries are making money online, which could explain why Upside and Wired and the Wall Street Journal are devoting so many pages to the wonders of Web porn profits. So it's not surprising that Web professionals who read those awe-struck reports in business journals might want to tap into the heralded riches. "Everybody knows that the largest profit center on the Web is porn. There was an article about a year ago in Wired, I think, about a German company that claimed that it was making tons and tons of money making porn on the Web," says Russ, a Web developer who recently began producing e-commerce software for porn sites (and who requested that his last name not be used). "The story glorified them -- they were proud of it, and kind of dared you to come after them. But I think that was an early sign that it was going to be cool among some crowds to be involved in porn on the Net." There has, of course, always been money to be had in the porn industry -- by most reports, porn is an $8 billion industry in America alone -- but the Internet has put that money into a medium that Web workers are comfortable with. You don't have to have connections in the porn industry to get started; all you need is some pictures. You don't have to deal with bodily excretions and shady customers; instead, you deal with sterile pixels and HTML. Web porn entrepreneurialism offers all the revenue of the porn world without having to deal with the physical reality of sex and the human body. "It's cleaner. You don't have sleazy stores on the street and riffraff hanging out," explains Strauss. "You don't have to deal with the Mafia or Asian gangs -- they can't control the Net when anyone can do it from their bedroom. You don't have the smell and the sound of the girls in front of you with dollar bills in their G-strings." N E X T_ P A G E .|. Anyone can play X-rated webmaster. But can anyone make a fortune? - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY TIM BOWER |
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