WWW/XXX
It's not all smut and porn in Austin's Web Light District. Behind some of these sites are savvy entrepreneurs who see a need for self-expression and original content.
By Omar L. Gallaga
American-Statesman Staff
Friday, February 16, 2001

Jenn Ramsey was feeling a little naughty that day.

On the day that her life was to change, her goals for the future altered forever, she walked into an adult video store.

Ramsey had driven past the store, Talk of the Town in San Marcos, thousands of times. This time, curiosity got her ó she finally decided to see what mysterious goods were hidden inside. Ramsey, who is married but considers herself open about the subject of sex, found it difficult to even enter the shop.

"It was mortifying," says Ramsey, 28, an Austinite who works in advertising. "I was surprised by my own reaction."

Ramsey figured she couldn't be the only woman who found it difficult to have her curiosity satisfied by the intimidating brick and mortar walls of adult stores. Delving further into the subject by looking online, Ramsey found that even the Web, the bastion of browse-at-home privacy, wasn't a place where many women could feel comfortable visiting sex-related sites. "Many of them are slimy and in-your-face," Ramsey says, "there's a huge embarrassment factor."

So she started her own adult Web site and company, HiddenSelf, with the goal of providing a more elegant place for women to explore their sexuality. Her site, launched in November, features erotic stories, essays about sexuality and will soon include an area to buy adult merchandise — all with the goal of removing the stigma that Ramsey says places a gulf between women and adult content on the Web.

"I want to do for adult content what Victoria's Secret has done for lingerie," Ramsey says. "I want it to be just another shop at the mall."

Ramsey's site is barely a drop in the vast ocean of sex-related sites. In Austin, several Web site owners are trying to enter the crowded adult Web business. While some owners are building small sites based on specific content, others have plunged into the industry and are making a living taking advantage of the never-ending demand for sex on the Web.

While some adult site owners, like Jenn Ramsey, walk the line between working their mainstream jobs by day and fleshing out their adult sites by night, others are finding they can make a living on the adult Web. Local adult site owners say they've started their pages for a variety of reasons: Self-expression, a desire to add their opinions and sexual predilections to what's already out there and, most commonly, to make money.

The digital skin trade
While the frontier days of the Internet, when adult sites seemed to be the only thing you could find on the Web, are over, sex sites have remained the one consistently profitable business segment of the Internet.

While the dot-com industry gasps for air, adult sites have gone through consolidation to become even stronger in the mainstream than they were in the mid-'90s. And as faster Internet connections mean adult sites can offer more content traditionally cornered by home video (streaming video, live Web chats), the business shows no sign of slowing down.

And here's the biggest secret of the Internet that few mainstream businesses will admit to: The Web's Red Light District has consistently driven the rest of the Internet, innovating in areas like banner advertising, streaming video, credit card use through e-shopping baskets and subscription-based content.

So says Frederick Lane III, a nonpracticing lawyer who wrote "Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age." In his book, Lane describes an online adult market that is worth nearly $2 billion a year, about three-fourths of it from subscriptions. In the last few years, he says, adult sites have played a significant role in making consumers comfortable with using credit cards online and finding ways to deliver multimedia content over slow Internet connections.

The online adult industry, Lane says, will grow indefinitely, led by high-flying companies like Internet Entertainment Group, a multimillion dollar Web firm that first gained infamy over its legal battle in broadcasting stolen sex videos of celebrity couple Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. IEG's legal win cleared the way for adult entertainment conglomerates to find success by breaking rules that don't even exist yet. "If you look at our society as a whole, it seems pretty clear that we're getting more accepting of sexual materials as a culture," Lane said. "Even if there's a slowdown in the Internet industry, adult sites are fairly recession-proof. It's a product that there is fairly strong and steady demand for."

Even a 1998 research report from market research firm Forrester Research predicted that innovations from adult sites — editing images with "watermarks" to prevent stolen content, pop-up browser windows and "cooper-tition," communities of competing business that work together — would be ubiquitous. Not only have these business tools become common on the adult Net, but they've infiltrated mainstream Internet business as well.

