Categorizing porn is a monstrous task. For me to rate those categories in relevance to popularity is like atom-splitting. Perhaps it's best not to mess with forces I don't understand.
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"Here is my meager attempt to name the big niches. The ones that are so big, a little word like 'niche' just can't measure up. These are the Niches that, love them or hate them, get the most traffic and the most webmasters promoting them." |
What I do understand is that there are niches that are bigger than others. I also understand that porn simply can not be defined in simple terms like hardcore and softcore. I have devoted tens of thousands of words to porn niches. I've researched obscure niches from violet wands to armpit fanatics. There are niches I love and niches I hate and many niches in between. In this two part article I will try to define what I believe to be the major niches, the ones that stand tall above all others, the ones that are behemoths in the skyline of the adult Internet.
The Godzilla Niches.
As I stated, porn is a complex topic. One man's dirty picture is another man's bore. Still, even Godzilla had his Mothra and if one must simplify categorizing porn one can go with the big two: Softcore or Hardcore. When our smutty forefathers first began promoting adult content on the net, these kitchen-sink types of sites were common. Eventually, the word "niche" began to creep into the vernacular and by 1998, the first official Godzilla Niche (Amateur) was stomping down the business models. Other niches soon followed until we have what we have today: Niches Niches Everywhere.
Here is my meager attempt to name the big niches. The ones that are so big, a little word like "niche" just can't measure up. These are the Niches that, love them or hate them, get the most traffic and the most webmasters promoting them. I've decided on six niches, descriptions of which will follow in this article and in part two. I will not be listing these niches according to highest sales or most traffic. These six niches are all relatively similar in scope, that's why they're Godzillas. Instead, I will list them in what I believe to be their order of appearance in our on-running movie. I will describe each Godzilla Niche and in part two, I will detail the advantages and disadvantages to promoting these giants of our industry. Shall we begin?
This is the niche that made us. This is the niche that allowed us to break through the glass ceiling built by the established print and video producers of our pre-Internet past. In our early history, finding pre-made content for a reasonable price was almost impossible. I'm sure some webmasters could afford a set of ten dirty pictures for say, $500.00 but not many. The existing production houses did not understand that if they offered their ten-image sets for $50.00, they would make much more profit because there would be thousands of us buying them.
A webmaster was lucky to get so much as a response to a purchase query from Playboy or Vivid. Some webmasters cheated and simply scanned their old porn mags or downloaded stolen content off of Usenet. Other, smarter webmasters simply picked up their cameras and made their own content. Using non-porn stars as models, these webmasters soon found out that on the web, it's the naked that matters, not the name. Concurrently, the digital camera allowed us to process images in our homes instead of the local drug store. Amateur people made amateur porn and surfers threw money at it. For the first time in who knows how long, people able to open an adult business for less than a thousand dollars.
The Amateur Niche is still roaring like Godzilla. It's so prevalent and so complex, it has countless sub-niches from Babes to Couples to BDSM.
This Godzilla Niche is so powerful that VISA and ASACP have demanded a ban of the originally, badly-chosen label that I will lovingly refer to as the "T" word. We understood after a point, that not all naked women are the same and neither are their audiences.
My belief is that the niche was defined by the introduction of PornCity's Jenny, a flat-chested woman that was over eighteen but obviously no porn star or horny housewife. Her innocent visage and massive money-generating talents showed us that we needed to break our content down by age range in order to be more easily found by surfers.
The "T" word technically doesn't fit the niche to begin with because the models in this category are roughly 18-21 years old. The Coed/Cheerleader niche has become a colossus on the adult web. Many the newbie webmaster will choose this Godzilla niche as the first niche that they want to promote.
It's just not right to call the sexual tastes of Gay men a niche. Gay porn is as big if not bigger than straight porn, particularly when it comes to making money. Even adult webmasters who had never looked at gay porn began to look with an eye towards riches. Gay men buy porn and gay men own computers. What's not to love? Within this Godzilla Niche resides sub-niches, only with alternate names to their straight counterparts. Bear = MILF/Mature. As for the gay COED/Cheerleader alternate, let's just refer to that as the other "T" word.
Gay porn has saved many an adult webmaster from failure and/or financial ruin. The demand is steady and voluminous. Gay/Lesbian people make up 10% of the world's population which is a lot. Not to mention millions of housewives and others that are fans of the Godzilla Niche.
And so ends part one of this two-part article on Godzilla Niches. Enjoy the intermission and come back for the airplane swatting, building crushing finale, here at Cozy Frog!
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