OOPS! WRONG WHORE PHOTO

Happy belatedly, Blogslutty New Year!

Last week, I was in Las Vegas for the 2006 Internext Expo. I was only able to stay for a couple of days and missed out on most of the good stuff like the Player's Ball:

Internext is arguably the biggest convention for my particular portion of the porn industry. The internet portion. We geeks have never really been accepted by the video/print porn industries. We never got much love from the non-porn geeks either. When Comdex kicked all the web smutmeisters out, we started AdultDex. AdultDex didn't catch on. Cybernet Expo teamed up with AdultDex for a while but eventually AdultDex died quietly. In the meantime, AVN - home to a massive borg-like network of sites and publications dealing orginally with the porn video news for retail shoppers - opened Internext. Powered by name recognition and sponsorship dollars, Internext Expo soon became the big show for adult webmasters.

However, that orginal indifference to adult webmasters still exists. The kids in Chatsworth don't like us geeks and they never have. Before the internet, if one wanted to purchase pornographic image/video content to publish/sell commercially, one almost always had to deal with the clique from California. The problem was that the porn makers in Porn Valley refused to understand that no webmaster in the world was going to pay $1000.00 for a set of dirty photos. The video/print pornographers refused to realize that porn on the web is a numbers game. A photographer could sell a set of 50 photos for $1000.00 to five non-web buyers and make $5000.00. On the other hand, that same photographer can sell 50 photos for $50.00 to 1000 webmasters and make $50,000.00. But no. The establishment porn manufacturers in Chatsworth would have none of us. So we made our own damned porn. There has been deep emnity ever since and it showed at this year's Internext.

Adult Video News is AVN. AVN publishes magazines, hosts a network of websites and is responsible for the Adult Entertainment Expo, the AVN Awards and Internext Expo. In previous years, Internext was usually scheduled to happen concurrent with Comdex and now the Computer Electronics Show (CES). AVN always had the courtesy to schedule AEE and the AVN Awards after Internext. Not this year. This year, CES, AEE/AVN Awards and Internext weren't just occuring at the same damned time. They all took place in the same damned building. The Sands Expo Center. Clusterfuck can't begin to describe what it was like trying to find Internext in that madhouse of badges and ill-informed Sands employees. Signs for AEE? Everywhere. Signs for Internext? Nowhere. When I finally found my convention it turned out to be tucked in the back, like an afterthought. AVN raised the prices for Internext attendees and exhibitors and lowered them for AEE. Naturally, AEE was a smash and Internext was a bust. Many suspect AVN intends to kill Internext completely and sweep it's corpse back under the AEE umbrella. All I know is a lot of adult webmasters were pissed as hell. Many of them said this year was their last year for Internext. From now on, they plan to attend smaller shows like Webmaster Access.

Despite all the crap, I got to see friends, talk shop and even managed to go to a party. I love adult webmasters. They're smart, funny and they come from all walks of life. Let the Chatsworth Clique have their club. Internet porn doesn't need them and they know it.