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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 By Mary Eisenhart How do online communities work? One veteran writes a book with some answers (10/19/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg See you in court -- as the Microsoft trial begins, forget the browser war and follow the money (10/16/98) The 21st Challenge No. 14 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau High-tech designer drugs (10/16/98) The cookie monster of Putnam Pit By Matt Welch An angry muckraker seeks access to the municipal computer systems in a small Tennessee town (10/15/98) Service with an artificial smile By Robert Rossney Supermarket clubs point the way to a future of corporate-mandated friendliness and Stepford clerks (10/14/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Block that filter! - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

HAS THE WEB MADE PORN RESPECTABLE? | PAGE 1, 2, 3 - - - - - - - - - - The barriers to entry for Web porn are low: Anyone can put together a rudimentary adult site for under $1,000 by purchasing a CD-ROM of pornographic photos and slapping up a Web page. Adult Webmaster resources like the YNOT Network list hundreds of distributors of pictures and video, as well as adult e-commerce and verification services. Other companies, such as Tiarra Corporation, will assemble the whole kit for you: A rudimentary site with pictures and ad banners goes for as low as $3,499; $4,999 will get you a video feed; $34,999 will get you an e-commerce subscription service. CEO Mike Tiarra says he gets about 1,000 requests a month, primarily for the entry-level packages. But the problem with this kind of a color-by-numbers site is, simply, that there are so many out there already. According to James Mann, producer of the porn database Naughty Linx, there are at least 30,000 adult sites on the Web, over 85 percent of which are commercial, and an overwhelming number of them carry much of the same content. The majority of the pictures, for example, are from the CD-ROMs distributed by ZMaster Productions, which offers the cheapest hot pics at 2 to 4 cents a pop. Even adult sites with live video are often cookie-cutter -- over 1,400 sites, for example, license IEG's streaming video of live men and women in action. What there's a distinct shortage of is well-designed adult sites with quality material -- and this is where most of the new Web porn entrepreneurs see their chance. After all, building stylish Web sites is what they do for a living. Arias Hung, for example, has been working in the computer industry for nearly six years, doing network administration and Web production, producing techno music and magazines. Dreadlocked and progressive, he says he has no more interest in pornography "than your average guy." But when he was coming up with ideas for an online business, pornography seemed obvious. Not only was sex where the money was, but most of the sites he looked at were awful; he thinks that his Web experience will enable him to build a site that stands out. "There are a lot of sites looking at the fast cash -- they are milking the people who are getting online, doing a lot of shady things," says Hung, who plans to launch his series of classy gambling-and-sex sites, called Masterplay, in early 1999. "You're not getting premium product out there, and that's what people are looking for. You have to wade through a hundred million sites to find stuff that is quality." But creating "premium product" isn't cheap. Hung estimates his first year will require $290,000 in capital, and he's starting out with $50,000 in seed money (unlike other porn entrepreneurs I spoke to, Hung says finding investors hasn't been a problem). The main cost: original content. Original content is crucial in the adult Web. -- wary porn surfers will quickly recognize that your Busty Babes are the same Busty Babes from the XXX Collection they saw a few pages back. But fresh content is costly. A photo shoot with a porn star or striptease artist can cost up to $500 for one day; a live video feed can cost tens of thousands of dollars in technology, not including the $15-an-hour fees for the performers' time. And it isn't always easy to track down responsible performers who will work well and show up on time. Andrew Strauss, for example, spent more than $60,000 setting up a live video system; his company paid an array of women -- recruited through ads and friends -- hourly fees and a percentage of the profits to perform live at its warehouse headquarters. But although WallStreetSex was doing reasonably well, with 150 regular members and tens of thousands of visitors, he found that live video was too expensive. He also says that some of the performers were "weird" or had family troubles: "Some were abused, had bad boyfriends, real problems. It was depressing. I couldn't deal with the girls, and didn't want to hang out with them." After three months, he decided to license his video from outside; today, having lost nearly $15,000, he's decided to sell the entire WallStreetSex site and move on. "We wanted to take on Seth Warshavsky -- he had the market share, but his stuff is crap," says Strauss. "The reality is that we got into this later than we anticipated, and there's a lot of competition. There's only a few sites that can create live content. People think they can make a lot of money in it. They can't." Industry observers agree that most of the Web pornographers raking in the big bucks are those who already have connections in the industry: 900-number operators with staffs of hot-talking women, video producers who know porn actresses, magazines with portfolios of pictures. Not only can the offline porn industry leverage its X-rated resources, but it can leverage its brand name and revenues. In this saturated market, your average Web worker who tries to launch a site with a small investment is going to have a hard time competing with the porn professionals. "I think adult content is overly exploited; it's very difficult to make money right now," says Warshavsky, who talks to me on one of his two cell phones as he navigates his BMW through Seattle. Warshavsky owned a successful phone sex company before starting IEG in 1994: "We invested $3 million in setting this up, and we were the first major adult content player in the world. Could I start today and be where we're at? No. Could you start in your basement and make a few thousand dollars? Probably. But adult content is tapped: There are 20,000 or 30,000 sites out there. There isn't a lot of new ground anymore." In many ways, the rewards of Web porn depend on your ambition. Entrepreneurs like Strauss and Hung, who envision adult empires on the scale of that of IEG, are going to have a tough time competing. But there are also plenty of entrepreneurs like 25-year-old "Ken," a computer consultant who has been producing a modest site of soft-core smut called mystique-xxx since May 1997. This one-man operation is just one of several projects he works on, he says, and he never intended to make it his career. Ken had expected to bring in nearly $20,000 a month, based on estimates he'd read in Interactive Week articles. Instead, he's making $2,500 a month in membership fees. That's not as much as he'd expected, he says, but it's still a nice income that he hopes to use to finance another start-up, or eventually go back to school for a master's degree. Ken's profits are more typical of Web porn. The average adult webmaster, Mike Tiarra estimates, is making about $2,000 a month -- not an unhealthy living by most standards, but a pittance compared to Warshavsky's millions. N E X T_ P A G E .|. It's cool to be a pornographer -- but don't use my name!