What part of the “your site” comparison with other porn sites fooled you into thinking I didn’t? :smack:
Since cavemen invented the airbrush, it predates Playboy by several millenia.
I blame the codeine.
And the boobies.
Hmmph. Codeine never had that affect on me.
Boobies doth make fools of us all.
I speak not as a doctor, but as an aficionado, and there were breast implants using closed-cel sponges in the 1960’s, at least if Coronet magazine can be trusted. I think they were experimenting with saline injections as well. If Playboy’s models were altered, they took great care to not reveal scars or other evidence.
I’m beginning to think I should have named the thread “Perky 1950s breasts”, because, looking through Playmate photos of that decade, bullet breasts, torpedo titties and missile mammaries were far more frequent.
Some (deliberately broken; copy n’ paste) links to the more extreme examples …
erichollen.com/blackbeard/The%20Compleat%20Playboy/ BCFs/195910_Elaine_Reynolds_CF.jpg
erichollen.com/blackbeard/The%20Compleat%20Playboy/ BCFs/195710_Colleen_Farrington_CF.jpg
erichollen.com/blackbeard/The%20Compleat%20Playboy/ BCFs/195602_Marguerite_Empey_CF.jpg
www.freeweb.hu/playboymagazin/playboy/ 5410_Madeline_Castle.jpg
Based on what I’m seeing in this thread, I’m chalking it up to Hef’s preferences, and the tastes of men from the era, which may also be a reason why cone bras were so popular in the day.
Hey leave me out of this 
I’m a Mrs. anyway…
huge: $8m turnover, 40 staff - pretty good for a niche, I reckon.
successful: been around 8 years, ~30% profit margin.
Those are my definitions. I guess there are official ones somewhere, but i am not sure where to look? Certainly not huge compare to Penthouse, but certainly a viable enterprise.
Word on the street is, that is absolutely not the case. But I don’t know.
Comparable number of members, better retention (as in, rebilling subscriptions). Also, we do not rely exclusively on affiliate sales (where affiliates get 50% of every sale), whereas most mainstream sites do.
Ah, that’s the rub. As we have noted, there are a zillion people on the internet with credit cards willing to buy stuff, but they are spread over hundreds of niche sites. More and more consumers are less satisified with a site that tries to deliver good quality stuff over a range of genres (as many of the old media companies do) - they know they can go places and get their very particular, specific “fetish”* extremely well catered to. And many consumers have multiple fetishes, so they sub to multiple sites.
Overall, they are spending more on this kind of entertainment (both more sites, and more expensive sites) , because it’s floating their boat very well.
Indeed. But if I tried to produce and distro a mag with my level of “fetish”, there is NFW I’d be as successful as I am now, nor would many other sites.
The internet as a delivery medium makes it possible to earn money in ways that were just not possible before, and is ESPECIALLY suited to delivering stuff that was previously considered not worth producing, cos there was no efficient way to disseminate it.
So. You’ve never heard of Google?
(* I putting the word ‘fetish’ in quotes, cos lately it has come to mean leather and whips and stuff, but really it’s more generic than that).
I think the shape of bras was dictated by the materials and construction methods available at the time, although I am not a bra expert. Remember, many synthetic fabrics are new developments. A cone shape is pretty easy to make compared to a complex curve, given only cloth and whalebone.
I was pleased to find out that women’s breasts weren’t made the way I thought they were based on external dimensions.
Google is a niche site?
You’re completely misinterpreting my comments. I never said that niche marketers, on or off the net, couldn’t make money, even good money. (I said the opposite, in so many words.) Obviously they can. Just as broad market businesses can go bust.
But Google’s revenues are about $20,000 million, not eight.* There are a zillion niche search engines. Some of them will last and make money. None will ever close within several powers of ten of Google, or the broad market successor to Google.
That’s what hasn’t changed.
It may be easier for niche marketers to make money using the internet, but the net also makes it easier for broad marketers to get to more people faster, witness Facebook or Youtube, and that makes them worth billions, not millions, faster.
I’ve been hearing about the Internet transforming business for a long time. That’s flat wrong. It transforms individual businesses. The basic laws of marketing haven’t changed an iota. Niche businesses, no matter how easy to start or maintain, do not and will not have the potential sales and profits of broad market businesses.
- When I was working for city government, we were trying to persuade Kodak to move into a city-developed project across the street from its world headquarters. They started a project incubator there, but closed it just a few years later. The reason, I was told, was that it made no business sense to get into any market that was worth less than a billion dollars in sales to them. This may explain many of the problems that Kodak has had over the years, but it’s also a staggering indicator of the difference between niche markets and broad ones.
