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ErosBlog posts containing "google #pornocalypse"

 
February 24th, 2015 -- by Bacchus

#Pornocalypse: Blogger/Blogspot Second Round

This is huge:

blogger-pornocalypse

Violet Blue has all the details at ZDNet:

Every Blogger user behind an “adult content warning” page was told Monday by Google to delete sexually explicit content, or find their blog removed from every form of access except registered users.

Until today, Google’s Blogger platform previously allowed “images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity,” and stated that “Censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.”

That changed on a whim Monday when Google ripped the rug out from under its previously-compliant Blogger users, who were told they’d be disappeared if Google decided their blogs contain “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video.”

Rather than leave its already-restricted adult content alone, Google has told Blogger users it will be eliminating all adult blogs from public access on March 23, 2015, (and taking them out of all forms of search).

Blogger blogs with adult content which — at this time — are findable in search will be deep-sixed from the Internet once the changes take effect.

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of adult blogspot/blogger blogs are, at this time, moribund. Which means that nobody will be bring them into compliance. And when they go dark in a month, a huge proportion of the links in the sex blogosphere will break.

I have said it before. I will say it again. Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own domain that you control. If you use a free service to post adult material, that free service will, eventually, fuck you. (Not in the nice way.)

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September 6th, 2023 -- by Bacchus

Pornocalypse Comes For Kink Education

Speaking honestly, I’ve sort of let my #pornocalypse coverage lapse recently. Not much has changed in years; corporate social media keeps tightening the noose, formerly adult-friendly places become less so. On the one hand we still have the old-fashioned open web, with the freedom to publish on adult topics but without much access to traffic or to the financial system. The freedom to sleep under a bridge, right?

meme of the space under a highway bridge, studded with concrete pyramids to prevent human access, superimposed with the Anatole France quote about how the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges

On the other hand, we have the infamous five websites, which is where all the people are, and from which they mostly will not migrate nor follow any links.

famous five websites filled with screenshots tweet by Tom Eastman

Adult material and links are mostly not welcome there, on the five websites, except to the extent that that this material is disguised from the machine censors by cutesy emojis and twee circumlocutions. If you’re a “spicy accountant” or a “mattress actress”, a lover of “quink” or a “corn” aficionado, a fan of big eggplants or women whose peach icons sometimes spray cartoon raindrops, corporate social media is very much for you.

eggplant peach eggplant peach eggplant peach squirt squirt squirt squirt

So yeah, I’ve grown tired of the #pornocalypse beat, and I’ve let lots and lots of pornocalyptic stories glide by without any of my commentary. But yesterday, Pandora / Blake (perhaps best known to ErosBlog readers as the director and publisher of Dreams Of Spanking), published an open Patreon post discussing their frustration at the recent deletion of their kink education channel on YouTube.

Blake, also sometimes professionally known as Pandora Blake

Blake’s treatment exemplifies the recent trend in #pornocalypse behavior by the major social media platforms that I first wrote about back in May:

Increasingly the hot new trend in #pornocalypse is social media platforms banning accounts and people not for what they posted/linked, but merely because of who they are. Biggest example was PornHub getting banned from Instagram despite having a whole team of lawyers and creatives making sure their Insta account broke no rules. It’s frustrating, and it’s why I never have the courage to try anything effortful on adult-hostile social media channels.

It used to be common for porn-hostile platforms to tolerate porn-adjacent people, sex educations, and even sex workers, as long as the platform’s specific TOS against adult material were complied with. For many people, this was workable; they’d ride the ragged edge of the TOS for months or a few years, getting specific posts banned and enduring shadow bans, until eventually (and with great pain) they’d lose an account after too many strikes and have to start all over again. You could make a living that way, if you didn’t tire. But, over time, I started noticing that specific TOS compliance stopped mattering. All over porn-hostile social media, people started losing accounts not for any specific violations, but simply because of who they were. If their public identity was too identified with adult topics, they would be banned without warning or appeal, never knowing which posts gave institutional offense. Thus, Blake’s experience:

I’ve been publishing videos on YouTube since 2014, throughout my campaigns against UK porn censorship and age verification. For the last two or three years I’ve been regularly posting original kink education videos, many of which I’ve accompanied with transcripts here on Patreon. The channel mostly consisted of these fully clothed talky adult education videos on topics ranging across consent, BDSM, porn, feminism, queerness, and organisational and self-care strategies. It also included video podcast style interviews with other educators, interviews with adult performers, political campaign videos, and a few carefully cut trailers for spanking films that showed no sex or nudity, but either clothed character interactions and plot snippets (in the case of multi-performer videos) or excerpts from clothed POV fetish talk videos. I suspect it was these latter videos that fell afoul of the content policy, but I have no way of knowing.

None of the videos on my channel included sex or nudity. I avoided posting links to any adult sites in the video descriptions, linking to Patreon and mxblake.com instead. … I’m furious that a channel 90% of which consisted of educational material about consensual pleasure and LGBTQIA issues has been summarily deleted without any option to review or edit the content. Was it just those few talky trailers which YouTube objected to so much, or is the entire project of BDSM education in itself too risqué for YouTube?

