Sometimes We Are Just Too Honest in Adult
Posted On: 2006-10-02
Mainstream has a hell of a lot to teach us
Of course, I'm really only saying that with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek. The fact is that when it comes to honor and integrity we have a lot to teach mainstream.
I guess I should not be surprised but the longer I work in the adult side of this industry the more I see people here displaying all those great virtues that mainstream claims to have - but doesn't. Sure, mainstream might point the finger at us and declare that we are evil and dishonest and should be avoided at all costs ... and there are people like that here ... but we're not even in the race when it comes to comparing us to mainstream.
Right now I'm looking at two sites that people have asked Steve and me to comment on. One is owned by a shoe shop - a very small shoe shop - that sells nothing out of the ordinary and is only one of many shoe shops here in town and in the region.
Yet someone has convinced them to invest thousands of dollars in a full-blown ecommerce website ... that uses readily available templates for the pages.
Of course, with a new site you may feel the need to give it some credibility in the eyes of would-be purchasers so why not do as the web design company who built this site did. You pluck a suitably large number out of thin air and display it down the bottom of the page and tell surfers that the large number represents the number of people who have visited the site in the last 18 months.
I guess it might work too because how many people would actually know that the site has only been live for a matter of weeks?
Then there is the tourism related business here in town. It's quite large and it has had a website for quite some time that they think attracts a reasonable amount of business. However, they are having trouble getting the site updated.
The designers originally sold the site to the business as a package deal; they would design the site, promote it, host it and update it. Unfortunately the business is now having trouble getting the designers to update the site and so they came to us to see about taking on the site and doing the updates.
And what do we find when we have a look? A site that has been around for six years and still only has a couple of pages indexed in Google. Where those pages appear in Google is anyone's guess because they sure don't appear anywhere useful in Google for any relevant term that people would use to find the business.
Not only that, but the business doesn't actually own the domain names - either the .com or the .com.au domain names. Instead the domains are owned by an individual who appears to have been involved with the designers at the time the site was commissioned.
And for all that they have been paying good money every month for a service that was not being provided.
I guess when you think about it most of us in adult make it fairly plain to the consumers - you give me your money and I will give you porn. Sometimes we dress that message up a bit and undoubtedly there are some who don't deliver what they promise but overall, we deliver.
Perhaps I am being bit one-eyed here but I don't see the adult industry these days as being as blatant about taking people's money as it once was. Most adult sites that are out there now do provide good value for money and most service providers in the industry do deliver the a quality product to those who buy from us.
However that's not the way things seem to be going over in mainstream. While I have only mentioned two instances here there are many many more that I've come across. Every day more and more of these are coming to light so please don't tell me that mainstream is somehow more honest than adult because it just isn't so!
Well that was something I wasn't planning on writing about for my first piece in Rated Hot but I guess sometimes things just get to me. We always seem to be on the back foot in this industry for what we do and how we do it and yet you just have to look over the fence into mainstream and see that they are worse.
And it doesn't just stop at ecommerce. Over the weekend the sordid details of the US senator who was big on protecting children in public but liked to talk dirty to them in emails came to light. In Australia we've had similar instances and I'm sure that many more nasty perverted instances will come to light but it's always us in adult who are the ones that are evil and bad.
It's time mainstream business and life took a good look at itself instead of pointing fingers at us all the time.