COLBY DOPPELGÄNGER: RANDOM NORWEGIAN

"Tim", Norwegian doppelgänger, courtesy of intensive social media research by Minister of Propaganda Karl Marxxx. 

KARL MARXXX INTERVIEWED FOR PORNO ACADEMICO (PORTUGUESE)

If you read Portuguese, or just like the way the beautiful language looks, be sure to check out the Karl Marxxx interview on Porno Academico by Ulisses Carrilho.  The interview was conducted in English, but it's kind of awesome to see Marxxx pontificatin' (as he does so often) about porn, consumption, social media and what's next in a different language.  Working men of the world unite!

FACEBOOK MINI-MEMES: MEOW! COME PET ME!!!

Thought I've been tweeting since I started the blog, I only joined Facebook in the past couple of months and what a ride it's been so far.  It's amazing how different the interactions and content can be on all these different platforms, but hands-down the best thing to come out of Facebook so far is the cat/Colby "Will Fuck/Meow for Food" mashup.  If you're on Facebook, come pet me!

PORN IS DYING: AND IN EVERY MAJOR EXTINCTION, THERE IS REBIRTH

Karl Marxxx here, spouting off "socialist" rhetoric about the porn industry....

In his recent review of a Raging Stallion original and sequel film in which Colby appeared, Bay Area Reporter and Nostradamus of porn, John Karr of the Bay Area Reporter (no, not that John Mark Karr who falsely confessed to killing Jon Benet Ramsey and then M2F transitioned) claims that two of his predictions about the adult industry have come true and the evidence is in the new Raging Stallion films, Cowboys Part 1 and 2. And I can't agree more (or less depending on how you look at it). SHOCKING NEWSFLASH! Porn(like every other content driven media platform) as we have known it is dying. And in every major extinction, there is rebirth. Here's what Karr says:

"I predicted two things about porn, and both will be borne out by my upcoming reviews. First, that plotted porn is either dead or dying, and second, that in the future, every sexo will have the same cast."

He's right about both parts, but Karr seems to be naive or is simply indifferent to the factors that are forcing this as he whimsically questions why the studios wouldn't keep porn the way it should be. There's no time for nostalgia or whimsy now and as is the case in capitalism, producers interested in profit follow the market. And for however much lusty sin the religious right wants to project on to the porn industry, it has an even greater vice than it serves, and that is greed. It's all about the money.

The role of plot in many cases is jumping ship from the films themselves to the Survivor-like island of reality in which the performers themselves live. With the advent of social media, the nature of who those performers are changes as well. No longer can fresh off the bus hotties hide their identity behind a nomme de porn and continually re-populate the craven need for newness that the industry and its consumers demand. In this world of immediate feedback, obsessive re-articulation and information saturation, not to mention identity-forcing websites like porn wiki-links, performers' ever-viewed lives trump any canned drama a short 30 second lead-up to fucking a "sexo" could provide. The old studio star is indeed a dying breed, fighting amongst themselves for scarcer and scarcer traditional porn star payouts, seeking immunity in challenges with increasing difficulty.

And the major studios are moving in step with this transition. Michael Lucas interviews his performers about their personal lives before they get busy; Dominic Ford in So You Think You Can Fuck gives the performers the opportunity to set up, design and direct their own scenes as they compete in a reality porn competition like Project Runway; and Randy Blue gives its performers non-stop access to consumers (or is it the other way around) in live pay-as-you-go cam site (shameless plug: where you can see our favorite Colby in the flesh several nights a week).

Karr's first and second prediction are actually becoming one in the same as major studios fight for dollars that are spread thinner and thinner across more and more media platforms. Online sites like Sean Cody and Corbin Fisher turned the industry on its head in the early 2000s, and now amateur porn and the consumption of social media about performers seem to be turning a relatively young digital landscape upside down once again. But there is opportunity in web 2.0 and everyone is seizing it, especially new-cummers (sorry, I had to).

This is hardly scientific, but a recent poll I read on Joe Knows Gay Porn said that about 29% of viewers prefer amateur porn. I can recall a similar one about five years back that suggested about 15% of viewers preferred amateur porn. That's a pretty significant increase and I'd be curious to know what people's actual consumption patterns are. But in the past couple of years, sites like Xtube have exploded with opportunities for amateurs themselves to make money fucking, branding themselves and their porn identity and growing their market. Some have even expanded their amateur beginnings into full-on studio presence. And this is only the beginning, I think. Consumers will continue to want their needs met in new and different ways.

And plot will always be necessary and will continue to evolve. The plot lines of the performers and the lives they lead in between scenes will thicken; amateur stars like Blackspark will push the envelope of what porn is and what can actually be filmed with home video cams and devices like Looxcie, and major studios will find a link between live camming, gaming and trends in contemporary theatre to create pick-your-path/choose-your-own-adventure style porn where the audience decides the plot and fuck scenarios. Let's stop our moaning and hail the evolution of plot in a digital world where we all control the means of production.