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From Housewives to Strippers, Small Smut Sites Make Money By Matt Richtel April 2, 1997 | |
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ACOMA, Wash. -- On a typical day in her Tacoma household, Beth Mansfield readies her husband for work and makes school lunches for her two sons, then settles down in her home office to scour the Internet for the latest in hot, raunchy, XXX pornography.
By all accounts, she makes a killing doing it.
Mansfield is the creator and keeper of Persian Kitty's adult links, a list of hyperlinks to more than 1,000 pornographic World Wide Web pages. The site has become a veritable Yahoo! of pornographic content, a stopping-off point for 300,000 visitors who drop in each day to check out Mansfield's unparalleled list of the lewd and lascivious online.
The traffic has translated to big bucks, with the site generating $80,000 a month in advertising, 70 percent of it profit, she says.
"I feel like I've won the lottery," Mansfield said in a recent interview. "I guess I was in the right place at the right time."
Mansfield is an extreme -- though by no means unique -- example of the innovative, aggressive and unlikely entrepreneurs who are proving the Internet a viable commercial medium even for the little guy. Unlike the major purveyors of pornography who are sinking millions into online media, these small-time Larry Flynts are profiting from good timing and the value of an old-fashioned good idea.
Mansfield, a 36-year-old mother of two, said she didn't even have an interest in pornography when she launched Persian Kitty in November 1995. She created the site, she said, merely "to see how many people I could bring into my corner of the Web." Despite the connotations of its name, the site was named after Mansfield's Persian cat, Smokey.
Mansfield says that though she spends most days combing the Internet for the latest adult sites, she hasn't developed a taste for lurid content. The finicky former accountant posts her most interesting finds on Persian Kitty, where she divides the pay sites from the free ones and painstakingly categorizes them by content -- soft core, hard core, gay, lesbian and various other permutations and specialties difficult to describe in a family publication.
"I'm probably the strangest adult cruiser there is," she said. "I go and look at the structure, look at what they offer, count the images, and I'm out. It's kind of like an OB/GYN type of thing."
The popularity of Persian Kitty has made Mansfield a power broker on the world of online pornography. She says she receives an average of 350 e-mail messages a day from new adult sites asking to be included on Persian Kitty. It is said that a presence on Mansfield's page can bring an adult site immediate traffic in the thousands of hits.
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"If you get on her list you can make a small living," said Mark Tiarra, founder of United Adult Sites, a trade group for Internet erotica sites. "To be on her list, puts you in business Similarly unexpected success has befallen two married adult webmasters, Steph and Janey Huntington of Diamond Bar, Calif. In February 1996, the couple launched Janey.com, a tribute to Mrs. Huntington, a 45-year-old grandmother of two, that included provocative, though fully clothed, photos of her. The Huntingtons soon realized that they were onto something, however. Mrs. Huntington spread word of the home page on Internet relay chat channels and within a couple of weeks, she said, it had registered 20,000 hits. The Huntingtons began posting more pictures and soliciting photographs from other amateur models. Today, she said, the site attracts 14,000 visitors a day, who come to see topless pictures of Mrs. Huntington and more explicit images of other amateur models, including housewives, college students, a lifeguard and a waitress from Hooters. The Huntingtons say they earn between $8,000 and $10,000 a month selling advertising space. Most of the space is bought by larger adult sites, though there one banner is for a pizza restaurant advertising delivery. The site also makes money selling the models' pictures and their undergarments. Mrs. Huntington insists that the site will continue to be able to compete with large, heavily advertised pornography pages because it offers more intimacy. She says she personally responds to each of the 150 e-mail messages she receives each day. "I can't tell you how many guys are lonely or suicidal or by themselves who write," said the woman known to her fans only as "Janey." "I think there are a lot of lonely people out there who I can help." A similar philosophy underlies the efforts of Danni's Hard Drive, a site slightly higher up on the pornography food chain that is run aggressively run by a stripper, Danni Ashe. The Hard Drive features pictures of Ashe, 29, her office mates, and images she presciently licensed from magazines. The images are called Naughty Neighbors and Scores. Ashe says she expects the two-year-old site to gross $2 million in revenue this calendar year, largely from charging $9.95 in monthly subscriptions. She said the Hard Drive gets 3.5 million hits a day. Like Mrs. Huntington, Ashe argues that smaller pornography sites can compete because they give visitors a sense of intimacy. At the same time, Ashe also agrees with Steph Huntington that it will get more and more difficult for small new adult sites to establish themselves. "The door isn't closing for the little guy, but it's getting more and more difficult," Ashe said. "It's harder and harder to get seen unless you spend a lot on advertising." |