My speculation is that the answer is “neither”. Rather, I suspect that one or more videos generated enough algorithmic red flags to fall under human eyes, and the human in question applied the new-ish unofficial #pornocalypse policy that’s been spreading so rapidly throughout corporate social media: “If the entity who posted this is any kind of pornographer or sex worker, nuke their whole stinkyporny channel and get them off the platform. Fuck the terms of service! Those words only mean what we pay them to mean, no more and no less.”

nuked by social media crude digital collage

For me, the event that dropped the final scale from my eyes was when PornHub got banned from Instagram. If it ever made sense to go dancing with the social media devil while accepting your periodic lumps from the censorship algorithms, it no longer does, in my opinion. PornHub has a whole professional social media team, complete with content creators, editors, and as much legal support as they need. You can guarantee that they posted nothing that contravened Instagram’s TOS, not by the least jot or tittle. Did it matter? No. Throw them into the pit! You and I? We’re not going to fare any better.

I don’t have any solutions to offer, and anyway Blake explicitly isn’t asking for any. So I’ll leave you with Blake’s powerful summary of the state of the #Pornocalypse in 2023:

I mourn the loss of the open internet that was promised us in the early 2000s. My cyberpunk dreams of open peer-to-peer communication and free expression have been repeatedly thwarted, and I’m so angry about it. Fuck Google, their YouTube takeover, and their long-standing policy of devaluing adult sites in search results. Fuck Elon Musk for turning Twitter into his own personal ego trip, and a hotbed of Nazism and transphobia. Fuck Meta for taking over Instagram and enforcing their “family friendly” policies in a way that forces grown adult sex educators to talk about “s3x”, “quink” and “spicy corn”. Fuck Tiktok too, while I’m at it. I hate that in order to reach an audience we’re forced into these privately-owned silos which loathe everything to do with consensual adult sexuality, and which have the power to remove our access to social connectivity at the whim of a badly-trained algorithm.

All of this, every word.

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February 7th, 2022 -- by Bacchus

“Never Build Your House On Someone Else’s Land”

This is a long post about how Facebook made the precise mistake I’ve been yelling about since forever. They forgot Bacchus’s First Rule, or stopped thinking it applied to them. And last week, it cost them so many billions of dollars.

apple altering the deal and ruining Facebook's revenue outlook

I Was There Early: Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet, Circa 2004

In various formulations I have preached what I now call Bacchus’s First Rule Of The Internet since 2004, when I got my earliest primitive inkling that social media platforms were the Sarlacc pits where independent websites went to die.

In those distant days, people who wanted to socialize in writing on the internet had started spending more and more time on “blogging services” platforms with primitive social media functionality, rather than making and reading actual free-standing websites. So folks with websites would, increasingly, just move all their shit onto the growing platforms, leaving their old websites behind to dry up and crumble away. Time would pass, and then something (like, for instance, a #pornocalypse event) would destroy their new social media presence, utterly and without recourse.

I believe I got started down this road of thinking when LiveJournal ate the Vintage Sex community. I’m stubborn about not forgetting this shit, and it helps that I have an ancient blog to preserve my ramblings. Whatever little else this old die-hard of a blog may be good for these days, it’s indisputably useful as an aide-mémoire.

After a variety of wording changes in the early years, by 2013 my First Rule finally settled down as follows:

“Anything worth doing on the internet is worth doing on your own server that you control.”

Light Dawns On Marble Head: My Comprehension Grows

In the early days, I honestly thought people were being bone-stupid. Why go put all your content on somebody else’s website — for them to control or delete at a whim — when you could be building your own traffic to your own website? Why give your content and traffic to some other website operator, for free? Why build up their web property instead of your own?

Eventually I came to understand it was not stupidity, but desperation. People in the social media platforms and silos weren’t leaving those spaces. They wouldn’t or couldn’t click away to our websites; our websites were dwindling, not growing. And of course, in the adult space, we feelthy porn people were increasingly not being allowed to put our stuff on the social media sites. Perhaps we were welcome for a short time, when the social media sites were new and desperate for growth. But always, inevitably, the shit would change, and we stinky pornsters would get booted. No exceptions: the pornocalypse comes for us all. I called it in 2013! “Ask not for whom the pornocalypse bell tolls: it tolls for thee.”

Facebook Gets Ever Fatter, And Stupider, Then Stumbles

OK, now put your thumb on the societal fast-forward button. Mash that sucker down hard — as hard as you can! Watch all of the horrible things happen to the web we knew, in a high-speed burst of time-lapsed video, complete with squealing-audio sound effects. Among many other terrible things that happened, Facebook got really huge by eating a lot of other people’s internet lunches. What’s left standing? The infamous five websites (now mostly appearing as apps, which will be important later in this story) are basically it. (That link is to a famous 2018 tweet that says “I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.”) A few vampire tubes bought up most of the porn sites, and the pornocalypse came for just about every last bit of adult content on social media, except on Twitter, where the clock on the time bomb has been ticking for years and getting louder all the time.

But then, last week, Facebook, recently rebranded as “Meta”, had a terrible earnings call, and lost a whole bunch of its market cap in a single trading day:

Facebook stock plummets

Whoopsie! But what in the hell happened?

The Biter, Bitten: Facebook Ignored Bacchus’s First Rule

What happened? What happened indeed?

