I’ve been an on-again off-again fan of Nerve.com for what feels like forever. Certainly, it’s been for long enough that I can still remember when they started putting their best photography behind a paywall, back when that was still a novel and extremely unwelcome innovation among online magazine sites. For awhile I maintained a silent one-man boycott; my attitude was then, and largely remains, that there’s more free media on the web than I can consume before I die, so why pay for any? And why reward online content producers with my eyeballs, if they aren’t smart enough to understand that their target demographic is already flooded with quality free media?

Ah, well, but there’s quality and then there’s quality. Much of Nerve’s content has always been both free and of unusually high quality, so gradually and sporadically I’ve drifted back. For the first year of Erosblog’s existence, I even kept a link to Nerve somewhere among my lists of links to quality non-blog sex sites. I purged it, somewhen, for reasons I don’t fully remember. Most likely, it was because I hate to provide free traffic to moneymaking operations that won’t send me either money or traffic in return; and until recently, Nerve didn’t link out to anybody in the blogging community.

Suddenly, however, I see that’s changed. I noticed in my referrals that they are now operating a blog called Breaking News, subtitled “No weather. No traffic. Just sex.” And, although like many corporate bloggers they don’t quite fully get this blogging thing (what’s with only showing seven entries on the main page, when the default page height would support five times as many and is now four-fifths blank?), the sex news entries are entertaining and (importantly) they’ve linked to Eros Blog under a “Nerve Recommends” header. Thanks, and welcome back to the blogroll!