I pretty much kept my mouth shut last week when the adult internet and especially sex-blogging Twitter blew up in outrage over the Bustle/Bellesa story. In case you missed it, Ms. Naughty has a good summary with the pertinent links; my perhaps-too-cynical summing-up is that a fairly generic “porn-for-women” themed tubesite got too successful in its traffic-seeking public relations operation, forgetting its fundamentally villainous positioning in the porn economy and winding up with some high-profile media coverage that exposed it to a blast of outrage it was ill-prepared to weather.

I am not myself well-positioned to inveigh against the tube sites these days; they are, like the banks Willie Sutton loved to rob, where all the money is, and in recent years I have done a variety of business with them, ranging from selling them sponsored posts and links through doing contract writing for their house blogs to continuing the affiliate promotion of porn sites that they bought with their profits. But I can’t deny a certain sense of schadenfreude at the recent spectacle: an instance of the tube site business model, which has done so much damage to the porn industry writ large, blowing up in its owners’ hands like a hand grenade not thrown on schedule.

hand grenade with lit fuse

But that’s not why I decided to highlight Ms. Naughty’s post. No, I thought her comments on the increasing role of public relations in porn marketing were fascinating, bringing together many things I have slowly come to observe without fully understanding:

[T]he thing that has struck me about this entire shebang is the growing power of PR within porn. Specifically, that becoming successful in porn now often relies on getting yourself into mainstream media publications. And if those publications happily repeat your slogans for you and present you well, you can build a big website in a very short amount of time. If you can sucker in some startup capital with those publications, you’re off.

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It used to be that anyone, including me, could get traffic via Google and other search engines (ah, the good old days *shakes fist at cloud*). That doesn’t happen anymore because Google’s results for porn searches turn up two things: major tube sites like Pornhub and news articles about porn.

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So if the tube sites are hogging the search results, today’s pornographers have to rely on PR to let people know they exist. The female director to most successfully do this over the last two+ years has been Erika Lust. I believe she has three PR people working for her and it has resulted in hundreds of mainstream media mentions for her. When I look at discussions around the web about porn that women will like, Erika Lust’s name is the one that comes up. Cindy Gallop of MakeLoveNotPorn is also very good with PR, especially because she was originally in advertising to begin with.

I would say that Bellesa’s PR campaign was also hugely successful. The site only launched in February 2017 and it clearly had a shirtload of traffic and recognition by the time this week’s drama happened. It’s a textbook example of the tech industry/startup culture top-down approach to porn: a flashy looking website that needs vast amounts of capital to begin, large offices, great PR, extensive “market research” and… oh maybe some porn in there somewhere. But not icky porn. NICE porn. Because you need to differentiate yourself from the mainstream and look vaguely respectable to avoid the inevitable stigma.

(By the way, I’m doing my best to keep the snark out of my tone but I suspect it’s creeping in. I’m old in porn, I’m jaded and I’m jealous. After 17 years I’m still running a porn business from my home office, doing everything myself, barely covering the bases but doing my best to create porn that I believe in, like I always have. I’ve been profitable because I stayed skinny. But If anyone wants to give me a wheelbarrow of cash or do PR for me, I’m very open to suggestions.)

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It’s no wonder everybody piled onto Bellesa this week; for once there was a tube site with a real contactable person behind it and we could actually do something other than just send out endless copyright infringement notices.

Meanwhile, those of us who are actually trying to make ethical and feminist porn films struggle along, scrounging traffic from whatever source we can. The pickings are getting slim and good PR is gold but it’s hard to get. Getting a mention in a mainstream media article relies on networking, on knowing the right people, on sending out hopeful press releases. Or else it involves spending time writing your own promo pieces and submitting them for free, hoping the editor will take notice, hoping they don’t sound too much like blatant advertising. All of this requires time away from actually making porn and having a PR person is a privilege that only some feminist porn creators can afford.

I need to remind myself that this is the old world media hierarchy establishing its order on the previously-untamed, democratized internet. PR is the meatworld version of getting in the top 10 of Google results… especially now that Google doesn’t even pretend to be a level playing field anymore. Old websites without expensive security certificates have been scrubbed from the results. Media outlets get priority. Newer sites push out older, larger, established ones. Net neutrality isn’t guaranteed. It’s a bloodbath out there and I think I’m getting too old for this shit.

Indeed.

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