I don’t follow Facebook news closely. To a pornographer, pornocalypse platforms are boring and useless. But I do read online news, and over the years I’ve seen Facebook utterly destroy all but the strongest few independent news platform. One by one, they ignored Bacchus’s First Rule: they took their content to Facebook, gave Facebook their traffic, and then got utterly shafted as Facebook deliberately and repeatedly changed the rules on them.

On Friday, Megan McArdle wrote a column in the Washington Post, which is one of the surviving “independent” (from Facebook, anyway) news platforms. It helps that WaPo is the fully-captive plaything of Jeff Bezos, who happens to be that rare creature, a “not Mark Zuckerberg” internet centibillionaire. Thus WaPo can still pay its people, and so they have some good ones. McArdle’s column is headlined We all learned a painful lesson from Facebook. Now Facebook is learning it, too. McArdle adeptly summarizes how Facebook got fat on people who ignored my First Rule. But then, as she explains, Facebook made the same mistake as its victims, leading to last week’s debacle of a one-day $251-billion market-cap loss.

Please allow me my moment of schadenfreude. All this is of course intensely satisfying to me. Am I officially smarter than the Zuckster now? Hot damn! But of course an instant and obvious rejoinder fills my inwardly-directed ears. In a voice deep and stern, as if my own father were speaking from beyond the grave, I hear “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”

McArdle writes, with rich expository linkage not reproduced here:

What Facebook is experiencing is a feeling we in the media knew all too well during the platform’s rise. Those users? They were spending time reading about their friend’s baby instead of reading news content written by professionals. And those digital ads Facebook was selling? They were gobbling up market share that used to belong to us news outlets. Without ads, a lot of publications went into precipitous decline.

No hard feelings, of course; all’s fair in love and free-market competition. However, the media was understandably eager to get our hands on some of that sweet, sweet traffic. We scrambled to build Facebook pages to woo readers, and when Facebook started limiting the reach of free pages, we supplemented our traffic by buying ads. We optimized our content for sharing and massaged our headlines to make them compulsively clickable. When Facebook went mobile-first, we mobilized, and when the company informed us that streaming content was the future, we duly pivoted to video.

Whole outlets were built around the clickbait Facebook seemed to want … and then died when Facebook, having encouraged all this activity, abruptly changed the algorithms to favor something else. The outlets that survived tended to be the ones that had largely given up trying to appease this jealous god and instead turned to alternative business models, such as selling subscriptions to a comparatively select few.

And this is where it starts to gets good!

The Jaws That Bite, The Claws That Catch

McArdle goes on to explain precisely where Facebook went wrong. In a nutshell, when Facebook followed people into mobile apps and away from “the internet”, the Facebook people forgot that they don’t actually own mobile. Eventually, inevitably, playing on Apple’s and Google’s private playgrounds caught up with Facebook. Mobile apps don’t run on Facebook’s servers. Mobile apps aren’t under Facebook’s control. They should have listened to… little old me? Some two-bit sex blogger from before the dawn of time?

As a chronological aside, it’s true: ErosBlog’s genuinely one year and 25 days older than “Facemash”, as Facebook was named at first. But, to the company’s great cost, they didn’t listen! The deadly oversight caught up to them last year, when Apple finally sent them a candygram with a bomb in it by changing the IOS platform data-harvesting rules that used to let Facebook make so much money. McArdle again:

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take the company all in on a mobile-first strategy. This was disruptive, at first, but in time, he would be seen as a visionary prophet leading his company to the promised land. The problem is, that land wasn’t owned by him. Zuckerberg had shifted his company away from the open platform of the browser and onto a closed system where Apple set the terms. For a long time, that was a very good deal for Facebook — but when Apple decided to alter the deal, Facebook didn’t really have much recourse.

Whoopsie again!

Let’s Do Schadenfreude Some More, That Was Fun

Do I feel a wee tiny bit smug about Facebook losing a quarter-trillion in market cap because they ignored Bacchus’s First Rule? Because Mark Fucking Zuckerberg made the specific mistake in 2012 that I warned about in these pages back in 2004, and then again in 2006, and then again for the third, fourth, and fifth times in 2007? And then some more times in 2010 and in 2011?

Fuck yeah I feel some smugness about that, theydies and gentlethems and glitterkittens! Nobody pays me to be a business consultant, but sometimes I do it anyway, for the sheer pleasure of being right on the internet. If you squint and hold your eyes correctly while you look at this situation, Zuckerberg personally lost thirty billion dollars of net worth in one day for not being an ErosBlog reader. And ErosBlog is totally free! So, you know, fuck that guy. Fuck him in particular.

fuck this thing in particular meme gif

So Long, And Thanks For The Metaphor

But this blog post from hell is only mostly about pointing out and hooting at Mark Zuckerberg’s predictable strategic missteps. The real reason I gathered you all together here today and subjected you to my endless blather is so that I can share the nifty metaphor McArdle built her whole column around. I wish I’d had this framing at my verbal fingertips back in 2004, and subsequently! Maybe more people would have understood what I meant by my Rule. Her column opens:

In 2015, some professors at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College faced an unusual problem. Through the college, they had purchased homes on campus. The land underneath them, however, was still owned by their employer. And now the college was closing, and presumably selling the campus to someone who might want to use that land for something else.

