Liveblogging a panel at South by Southwest 2005 (SXSW2005; SXSWI) with John Halcyon Styn, John d’Addario, Amelia G (sic); 2005.03.15 16:08
I walked in late, having just presented at the Accessibility Shootout. Naturally I would walk immediately into the porn panel. I just had to meet Jonno, finally.
Jonno: It relates to the guiding principle I use to anything (the Golden Rule). If I had a personal sex video that was hacked from my Sidekick, I wouldn’t want blogs talking about it. Some of my friends use affiliate programs; Fleshbot doesn’t. Doesn’t that affect your editorial? Styn mentions that Jonno could be getting half the money from the signups caused by links from Fleshbot. “There’s a certain amount of objectivity to what I write about.” Some sites see traffic from Fleshbot and buy a banner, leaving him in “a sticky position” later: Is he writing about them because he wants to keep them as an advertiser?
Styn: Have advertisers pressured you? Jonno: Yes. All Gawker sites do the “advertiser salad toss” – a weekly post listing the advertisers that week. “ ‘We’re paying $400 a month for a tile ad. I see you did a spotlight on Blue Blood – why can’t we get the same treatment?’ I don’t like all my advertisers, quite frankly.” Question from audience: Does Gawker Media (that is, Denton) ever call you about advertiser pressure? No.
But he probably wouldn’t do the weekly advertiser wrap-up if he didn’t have to; it seems too much like paying for editorial.
Styn asks audience if anybody has a goal to work in or on any adult site whatsoever; none do. “You can talk about porn in restaurants as long as you avoid salad-tossing talk, or activities.”
Amelia: “When people won’t pay for things that are really [needed] for them, they will pay for smut.”
Jonno: “You can lie, cheat, steal… but you can’t cheat about what turns you on, what gives you that little frisson [or whatever].” “I am sort of of the belief that you shouldn’t have to pay for porn, and I’m glad that a lot of people I care about” are making that possible, and Fleshbot links to them. “For the casual porn fan, I don’t think you have to pay, but when it comes to the realm of the sort of more-niche content,” you do.
Jonno will link to sites that steal other sites’ photos if the source is a large corporation, which he sees as not as bad as taking money out of the pockets of the “more personal” porn sites. Amelia says it’s more important to get credit for what she did rather than to get paid.
Jonno has 724 DVDs unopened at his house. If anyone with a Weblog here would like to guest-review a title on Fleshbot, mail him with “your approximate flavours.”
Question about content filters on one guy’s dreamed-of erotic-fiction site. Amelia says to place things inside folders that are not linked at the homepage, which does not make the tiniest bit of sense whatsoever. Also stay away from the classic swearwords. Or use a subdomain. Or make a password-protected site whose password is listed right on the page.
Jonno says Gawker “give[s] me a pretty long leash… apart from the occasional frantic IM from Nick Denton when a celebrity sex tape breaks with ‘Are you blogging this? Are you blogging this?’ ”