So what drives the demand for adult content? If we are indeed a culture of puritans being ushered into a new administration that promises a turn away from Lewinsky-era sexual frankness, why do so many people visit adult sites and how is it that they continue to profit while much of the Internet struggles? Lane and others who watch the industry, say the privacy of shopping for adult content at home and the pervasiveness (if not the perverseness) of the content itself (like Visa, it's practically everywhere you want to be, online) keeps people coming back.

Consider this: In the early 1980s, when much of the adult industry chose to distribute its video in the VHS format, the rival Betamax format died on the vine.

Adult sites drive the Web, Lane says, and as adult sites charge $9.95 to $24.95 a month for their services, they are riding high on a sea of cash. It doesn't hurt, either, that studies claim four out of every 10 people using the Web have visited an adult site in the last week.

And as long as there are readers out there who want adult content, there will continue to be enterprising new Web site owners who think they've got a new take on the oldest game in town.
The adult videophile and the dominatrix
Content Knowles, a longtime Austin resident and self-described former dominatrix, says she found she could make money and promote her business at the same time by creating Web sites that turned different parts of her personality into full-blown Web personas.

To date, Knowles, a part-time jazz singer who lives comfortably in South Austin, owns more than 30 working Web sites. Since she began learning to build Web pages in 1997, she's created a string of stand-alone projects that, through advertising deals with other sites, allow Knowles to work from home on her own terms and make a living exclusively through her Web work.
"I think of them as jobs," Knowles said. "I had a product to sell — me. They're performance-related things that I do. They help me find my self-identity as an artist."

After struggles with Internet service providers and a huge learning curve about the business of making advertising money through her sites, Knowles says she's gone from promoting herself as a dominatrix on the Web to pushing herself into mainstream content, applying the lessons she learned in the adult world to her latest pet project, Coolfreesamples.com. That nonadult site makes money from her referrals to product samples on other Web sites. The thrill of producing and offering adult content, she says, pales next to the challenge of being a businesswoman and learning to make money on the Web.

"Business is an art," Knowles says. "It's just so damned interesting to me."

Knowles speaks quickly and knowledgably about the way the business world and the adult entertainment industry intersect; the fact that she's made money from her Internet work puts her far ahead of many dot-com CEOs in terms of financial success. While a site she built over just a few hours may only attract 1,000 or 2,000 hits a day, the number of sites she owns, each feeding traffic into the next, turns into a tsunami of click-throughs and income. And the subject of sex and the way people respond to it online, she says, is one that will never cease to fascinate her.

Neil Blank, another would-be sex entrepreneur, started his site based on his affinity for porn. On his site, Blank offers detailed reviews of adult films. Working a day job at a print shop, Blank first experimented with Web sites about billiards. "The thing with pool players is they play pool. They don't get on the Internet," Blank said. He had better luck attracting Web visitors when he decided to start writing adult film reviews and putting them online.

When his employer's board of directors learned of his plans to start an adult site, he was fired. His attempts to incorporate his company, Smuttco Inc., initially met roadblocks." Three banks in town refused to open an account for me because it was a sexually oriented business," Blank said.

Eventually, he got set up through a bank in California and a Web host in Florida. Slowly, his site, launched in 1999, grew through subscriptions to about 250 paid users. After a recent visit to an adult expo in Las Vegas, Blank says his site will soon become profitable as his reviews are syndicated to other adult sites hungry for original content. With his small group of free-lance writers, Blank recently transformed his site from a subscription-base to a place that offers his reviews to readers for free. His site currently receives about 9,000 visitors a day.

He says he's become a recognized figure in the adult industry, as film directors, actors and actresses have praised him on his reviews. "It's really an amazing thing," Blank said, "On the Internet you can be as big or as little as you want to be."

Blank says it's possible his small adult site will begin making profits in the hundreds of thousand of dollars. "And I don't know that there's a ceiling on it."
Another Web site owner, Rick Hunter, says he makes a comfortable living from a string of adult sites he owns, including a site featuring nude photography he's done. "I don't want to say how much I make, but I couldn't make as much if I had a doctorate in just about anything," Hunter said.