Happily, Sweet Briar was rescued at the last minute by its alumnae. But the financial cavalry don’t always ride to the rescue just in time, so the plight of the professors nonetheless stands as a vivid example of a wise business adage: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”

Let’s say that again: Never build your house on someone else’s land.

That’s what Bacchus’s First Rule has been trying to get at ever since 2004. It’s clear, it’s succinct, it communicates with clarity. That tight little sentiment is why this crusty old sex blog is still here, surviving on my sponsorships and generous patrons, long after most of the other sex bloggers moved to Tumblr or wherever, only to get rug-pulled by some sudden pornocalypse event.

After citing her Sweet Briar College example of the “someone else’s land” metaphor operating literally, McArdle references the metaphor as “a wise business adage”. Since I’m not in the business world, I never heard it before. You know this is true because I would have been repeating it at you like a broken record!

A bit of Googling suggests that the adage wasn’t much in the popular parlance before McArdle began writing about it. The earliest reference I found was a 2014 blog post quoting a 2013 paywalled Bloomberg article McArdle herself wrote. I can’t get at the Bloomberg article, but the post summarizes it thusly:

Megan McCardle explains the relevance of a maxim she learned in business school: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”

So apparently we have McArdle’s B-school professors to thank for this succinct metaphor. Which I hereby do! And McCardle herself has my thanks for popularizing it. Now, if only Zuckerberg had gotten the memo, imagine how much money he might have saved…

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December 20th, 2019 -- by Bacchus

Twitter Search Invisibility For Syren De Mer, Porn Megastar

It feels like a very long time ago that I wrote the post Google’s Mechanical Prude, documenting how Google’s then-new autocomplete search-suggestion feature ignored your settings (if you had asked Google not to impose its censorious “Safe Search” on your search results) and used a bunch of stop words to avoid suggestion porn, nudity, or popular adult performers. It feels like a very long time ago because it was eleven years ago, in 2008. Of course, Google never backed down from that then-cutting-edge bit of search-invisibility engineering. One ludicrous example I documented back in 2008 was that Google autocomplete refused to comprehend or to admit that searching for “Jenna Jameson nude” was a thing that people might want to do. And today, in 2019, Google is still sticking to those ancient prudish guns:

Google search autocomplete screenshot still refusing to admit that Jenna Jameson was ever nude

That investigation was perhaps the genesis for my hatred and horror of search invisibility as a #pornocalypse tactic. It feels totalitarian and epistemologically violent to me. People search for a thing. The robot assistants who operate so smoothly we barely notice them: those helpful bastards blandly pretend that the thing we want doesn’t exist and never existed. It’s insidious, it’s dangerous, and it’s intolerable. It’s also unaccountable, and we have no real way to protest or demand better searches.

Today’s post, however, is not about Google. It’s about Twitter. Search invisibility on Twitter is hardly a new thing, to be sure. It’s been a sometimes “feature” of the poorly-understood shadow bans that have plagued adult performers and sex bloggers on Twitter for years, though denied by Twitter until the recent release of their new 2020 terms of service incorporating shadowbanning as normal practice. Yesterday, however, I discovered a new-to-me type of search invisibility on Twitter. (I say “new to me” because some accounts of shadow banning had previously reported this dysfunctionality, but I never saw it when I myself was shadowbanned.) Specifically, the autocomplete search function that we all rely upon when we are trying to “at” somebody appears to have some disfavored Twitter users whose user IDs are not autocompleted. My discovery exemplar, surprise surprise, is an adult (porn) megastar with 172,000 followers. Gee, I wonder why she’s been invisibilized? I don’t know … but there’s a pornocalypse stench to it, don’t you think?

Here are my receipts.

Yesterday, I went to tweet about a lighthearted Christmas femdom shoot featuring Syren De Mer taking extreme liberties with a hapless Santa. I knew she was on Twitter but I didn’t know her username, so I just dove in with my “at” symbol and the first three letters of her name:

10 results, no syren

At this point there are ten results in the drop-down autosuggest box, although we only see five (without scrolling) in the screenshot. None of them are for Syren. Not really a surprise; we are only three letters in. Moving on.

And on and on and on… By the time I get all the way out to “@SyrenDeM” we are down to just two suggestions:

2 results, no syren

That second result looks like a possible hit; it’s @SyrenDeMerX. But no; if you look at the account profile, it’s a low-activity fake or tribute account, dating to 2014-2015 exclusively, consisting mostly of porn retweets. Let’s keep typing:

No syren

Now we see the violence inherent in the system! Her true Twitter handle is @SyrenDemerXXX, which is a 10-years-old but still-currently-active account with her OnlyFans and her agency booking info in her profile. But when we type it all the way out to one letter short of the full user ID, Twitter is still stalwartly maintaining that it has never heard of her. @SyrenDeMerXXX? Who dat?

