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T O D A Y

Pornutopia lost
By Andrew Leonard
The X-rated Web is building a bold and bewildering new world of sleazy techno-tricks

Editor's letter
21st goes daily

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T A B L E__T A L K

Are marketers the only people excited about Windows 98 and the active desktop? Discuss the future of Push technology in Table Talk's Digital Culture area.

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R E C E N T L Y

Apache's free-software warriors
By Andrew Leonard
Developers collaborate online -- and shake Microsoft and Netscape
(11/20/97)

A giant sucking sound
By Scott Rosenberg
Suck, the Web's "longest-running daily column," bellyflops into print
(11/13/97)

Riven rapt
How Myst and its new sequel won our hearts and minds. By Laura Miller
(11/06/97)

Reality Check
Scott Rosenberg on why digital-economy revolutionaries need to sober up
(10/30/97)

Will the Net spawn intelligent life?
Andrew Leonard on George Dyson's "Darwin Among the Machines"
(10/23/97)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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Captain Hollywood was a classic click-through farmer -- but that wasn't what outraged his colleagues. His offense lay in his methods.

His favorite technique -- "hot-linking" -- required little ingenuity. Captain Hollywood baited his click-through farm with free pictures that actually resided on other sites' servers.

"By linking directly into my site ... he can display my pictures without having to deal with the expense of my bandwidth," says "David," the aggrieved Webmaster of The Erection Collection. "He bypasses my counters by going directly to my pictures. I cannot have a counter on every picture, mainly because the major counters don't allow it and because each counter takes a certain amount of bandwidth to load."

"He was stealing my bandwidth," says David. "It is thievery, pure and simple. It is pretty slick if you can get away with it, but death to your site if you are caught. It is a major taboo to do."

Hot-linkers caught red-handed, says David, are likely to have their sponsorship links cut off by other sex sites, and will also be banned from the toplists compiled by organizations such as WebSideStory and SexHound. David also alluded to harsher retribution, including direct network-based attacks on offending Web servers.

Hot-linking, while common, is still garden-variety cheating. A much more nefarious trick is blind-linking, another tactic Captain Hollywood allegedly dabbled in. Blind-linking requires a level of HTML expertise slightly above simply hand-coding direct links. The basic idea is to register a "hit" on a click-through program without actually allowing a Web surfer to leave the original site. There are a number of ways of doing this; one key trick is to make the physical result of clicking on a link invisible, usually by specifying that a new page or new frame is infinitesimally small.

Subverting click-through programs is the underlying motivation for nearly all the weird browser tricks that porn surfers increasingly encounter in their search for sex satisfaction. Of particular interest, and annoyance, is the exit console -- a pop-up window containing several advertising banners that is generated whenever a surfer exits a given Web page via an advertising banner. Exit consoles usually point surfers directly back to the original site. So surfers easily get trapped in a loop, repeatedly returning to the original site without realizing it.

Such a practice is known as "circle jerking," and it has a double purpose: It generates click-through dollars and it boosts a site's ranking on the various toplists. Circle jerking is closely allied to a raging epidemic of so-called illegal link syntax -- a fancy name for good old-fashioned false advertising -- in which "list players" load their ad banners with references to outrageous and often illegal behavior ("Animal Gangbanging!") to lure visitors to their sites.

You'd think circle jerking would be the fastest possible way to alienate potential customers, but some circle jerkers claim a method to their madness. One "list player" suggested that surfers exhausted from following false links and wandering in circles will finally give up and agree to become paying customers. "That's what gets them to whip out that credit card," says Brian Muir, Webmaster for Butts-N-Sluts.

But to more above-board adult site operators, circle jerkers are ruining the online porn industry. "In all honesty, it's a scam," says Chris Jester, owner and chief programmer for SplitInfinity.

Even when click-through farms play by the rules, they're still helping to undermine the foundation of the online porn industry.

