Launched four years ago, Voyeurweb is the brainchild of 42-year-old Igor Shoemaker, an entrepreneur who says he holds citizenship in four countries including the U.S. and Germany. (He won't reveal the other two, "in case I need somewhere to run to.") A former top marketing executive at one of the biggest software vendors in the world (again, he won't say which), Igor quit his job after one too many reorganizations and took time off to pursue other interests. He surfed the Web and was struck by the way most Web sites treated content like a "one-way street." "Why are you using the Web?" he'd rant. "Why don't you just Fed Ex me the CD?" Convinced that content should be an interactive experience, he decided to ask "netizens to help me to build a site with their photos."

Today Voyeurweb draws about 1 million unique visitors a day (1.3 million on a recent Monday). People send in about 200 "contris" a day. Two eight-person crews work 18 hours a day reviewing and processing submissions. Contributors include a "story" along with their photos, and five editors provide "commentary." The photos vary in quality from the awkwardly posed to the artfully rendered. Content is organized into sections such as Voyeur Shots, Private Shots and Nude in Public. Shoemaker claims the company operates in the black. Most of the revenue comes from 400,000 subscribes who pay $20 a year for access to "RedClouds," the site's explicit photo section. Because of the risky nature of the business, Shoemaker says, the company operates out of five different offices in the U.S. and Europe.

By this point you're thinking, "Aren't we talking about just another adult site here?" But Voyeurweb is more than yet another porn emporium. It's a compelling demonstration of one of the things the Web does best -- providing a forum in which the users are also the producers. Voyeurweb shows what can be achieved if you combine a strong editorial voice with a popular format for user contributions and a regard for community.

Content is like strawberry jam, Sony of America Chairman Howard Stringer once observed. "The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets." When the demand for content exceeds the productive capacity of professional writers and producers -- as Stringer argues it has in the age of the Internet -- quality heads south. Sample the offerings of even the most professionally produced online entertainment sites and you get the idea that the "jam" is spotty at best. Building community around such sites -- an essential element for future financial viability -- is like trying to grow roses in frozen tundra.

But some Internet sites are bucking Stringer's sticky theorem by tapping a new and limitless source of free content: Ordinary Web users like you and me. Call it "user-generated content," "consumer created content" (Jupiter Research's term) or simply "interactive content," the approach offers more than just a solution to the "content problem." Guided by a distinctive editorial "voice," user-generated content can also be a powerful method for building strong communities of virile viral marketers. An as on so many other fronts on the Net, the adult sites are leading the way.

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