If this is a “regular” shadowbanning “feature” that Syren is currently suffering under, the behavior might be gone by the time you attempt to confirm or replicate it. Shadowbans are notoriously fickle; they come and they go. Or maybe she’s on some hitherto undiscovered permanent pornocalypse Twitter username blacklist aimed at adult performers. Does it really matter? This is a woman with 172,000 followers on Twitter, suggesting that she’s somebody that a lot of people want to hear from. But if you try to type her Twitter username, Twitter does its best to pretend that she doesn’t exist. The reason doesn’t really matter; the result is fucking shameful.

By the way, in case you were wondering, Syren De Mer is not just blacklisted in Twitter’s user search engine. She’s also on Google’s autocomplete search-suggest blacklist, just like Violet Blue was when I wrote Pornocalypse Comes For Your Keyword Searches back in 2015. Violet now appears to have escaped from Google jail, but Syren is very much in it, even when I’m logged into my Google Account with so-called “Safe Search” turned off:

Google refusing to suggest Syren De Mer in autocomplete search suggestions

This is a woman, mind you, with 12.7 million search results currently in the Google web database:

more than twelve million search results for Syren De Mer

If that doesn’t make you wonder what else Google and Twitter refuse to show you when you search for it, you’re not a very curious person. And if having to wonder about it doesn’t horrify or concern you, I truly worry about your capacity for imagination, empathy, and self-preservation in the information age.

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January 28th, 2019 -- by Bacchus

Robot Frottage

Serious question: Say you are an artist whose medium is video. Specifically, erotic video. Porn, not to put too fine a point on it. But you’re also part of today’s remix and fan cultures: you work with existing tropes, characters, stories, universes, and memes. (In other words, you are “extending and embracing” intellectual property that is not, strictly speaking, your own.) Now you’ve got a fun little porn loop sitting on your desktop, the product of a few weeks’ work that you want to share with the world.

Where do you upload it?

Forget my rule: almost nobody can afford to host their own video without a business model. Not if it has the potential to go viral.

YouTube is not an option. It’s a #pornocalypse platform. Google/Alphabet does not welcome your porn. Your porn will not survive on their platform for any significant length of time.

Что делать? What is to be done?

There truly is only one sensible solution. You would, you must, upload your work to a tube site.

Yes, yes, I know. Responsible commercial-porn consumers who pay for porn are primed to think poorly of tubes, because tubes have had a such pernicious effect on the commercial porn industry. But where you stand depends on where you sit. And if you’re an indy nonprofit artist looking for free distribution of bandwidth-heavy porn video files, tubes are an amenity. What follows from that is, that as a curator and researcher of obscure porn goodies, I have to give credit where credit is due: sometimes there’s no substitute for a good tube when I’m looking for video that won’t be found, that simply can not be found, anywhere else.

All of which is by way of explaining how I found myself searching pornkai.com for robot sex videos yesterday. Pornkai.com is an extremely interesting and useful site for the porn video researcher. Using various APIs made available by several large tubes and a search engine that does not suck, it exposes more than twenty-two million heavily tagged and key-worded video clips to the queries of intrepid researchers like your loyal reporter. Twenty two is a lot of millions. Or, to put it another way: that’s a metric buttload of video clips.

Did I find me some robot sex? Yes I did. Specifically, I found a somewhat puzzling fan video featuring a robot getting a blowjob followed by robot frottage (robot penis between humanoid thighs):

roboto frottage scene from Nier: Automata fan video by Xiesto

A bit of traditional in-out-in-out robot sex follows that but when our robot decides to sprout a whole bunch of tentacle dicks, Our Heroine (not actually a human, but apparently a humanoid android named Yorha 2B) has had enough; she draws her sword and there’s a sudden spate of robot de-dickifications. Cheering! And scene.

What does it all mean? Fuck me if I can tell you. I did track it all down as fan art associated with a videogame franchise called Nier: Automata. The artist and video maker is XiestoXenox-Xavi, aka Xiësto. I’d call them good at what they do.

pornkai banner

 
January 16th, 2019 -- by Bacchus

The State of Kink Unlimited’s Union

Amid today’s cable news babble, one bit of good news. The ongoing government shutdown disrupted plans for a State Of The Union speech that nobody wanted to hear anyway. But as I poured myself a celebratory shot of booze, it occurred to me that I never gave you all a report on Kink.com’s extremely rocky — but eventually successful — process of uniting its once-ragtag empire of kinky porn sites under the Kink Unlimited brand.

kink unlimited 70 kinky channels for one subscription price

I have a long and positive history with the company that became Kink.com in 2006. Peter Acworth’s original sites (beginning in the ’90s with Hogtied) were fresh and easily-marketed from an affiliate perspective. The company was professional, easy to work with, and paid like clockwork. As a sex blogger — even one not primarily focused on kink — I had a lot of time for all their projects. And at least in the early years, their models routinely reported safe and happy shooting experiences. They broke new ground with Sex and Submission, combining sex and bondage in a way that no mainstream porn company had previously had the courage to do. So great was their success, they were spinning out new sites like cotton candy. It honestly got hard to keep track of them all. They spent double-digit millions to buy their famous “castle of kink” — a former national guard armory — and ramped up production so much that by 2013 or so we started to need special web pages just to list all the Kink sites. Frankly, it was all getting to be more than just a bit of a wonderful mess.

