I just received an announcement about Blue Blood’s new NSFW contributor news section. It’s an impressively extensive collection of news and appearances made by people that appear on or otherwise work with Blue Blood. They tell us this is a lot like what they did with their contributors page in the Blue Blood magazine, but obviously more. They talk about girls’ magazine and book credits, site appearances, interviews, music video appearances, everything you’d want to know about your favorite models, photographers, writers, and more. I have to say that I like the idea. If I see a girl on Blue Blood, this will point me towards lots of other work she’s done that I might not know about yet. It’s a real contrast with sites that give ‘their girls’ new names and make like they keep them all in their basement when they are not using them. Even I had no idea some of these girls did so many interesting things and I pay a lot of attention. It looks like they are still working on it and asking readers for feedback, but I just spent an hour checking it out and found some great info. Amelia G always writes funny FAQ’s too.

Alt/ArtPorn site Zivity is losing a sizable chunk of their initial investment support. Zivity garnered a lot of attention with it’s widely reported $7 million+ in seed money provided by self described ‘mainstream’ tech investors and venture capitalists. The ‘web 2.0′ site, which relies heavily on models to submit content and then create their own buzz in the hopes of earning themselves an eventual payout based on popularity they generate for themselves, rather than opting for a more traditional affiliate sales structure, has not been as wildly successful as had originally been speculated. Their current Quantified (directly measured) monthly visitors measure out to equal 17.5K people (US) 26.2K (Global). By comparison APN currently measures 32.9K people (US) 66.5K (Global). Those are all directly measured quantified results, which are known to be more reliable than most other traffic measures, especially when being directly compared. So, in order to earn out for their investors more quickly, they have diversified their projects, money, and staff to generate more winners. According to industry sources AVN, XBiz, et al., $3 million of their remaining $4 million and 65% of their current staff are being split off to pursue the success of their new mainstream tabloid TopFans.com site, as well as some MySpace games and applications.

I’ve always found the Zivity business structure curious, along with the handful of girls that promote it. Nearly every one of the top AltPorn sites pays out at least 50% of sales generated by standard affiliate promotion and some of them give an even higher percentage payout to their models who promote their own appearances. They all pay out in just a couple of weeks too. This has always sounded like a much better deal than the the overly complicated and slow system Zivity offers. So, it’s not really a big surprise to me that they landed themselves about mid-list at best.

By the way, if anyone has $5 to $7 million burning a hole in their Ed Hardy’s and wants a successful hot new art/altporn site, hit us up. We’ll hook you up. Talk to me in the next two weeks and I’m authorized to cut it to maybe $1.5mil*.

We got an email about three weeks ago from a girl who is the subject of a new solo girl site we’d written up a few days prior. She emailed us to make the request that we remove the article about the site launch and not ever promote the site she was hired to model for at all. It was her hope that no high traffic sites like APN would promote the specialty solo girl site she had been hired to model for. Given the specific circumstances, we’ve decided to comply with her request. In return for the favor of removing any mention of that site (article, links, and galleries have been removed), and partially because it’s been weeks and we still haven’t gotten any sort of thanks at all for honoring her dire request, I’m going to make this post in it’s place, because this situation brings up some important issues worth talking about. Here is her email request:

I know you probably won’t, but if you could, I’d like for the post about XXXXXXXXXX to be removed. See.. I’m “XXXXX” and although it’s something I did knowingly, I’d prefer it not be marketed on high traffic sites unless someone is paying you to do so.. then it is out of my hands. I did what I had to do to get through a pregnancy in a shitty economy where neither myself nor my boyfriend had jobs.

If you can find it in your morale to take it down, I would find that very considerate of you. Thank you.

This brought up a few questions, so I sent them out to her in order to make what I feel is the best judgment. Here are the questions and answers:

What other sites have you modeled for? Do you feel bad about all of them, or just this one?

SuicideGirls. I’ve also done tons of other work earlier in my career including magazine work for Hustler, BarelyLegal. I did a set for Digital Dream girls as well. I’ve gone under the name Samantha, Pistolita and most recently XXXXX.. for this site. I only regret this one, simply because it involves my child. And unfortunately I had no other income options at the time, being pregnant I couldn’t get a job before needing maternity leave. I was between a rock and a hard place at the time, and have already been paid for all my work with the site. So no royalties are given to me from member joins. Therefore, I would rather not see it advertised.

Did you give the money you made from doing the job back? If not, do you plan to?

Like I previously stated, I can’t take away what I did. The money I made during the 4 months of shooting for the site got me through the last 4 months and the first 2 months of my childs life. So I can’t just give back the money. That’s $XXXX that I don’t have anymore. I can’t take the site down. I just ask that you not advertise it on your site. I’ve had 3 friends already see it and ask me about it.

How do we know it’s really you? People write to us more frequently than you might guess, pretending to be various models. We are more likely to honor your request if we know it is genuine.