Hunter got into the business three years ago when a roommate advised he might want to create adult sites, instead of just surfing them. "Next thing I know I was making $3,500 in the first month I started," he said.

Hunter is currently working on a string of Texas-centric sites that will feature local adult businesses and links to area Web sites.

Morals, laws and a new president
Lynn Raridon, the owner of Austin's Forbidden Fruit adult stores, has become a kind of patron saint for those starting up adult sites in Austin. That's because Raridon, in her 20 years of running an adult business, has dealt with lawyers, vice cops, competitors and local obscenity laws she says are more lenient in Austin than in the rest of the state. Peter Yang / AA-S
Lynn Raridon, owner of Forbidden Fruit stores, is known as a sort-of go-to person for those starting adult Web sites in Austin.

She cites Austin's "intelligence factor" as a reason that adult businesses can succeed here, where an obscenity ruling based on community standards is more difficult to achieve.

Raridon's Web site for Forbidden Fruit launched in early October and is close to breaking even with its monthly maintenance cost, she said. What started as a way of promoting her business online has become a Web boutique where customers can order unique products from area artists.

Raridon has seen political climates change and says she isn't worried that the new George W. Bush administration may take a harder line on adult sites, a concern that's spreading through the adult industry. "We don't have hard-core content on our site," Raridon said. "I think we're going to fall outside the bounds of it, but it does feel like it's gonna get a lot tighter."

The relative anonymity of the Web makes it difficult for prosecutors to pursue many cases against adult site owners. During the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno targeted child pornography for prosecution, but largely left mainstream adult content alone. That may change with the political climate, but Lane said it would still be difficult to stem the flood of sex on the Web.

"I think you've not seen a lot of prosecutions because Reno was sensible enough to realize that the time and money you spend on increasingly borderline cases is vastly disproportionate to the good you do," Lane said.

Locally, the Internet bureau of the state attorney general's office has aggressively targeted child pornography and child enticement through the Internet, but has so far left other online adult businesses alone. "Adults willingly visit these sites by their own will," said Tom Kelley, a spokesman for the attorney general's office. "Unless you're talking about clearly jailable offenses, it's not something we're involved in."

For adult Web site owners, however, local laws are still a concern.

When Ramsey started her site with the intention of selling products on the Web, she sought advice from Raridon. One of her first moves was to get a lawyer and to study up on Texas obscenity laws. "Texas is a very hard place to run an adult site," Ramsey said. "If you have a choice, you do it somewhere else."

Many adult site owners have their sites hosted in states such as California or Florida to avoid legal issues. Others who sell products online house their goods in out-of-state locations.

But for Ramsey, dealing with the peculiarities of her new business also included fielding concerns from her parents and husband. "He's happy for me," Ramsey says of her husband. "He just wishes I'd chosen another topic."

As for her parents, the first thing her mother asked when she started the site was, "Why are you telling me this? Do you need money?"

Austin's dirty little secret
The relative anonymity of the Internet and the geographic facelessness of the Web means anybody anywhere can run an adult site. Your neighbors may be having sex and broadcasting it to the world via a Web cam. A site created at someone's desk at an Austin startup may play host to sexually explicit online chats. A rack of servers at an Austin Internet service provider may contain gigabytes of pornographic images and compressed Web videos. An apartment complex may be host to a "voyeur-dorm"-style 24-hour video feed.

The acceptance of adult Web site activity in Austin may owe itself to the city's historical acceptance of alternative lifestyles, topless dancing and sex video megaplexes. After all, the city's warehouse district was once Central Texas' home for extracurricular sex.

Which is why it may seem that these Web site owners don't feel that they're blazing trails, so much as joining a stream of Internet activity that promises more acceptance and more opportunities for their sexual selves than any other medium available.
In a great, vast ocean of fetish and mind-boggling extremes, Jenn Ramsey takes comfort in that.
"I've learned that I'm soooo normal."

Peter Yang / AA-S
Jenn Ramsey wants women to feel as comfortable visiting her adult site as they do at Victoria's Secret.