But by that time, the arc of the profitable porn business had already peaked. Piracy, consolidation, and tubesites were taking their toll. In 2012 I noted with fascination an interview with Peter Acworth about his future plans for Kink.com in which none of those plans involved actual innovations in porn production. Obviously he wasn’t going to just walk away from his company’s core revenue stream, but his entrepreneurial eye was roaming off in other directions. About that time is when I started noticing that the affiliate department stopped being reliably and courteously staffed, too. Suddenly, getting affiliate support became catch-as-catch-can; whomever was doing seemed to be doing it “other duties as assigned” instead of as a core priority. Corners were being cut. Times were getting hard in the porn business.

One response from the company was to shut down or put on hiatus a few of its raunchiest sites (Bound In Public, Public Disgrace, and HardCoreGangBangs), eventually relaunching some of them with softer content, new shooting guidelines, and a bit of metaphorical soft-core Vaseline on the camera lenses. This was explicitly part of an effort to reposition the Kink.com brand as more of a mainstream lifestyle trademark a la Playboy. The unspoken notion, I think, was to license the fancy K on merchandise, and extend the “Kink” brand beyond porn, which was seen as a business in the final throes of ignominious death.

This cost-cutting and brand repositioning culminated in two huge moves in 2017 and 2018. 2017 brought news that all porn production in the huge San Francisco armory building had ceased, due to a search for tenants that were being dissuaded by sharing space with porn production. (That same story included rumors of a 40% decline in porn subscription revenue, driving the need to find tenants to support the massive space.) Porn production reported moved to “Southern California, Nevada and other parts of the Bay Area.” This caused one waggish email correspondent to describe the company to me as “a loose collection of contractors flying in formation” which I think may have been accurate at the time — except, I’m not sure if they were managing much of a formation. Of which, more later. (The move out of the Armory had to be traumatic for the organization. Empathy.)

Anyway, when I heard production was leaving the armory, my instant assumption was that this was preparation for sale of the building. I was not wrong: it sold in early 2018, for $65,000,000. (2006 purchase price: $14,500,000.) I’m not saying Kink.com didn’t make lots of money in porn, but this makes it look like a wildly-successful real estate business to me!

iconic armory building, long the home of Kink.com

But I got ahead of myself. Backtrack to 2015 or so, when nobody much was making any money in porn. Everybody was grasping at crazy straws like remaking themselves as “lifestyle brands” — this was the brutal year when even Playboy briefly flirted with the notion of abandoning nudity because they were bleeding losses and couldn’t get any social media traction due to #pornocalypse anti-nudity policies everywhere.

One strategy, widely adopted by the few remaining big porn companies, was to take all their little porn sites (and everything left was little compared to previous years) and shovel them together into package deals. “10, 20, 30 sites for one low subscription price!” Those were the shouty offers, and to this day they remain the industry’s default value proposition. Some of these offers — if they are backed by a company that’s still actively producing a wide variety of porn — are very good offers indeed.

The way these deals usually work is as follows: a porn company will take all their old sites, the ones that aren’t being updated any more but that have deep archives, years and years worth of old porn. In Kink’s case, this would be venerable old favorites like Wired Pussy (regular production stopped in 2014), Water Bondage (2013), and Men In Pain (2013). These get bundled together with sites that are still producing (sites like Sex and Submission, Whipped Ass, The Training Of O, Divine Bitches, Everything Butt, Hogtied, Device Bondage, Fucking Machines, and the Kink Men family of sites marketed at gay men).

But that’s not even close to the whole megillah. Every test shoot, abortive site concept, and side project that never saw release — why not throw that in? Stuff that only ever got sold via their Kink On Demand porn-by-the-shoot product, that goes in. If it’s got a shoot ID in their shoot database, there’s really no reason not to throw it into the final product. And then, icing on the cake — why not let other porn companies into the action? I don’t know the details of their cross-licensing deals, but apparently it’s not hard to cross-license kinky porn from other companies and make that available too. (Presumably the back-end-software tracks views/consumption and compensates the original owners on some sort of negotiated pay-per-view basis.)

The end result? A product called Kink Unlimited. It rolled out in beta in 2016. The price point has fluctuated a bit, but it’s currently about forty bucks a month. That’s the base price. Sales — usually around various national holidays — can dip quite a bit cheaper. It’s also the case that if you’re willing to prepay for six or twelve months at a time, the monthly cost drops radically. Whichever price point you go for: for your money, you get access to a fucking ludicrous amount of porn.

Kink.com no longer makes any serious effort to estimate how much porn you get; the various banners and bullet lists don’t get updated regularly. “Over 70 channels” is their current claim — where a “channel” is code for a former site, or for a collection of content licensed from some third party. They say “Over 10,000 hours of HD video” — and they’ve been saying that for quite some time; I’m sure it’s rather more by now. “Over 12,000 shoots” — likewise. “Over 2,000,000 photos” — that number has not been updated since perhaps 2016. You get the idea. You get a shit ton of porn for your monthly Kink Unlimited subscription!

But friends, we did not get to “here” without some growing pains. The consolidation was painful.