I’m not going to post the results of that last one because it would be creepy, but I do believe it is her, so that answer was satisfactory.

Starting with the obvious or maybe rhetorical at least, why does it seem like it’s always a SuicideGirl in this kind of drama? Experienced or not, every model should really know by now that they should assume their friends are going to see what they do and that should always be a consideration. If you don’t know, now you know.

But, beyond that, she doesn’t get royalties? Duh. We hear this ‘no royalties’ complaint a lot from girls, but that’s almost never the terms they worked under in the first place. Very few sites have anything resembling a royalty system and if that is what a model wants, she should have negotiated that when the deal was made to begin with. It doesn’t matter how long the job is, one hour, a half day, or even four months, if she takes a flat fee job, she gets exactly that, a flat fee. The world isn’t evil for not giving her something she didn’t have a deal to get in the first place. The model on the cover of Vogue doesn’t get a percentage of sales, and she doesn’t get to pull the magazine off all the news racks just because she doesn’t like the dress they hired her to wear. I have a lot of respect for the hard working models that put a lot into what they do, but I’ve also seen too many that quickly start accusing others of being immoral or crooked whenever they don’t get whatever they want, even if it wasn’t what they agreed to from the start.

You want to run your own site? Then run your own site. You want to get royalties? Then make a partnership deal that includes royalties. You want to get paid hourly, or a day rate even, for modeling work? That’s good too. But do not whine to the world that you didn’t get what you were never supposed to get in the first place. It makes it hard to respect you as an intelligent person.

Some girls partner to do their sites with professionals, and some of those girls get a percentage of the earnings, but most of the time, it’s work for hire modeling, sometimes followed by work for hire participation, if they are lucky. Here is how it works: The site owner pays her to model, then pays a photographer and/or videographer to shoot with her, then pays retoucher/editor to make the media nice looking, then pays designer and coder to build a good looking salable site, then pays the host to put the site up and cover bandwidth usages, and then pays another designer to build sales tools like promotional galleries, banners, then sometimes even pays public relations reps and/or affiliate reps to get the word out about the site launch, etc. and at the end of the day, they hope that all those costs come out to be less than they earn back by having ‘high traffic sites’ like APN promote the finished project to people who might be interested enough to join it. That is a lot of work and a lot of investment into what will hopefully turn into a successful site. If a model gets her cut and then tells all the big sites not to promote what was created with her content, that is immoral. It’s bad business at the very least. Everybody has bills to pay. Her child doesn’t deserve to eat any more than all the other people doing their job to put food on their table.

Models, a word of advice. Think about what you are doing before you agree to do it. Think about why you are doing it and whether you will be happy once it is done. You owe the people you are working with honest commitment to your agreements. Creating erotic media is not evil or immoral and if you think it is, you have no business in this field at all. Taking the money and burning the people who hired you to do a job is wrong. It is wrong to be accusing other people of being immoral just because you selectively changed your mind on an agreement as well.

Idealistic concepts get thrown around a lot in the world of AltPorn, ethical standards, feminist ideals, creative freedom, participant rights, standards of respect, etc. and a lot of the sites that have been around a while do deserve their merit badges in these categories, some more than others. Recently, Killshot of EroticBPM shared some of his thoughts on the perception of ethics in altporn and we’re happy to have the opportunity to share his insights here too. I’m looking forward to some of the likely discussion of some of the issues he brings up, so please, we’d like to hear your thoughts as well.

Just a small announcement. We’re working on checking over the extensive link list we have here, archiving dead sites and in some cases reclassifying entries. We’ve split model sites out into two groups, one for portfolio sites and that sort of thing, and the other list is for girls that have their own membership sites.

For those that haven’t had the pleasure yet, you should all take a moment and go check out our friend Fedora’s site FedorasBox. It’s a growing eclectic mix of thoughtful blogging, erotic photography, and more. I like it’s cozy feel and I think some of you will enjoy what she’s up to as well.

At what point is it ok for a site to make their name become part of the girl’s name? Is it a certain number of sets and/or videos? Is it only ok for the first one she was on? The last one she was on? Is it exclusivity? What happens if she then appears on another site? Does she get a divorce and change her name? Some sites seem to feel like their girls really belong to them, and some even seem to have contracts that amount to just that. Others simply pressure girls with threats of disinclusion and hostility. A surprising number of girls even take on certain site names and site initials in their MySpace profile names and other social network services. I’ve even had girls introduce themselves to me, using their site surname. “Hi, I’m Becky Starbucks” That would be weird, so why has it become such a trend in Alt? Some sites are more pushy about this than others and some don’t seem to do it at all. Isn’t branding a girl with a product name kind of the opposite of what this is all supposed to be about? A girl could be Penthouse Pet of the Year, but nobody would expect her to go around calling herselve Ivana Penthouse. What’s up with that? When should it be ok?