"Click-through programs are the downfall of the adult Web." says Beth Mansfield, the owner and operator of Persian Kitty, a hugely popular site widely recognized as the leading guide to online pornography. "I thought that click-through programs would come and go, but instead they've bloomed. There's been a huge influx of people earning revenues from banner ads who wouldn't even have sites without click-through programs."

Just two weeks ago, Mansfield watched as The Pink Club, a content-free site that has taken the art of circle jerking to spectacular heights, displaced Persian Kitty from its perennial No. 1 spot on WebSideStory's Adult5000, the premier toplist in the entire online porn business.

"Probably 30 percent of the top 100 sites are doing nothing but tricking visitors to gain hits," says Mansfield with a rueful sigh.

To some adult Webmasters, the golden era of online porn is fast fading.

"Two years ago, you didn't really see the saturation of 'nothing' sites that exists today," complained one Webmaster on the YNOT bulletin board. "Back then it seemed it really was a battle of quality ... site design and such to see who got the traffic. Banner programs were new and as a head-up-my-ass, haven't-a-clue newbie I could make $6,000 a month. But now it's no longer about the quality of a site, it's the number of hits you get."

The Pink Club is registered to Damir Kruzicevic, a resident of Croatia. Quality is not his concern.

"Competition is in hits not in so-called 'quality,'" said Kruzicevic via e-mail. "If they want (this what they call quality) let's make counters that will count 'quality.' Top lists are part of the adult Web. They are here and they will stay here (at least some time). Yes sometimes they are confusing to surfers, but whole Internet is confusing to some surfers."

But how soon before confusion translates into outright hostility? Greed appears to be outweighing common sense. When even a list player like Butts-N-Slut's Muir acknowledges that "popping consoles is not a fun thing, I don't like going to my own site, but it makes money, and that's what I'm in here for," one has to wonder how long the current situation can last. Ultimately, as one YNOT bulletin board commentator warned, an exodus of disgusted and frustrated surfers could topple the entire industry.

"If the pay site becomes extinct, we will all suffer," wrote this Webmaster. "Think of it as a food chain. If surfers stop signing with paysites, paysites in turn stop paying for click-thrus. This in turn will be the end of the free site who depends on click-thru's, partnerships and any other form of money making supplied by the pay sites."

"The pay sites need the free sites to gain traffic, and the free sites need the pay sites to gain revenue," says Mosier. "It is becoming more important to work together than to cut each other's throat."

Work together? In the ultimately unfettered free market that is online porn, such an idea might strike some observers as reeking of unwarranted optimism. Circle jerking, pop-up consoles, blind-linking, free-picture proliferation and all the other tricks of the click-through trade are paving a high-speed expressway straight toward a mass-shakeout dead end.

But why should anyone care? Indeed, one can imagine a cavalcade of anti-porn activists cheering the circle jerkers on. If they foul their own nest, who is harmed?

Actually, anyone interested in turning a profit by supplying information and entertainment via the World Wide Web should pay heed. Everyone faces the same problem -- ferocious competition in a sea of potential clicking options. It is often pointed out that a large portion of the Web's mainstream advertising is, in essence, one big circle jerk -- the Web's biggest advertisers all tend to buy space on one another's sites. How long can that be sustained?

The fact that sex sells on the Net is often taken as a hopeful sign for the online economy. Look, those inveterate pioneers, the pornsters, are making money! So can we! But the labyrinthine chaos of today's cyberporn sites harbors a more dire message: The fierce dynamics of online commerce and the breakneck pace of Net technology can create a vicious downward spiral. As long as it's just the porn sites that get caught, you won't hear too much complaint. But innovations spread fast online, particularly when they increase site traffic. The thing to watch for is the moment Yahoo starts popping consoles -- or the New York Times and the Washington Post hit the circle-jerk circuit.
SALON | Dec. 1, 1997

Do the new techno-tricks and click-farming tactics of the X-rated sites point to the future of the rest of the Web? Come to Table Talk's Digital Culture area and talk about it.