Consider what the Kink.com porn site landscape looked like in 2015. They had thirty or more kinky porn sites, each on its own domain. Many of them were closed, or at least moribund, not being updated, with discount-priced access to stale archives. They had millions of affiliate links scattered all over the web (using at least three generations of different link structures) belonging to a bunch of affiliates most of whom where no longer active, due to the overall decline in the online porn business. They had millions of expensive “hosted galleries” — free porn, on their servers — to support those mostly-out-of-business affiliates and a bunch of freeloading porn surfers. And it was a world where the conventional wisdom was that the future was video, video, nothing but video. Google was giving all the search listing to porn tube video pages. Still porn photos weren’t appearing in search engine results anywhere in the top results (they still aren’t) because “the time the surfer spends on the page” is considered a powerful page quality factor by Google.

How in the nine frozen hells was Kink.com supposed to transition this mess into a single subscription offering under the Kink Unlimited banner?

In the event, they went with the Leroy Jenkins strategy:

That’s right. In June of 2016, they just burned it all down.

Hosted galleries? Gone. All the old legacy affiliate links? They mapped a few of them, but most of them broke. Gone. Those two million photos? It’s the age of video, we don’t need ’em. “Only…a small portion of our members use or appreciate them.” Gone. (Fortunately, the legacy photo collection did come back after about six months, although new shoots are variable; some sites don’t produce many more than the handful they need to show for free on the shoot promotional page.)

Needless to say, I found all this pretty demoralizing. My increasingly urgent (ok, desperate) emails to affiliate support were getting either no answers at all, or snotty “we don’t have the technical resources to address your issues” non-resolutions to my tickets. At one point one tech gave me a tiny cash credit for all the broken links he was refusing to fix, which I calculate was enough to cover about four hours of link repair work at my normal freelance rate. At this point I had something like 270 posts covering the years between 2004 and June 2016, call it an average of 3 links per post, something like 800 links. In excess of 500 of those were broken — either not going to the right place, or not crediting my affiliate account. Virtually none of these were simple, repetitive links amenable to a bulk find-and-replace. It was a fucking nightmare.

It was also too burdensome and demoralizing to fix. I didn’t even try.

What I did do, eventually, is start making new posts about holiday sales. I explained my reasoning here. And I noticed that people were buying, some, the Kink Unlimited product.

It’s a good product. It has kept growing since it was introduced in June of 2016. It’s fucking enormous now.

Finally, during the long holiday sales event that started in December, I bit the bullet and laboriously went through my 270 old posts, rooting out all the old broken links and replacing them with “new” working links. Everything is a Kink Unlimited link now — either to the main site itself, or to one of the channels (really just a themed subpage within the main site, showcasing the content from one of the old branded sites).

The laborious part was the old hosted gallery links. Those hosted galleries are gone. But, for the most part, each of the galleries had 20 pictures, and those same 20 pictures are now the free photos used to advertise the shoot. Most (but not all) the old hosted gallery links had the shoot ID numbers encoded in their URLs. So it was possible — not easy, but possible — to look at those old hosted gallery links, extract a shoot ID number, deduce a modern shoot URL, and edit the old post so that instead of saying “see more pictures in this free hosted gallery” it says “more pictures available with the shoot” or something.

But it took days and days and days. I drank. A lot.

Why did I do it? Honestly, it wasn’t about the money. Porn affiliate sales aren’t much of a thing these days, and what sales there are, come almost always from new posts. I have stats, and they tell me that old posts don’t see much traffic. A few long-tail searches, but the numbers are tiny. Honestly, rationally, leaving the links broken for 2.5 years didn’t cost me much, and leaving them broken forever wouldn’t have cost me a whole lot more.

Part of it was obsessive-compulsive disorder. It bothers me to have a large body of broken links in my archives. (Don’t tell me, I know, there’s still a bunch.)

But part of it was … the successor product is good. Kink.com has built a good thing with Kink Unlimited. All those hundreds of old posts, pointing at sites that no longer exist? I’m proud of those posts, and it’s worth some effort to point them at the closest thing to the proper modern URL.

In June of 2016 when Kink.com went Leroy Jenkins on us all, I didn’t imagine they’d build anything worth linking to. They were a company in crisis, a company in transition. A flock of contractors looking for a formation, with a boss looking for the real estate payout of a lifetime. I did not trust that it would be worth my time to invest in changing out half a thousand links.

It’s still very much my impression that Kink.com is a real estate company with a serious porn hobby. I don’t expect Peter Acworth to walk away from his porn revenue stream — which obviously remains substantial — but I very much doubt that porn is his primary obsession here in 2019. I don’t think it has been his first focus for many years. If he sold the business to MindGeek or another one of the big players, it wouldn’t surprise me at all. But that shouldn’t (fingers crossed) affect subscribers or affiliates too dramatically, at least in the short run. Kink Unlimited produces, licenses, and distributes a colossal volume of iconic kinky porn at a value-package price. It was worth a week out of my life to fix all my broken links. You might find it worth a twenty (or two) to subscribe.

October 2022 update: The Kink Unlimited product has been rebranded as “Kink Prime” and no longer includes any of the gay male content, which has been rebranded and repackaged as a separate subscription product as Kink Men.

