(long post, grab a beer & a notepad)

there has been a bit of discussion about yahoo groups, both on & off the board. we all know they are good sources of traffic, but not many people see the other side of the groups - that is, the surfer and/or customer. so i thought id share something...

the last couple of weeks i've been staying with a friend in ottawa, we'll call him adam. he's not in the business, he's just a regular unemployed 25 year old twink. at first i wasnt too happy to be staying with him, he's a bit annoying. but after a couple of days i noticed that he has a quality that i could observe and learn from: he loves porn. better yet, he KNOWS porn. very well.

see adam trades pics in yahoo groups. hundreds of them. i dont mean hundreds of pics, i mean hundreds of groups. 218 to be exact. i asked. his apartment is littered with cds, zip disks and floppies. all of it is porn he's downloaded from emails, yahoo groups, etc.

at first i thought he was crazy. he literally spends hours every night going thru 100s of emails from the various groups he belongs to, looking at 1000s of pics and downloading the ones he likes. then he sends pics out to those groups. he knows what every group is about, what niche, what the people like and dont like, and even which studios and/or web sites people prefer to see pics from.

adam recognizes photographers. he can tell you who shot who, what site the pics is from, and if the guy is a pornstar or an amateur. and he almost never downloads or sends out a duplicate picture. he knows what he's got, even if he never goes back and looks at any of it.

yah thats right. he never goes back and looks at anything he saves. the only thing he uses the pics for is to trade and send to the groups.

so thats a lot of free porn. youd think he would have enough to spank it for the rest of his life. but nope. it gets better.

in the two weeks ive been here, adam has joined two paysites and bought three DVDs based on pics that he got in yahoo groups/email & liked. and this is an unemployed twink. they werent trial joins either. he's still a member and says he likes the sites & will stay a member as long as they keep updating with the stuff he likes.

which brings me to why he joined. he saw a couple of pics that he liked from each site. the site's url was on the bottom of the pics, and he went to check them out. seeing more of the same model on the tour, adam decided to join. as soon as he was inside he found those models and downloaded every pic of them in the site. of course, every pic was labeled with the sites url. so the cycle begins again...

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so i asked adam about all this. i mean he literally spends 2 or 3 hours a nite doing this. he's giving out tons of free porn, spending lots of time on it, and doesnt get anything out of it. he says he enjoys giving people what they want. he gets some satisfaction out of sending out free porn to the masses, and getting some back himself. i dont entirely understand, but then again im on the other side of the business. i prefer to get paid for the porn i show & the time i spend.

now, obviously i think adam is a bit toward the extreme when it comes to this stuff. the average yahoo pic trader is not this into it, at least in my opinion. however i think there is much we can learn from what ive observed the last two weeks. im not going to spell it all out for you, youll just have to read and interpret for yourself. i havent mentioned everything, but ive hit the high points.

so thats about it... i could go on a while longer, but i think ill cut this short and just see what everyone says. id love to hear some feedback. i just think its so rare that we as an industry get to observe our customers and potential customers like this....

and no, you cannot hire adam. he's mine.

cheers.