I don’t believe this for a moment. The bras of the 40s weren’t that style and most of the bras of the 50s weren’t either. You can watch a dozen 50s movies and never see a conical bra. Conical was a style and a look, the Sweater Girl look, not an engineering principle.
Pictures of 50s bra advertisements. There is one really conical bra for Sweater Girls, but the others look much more natural.
Actually, from what I’ve heard you’re probably doing considerably better than Penthouse! This story’s a few years old, but I haven’t heard anything about their situation getting better:
Interesting site, but not a great fetish site. Not enough pictures.
Oh! Sorry, I missed the shift in topic. 
That’s an article about the magazine, not about the Internet. You can’t compare markets across media. If the broad market magazines are doing worse, then the niche market magazines are probably doing even more poorly.
The Internet results are easy to check at Alexa.com. (Well, not easy. The graphs keep refusing to change whenever I try to get different views. Rankings are easy to check, though.)
Playboy.com rank 1265
daily reach per million last six months, about 800
Penthouse.com rank 2339
Abbywinters.com rank 7786
daily reach per million last six months, about 100
Abbywinters ranked in the 10,000s the last week and the 12,000s for the most recent day. Quick, order up another threesome! 
Did anyone else here imagine Sean Connery as 007, facing a 1960’s style breast day?
Now this is a weirdly shaped boob…
erichollen.com/blackbeard/The%20Compleat%20Playboy/BCFs/195606_Gloria_Walker_CF.jpg
But look at the page views graph since they started keeping track:
Page Views from ~Sept 2001
Reach over the same period
Reach is the percentage of people running their software that visit each site. If you believe this information, around 0.08% of users are visiting Playboy.com and around 0.01% of users are visiting abbywinters.com. Given that anyone with a pulse knows that playboy makes naughty pictures, I would say that having one eighth of their fan base isn’t too shabby. Right now abby is getting about 1/6 the page views of hef.
As a fun point of reference, abby kicks the shit out of the straightdope. =)
Also fun, for 2003 and 2004 fark.com and playboy.com had the same percentage of visitors. Then fark jumped ahead for a year or so and then tanked.
Which porn sites do you consider to be the real heavy hitters? playboy.com, if you look at the 5 year picture, is crashing. nubiles.net appears to be taking off. The number one hit off google when you search for porn is a gateway site called yobt.com. It’s really taking off, but is still nothing compared to google, of course.
You also can’t compare the success of subscription-based internet sites based on either pageviews or unique visitors. The true measure would be subscribing members. If abby had twice as many perpetually renewing subscribers, but a drastic reduction in pageviews, she’d be even more successful than today, even though Alexa would drop her ranking. I’d also bet that she has a higher new-visitor-turned-subscriber ratio than either Playboy or Penthouse, as I’d assume they get a TON of natural traffic, whereas I’d guess that abby gets a lot of organic traffic.
The analogy I usually use is that of country music stations. A country music station is the number one radio station around these parts. Yet, country music overall is just a niche genre in this area, not all that popular.
How is this possible? Because almost all the other radio stations in town are some variant of rock music. They may be sliced into oldies and rap and top 40 and alternative and all the other labels, but they’re all part of the mainstream juggernaut that is rock music. Collectively they have about eight times the audience as the country music station.
You find this basic division in almost any industry. Analog Science Fiction has long been the leading sf magazine in subscriptions, but it wins only a tiny number of awards. Why? Because hard sf fans are a niche audience. They are very loyal and very supportive, but only a minority of the whole spectrum of the field, so they get outvoted almost all the time.
Lactaid has become a generic in the field of lactose intolerance, with people calling all lactose-free milk Lactaid milk and lactase pills Lactaid pills. Its audience wants and demands such a product. But its sales are invisible compared to regular milk sales.
AbbyWinters does well for an individual site. You have to compare it against all the other mainstream porn sites to see where it fits into the overall market.
If you go to alexa.com and look at the top 100 sites for the U.S., you’ll find Youporn at #25, Adultfriendfinder at #33, Redtube at #36, XTube at #63, Pornhub at #72, and Adultadworld at #95. I didn’t check too closely into them, but they all look to be general agglomeration sites, not tied into a particular niche or style or name. Even the smallest is ten times the size of abbywinters. And there must be hundreds more ahead of her.
Niches are inherently limited. Take a look at your own trendline link. Abbywinters doesn’t change much at all over seven years. So what if any individual brand name declines? That just means that the same people are going to other equivalent sites. I’ve never heard of Youporn, but it’s doing great business. When people get tired of it, they’ll go somewhere else that does the same thing only better. They won’t go to abby. Only her niche will stay. She may keep making money at the niche forever, but never huge overwhelming money. That’s reserved for the mainstream.