 
October 29th, 2017 -- by Bacchus

That Burlesque Halloween Flapper Chick

cute flapper skeleton dancer with a pumpkin and a black cat

A little while ago when @whoresofyore tweeted the above photo out under the hashtag #VintageHalloween I knew I was finally going to have to get off my ass and get this shit in order. I thought I might get something special for my patrons out of it (which didn’t happen, in the event) but mostly I just couldn’t take it any more.

Here is (was) my problem.

I’ve been seeing that photo (and several more from the same series) every Halloween for many years. And why not? The flapper-esque blonde is cute as a button, her tits are perky, and the burlesque Halloween thing is too fun and cute and Betty Boop not to love.

cute flapper nude dancer mugging with a jack-o-lantern pumpkin

So, my first-stage reaction was “I need to track down that whole series of photos. It would make an awesome Halloween gallery. And if it’s really as old as the some of the clues would indicate, it’s bloody amazing; I want to know more about where these photos come from!”

Sadly, my second-thoughts reaction was “There’s something wrong here. The Halloween iconography is too modern; this is 1950s cheesecake pinup staged as late 1930s burlesque produced with 1920 flappers published by 1900s postcard publishers. Just a whole mishmash of subtle anachronisms.”

My particular problem was with the ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and black cat and happy-skeleton stuff all brought together in one display. You see all of these elements in Halloween imagery going back at least to the Victorians, but a comic erotic burlesque of them? My first mental/visual reference for a thing like that would be the painted cheesecake pinups of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I would be really excited to find them all in a real-photo pinup postcard series from then, but from decades earlier as these photos superficially appear to be? That would be…astonishing.

bare breasted nudie flapper burlesque dancer poses with one foot on a halloween pumpkin

But hey, a cynical skepticism, no matter how well-informed, is no substitute for doing the work, which for a project like this is quite considerable. Basically, my method is recursive image searching; I start with the first image, and while searching for the largest, best, most-original scan of it, I also look for any pages that offer any provenance, and I also look at all of the “similar images” that the image search engines throw up, saving anything else from the series that turns up. And then I proceed through each of those in stepwise fashion, doing the same for them. It’s a slow, often-tedious, and painstaking process.

There were early indications that something was hinky about this image set.

comical burlesque stripper pinup Halloween shadow play with ghost bat pumpkin skeleton black cat and nude naked topless flapper retro blonde cutie

One thing that bothered me was that diamond “MG” logo. It’s very much like the logos used by photo postcard publishers going back to the turn of the twentieth century and before. Only, a logo like that is typically the initials of the publisher, it’s a handy reference, and it’s usually easy to Google. Those two letters in quotes, “postcard”, and Bob’s your uncle. Collectors and auctioneers are all over that shit. Here? Nothing.

Another thing that bothered me was that as an iron rule, the best-quality scans I was turning up were always 805 pixels wide. That indicated a common digital place of entry onto the internet. Theoretically possible if these photos were from, say, a set of postcards in the hands of a collector, with no other exemplars known; but in practice, usually genuine vintage photos exist in a wide variety of (usually small and terrible) scans of different sizes.

valentines day at halloween as burlesque cutie hides behind heart shaped cardboard skeleton head

More subtly but also damning, no provenance for any of the photos from the set was turning up. They were widely distributed in copy-and-paste collections of vintage photos, usually mixed with genuine vintage photographs from the “French postcard” and burlesque eras. But nobody had ever taken the time to curate these together into a common gallery. This could just an artifact of digital decay (there’s an awful lot of the adult internet gone missing from the 1997-2007 era) but sometimes it means that the source was known and that the folks doing the copy-and-paste felt constrained from acknowledging that source. But why, if the photos were truly vintage?

bump and grind cartoon halloween burlesque faux vintage stripper routine

bare tits stripper vintage nudie postcard halloween bats ghosts skeleton burlesque

As is usually the case, there was just one clue, a single fragile provenance, one person who took the time to drop a credit, that broke the entire mysterious case wide open. One of these images, on a Tumblr that has not yet gotten autoflagged and force-vanished behind the Verizon #pornocalypse Tumblr-porn event horizon, had a link credit to a Deviant Art source, where the photo had been posted more than a dozen years ago by a photographer from the Ukraine who has not been back to DeviantArt since 2005. The photographer went by “MGstudio” (note those “MG” initials) and gave their URL as marthasgirls.com in their DeviantArt profile. Martha’s Girls is a website I vaguely remember; it’s defunct now, but for many years and until sometime in 2016, it ran an old-fashioned subscription paysite selling “The finest emulations of vintage erotica and pin-up, spanning the period from the Victorian times to the 50s pin-up era.” Ding ding ding ding DING! The mystery is solved.

Ukrainian faux fake retro erotica postcards nude flapper posing for Halloween

MG Martha's Girls topless flapper fake faux retro postcard erotica nude posing with halloween jack-o-lantern pumpkin

So these are modern, not vintage; they are a formerly-available commercial porn product by an unknown photographer from Dnipropetrovsk whose artistry I quite admire. My hope is that by assembling them here, it will be less likely for future enthusiasts to make the all-too-easy mistake of believing them to be vintage. If you know of more photos from this series, please let me know!

kneeling burlesque cutie hides her tits behind a jackolantern pumpkin

halloween pumpkin kisses goodbye

Happy Halloween, and enjoy!

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