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*.

Killshot, altporn O.G. and long time friend of APN, who has been running EroticBPM for nearly a decade, worked with Fatal Beauty, and also launched SpicePlay in 2004, shared his thoughts on the latest heavily funded venture in the altporn user generated content adult membership site category, Zivity. His points on PayPal and the inherent issues of unfair competition raise some real questions. A lot of people, particularly in the DIY adult site community lost a lot of money when PayPal suddenly radically changed it’s rules on adult sales and many of them are still reasonably bitter on the point. We have some questions as well about how models and photographers can get excited to contribute for free to a site that might eventually give them a potential payout based on traffic and popularity they have to generate for themselves by spamming their friends for ‘votes’ when they could easily make more money simply joining the affiliate programs of nearly any other altporn site and promoting just as hard. Killshot also points out some interesting similarities Zivity has with his Spiceplay site, which we miss a lot. It had some great interactive features and some really innovative ways of sharing the wealth with it’s participants.

Beautiful photographic muse Apnea has demonstrated her charming power to move the masses again with her recently posted Zivity collaboration with SuperCult’s Chase Lisbon. Their photographic contribution has not only broken the site’s all time record for most set votes within a 24 hour period, it has also now received more votes than any other set ever posted to the site. I have some reservations about very heavily funded UGC membership sites that not only pay for their content contributions based on ‘votes’ (traffic) you as a contributor manage to get yourself by doing their promotion work for them, but also also manage to deliver that payout significantly after they get to use your contribution. People seem excited about the system, but I know a few alt models that have made more money than this set will probably eventually pay out, simply by signing up for the affiliate programs of the alt sites their sets go up on and doing the same sort of self promotion, and they get paid faster too. Anyway, it is good to see Apnea really making a power statement and these really are some very sexy stylish photos deserving of accolade.