Although WhoPaidMe utilizes many less factors than Fame Registry in determining porn star rankings, WhoPaidMe is better because it shows the current Alexa ranking along with the percentage change over the last 7 days. WhoPaidMe is automatically updated daily, indexes thousands of websites, and offers a variety of search and filter options.

On the WhoPaidMe homepage, if we set the Alexa filter to < 50,000 (meaning only large, well known sites are displayed), the filter shows that the 'hottest' individual porn sites are:

• Mariah XXX
• Puma Swede
• Tera Patrick
• Jenna Jameson
• Club Jenna
• Lisa Sparxxx

If we expand the criteria to include sites with < 200,000 Alexa rankings, WhoPaidMe shows a few more names, such as:

• Briana Banks
• Jenna Haze
• Jesse Jane
• Gina Lynne

Mike, the founder of WhoPaidMe, says that an improved, innovative method of ranking websites will be released next month in January 2009. He may be building upon the juicy ideas of Fame Registry and developing them into a more viable solution.

What are your thoughts on the best way to rank porn stars on the web? Is the Alexa traffic ranking the most credible, consistent factor?

Microsoft and Washington state are in the process of suing Alpha Red CEO James McCreary. James is the marketer behind “scareware” product Registry Cleaner XP, which falsely leads Windows users to believer that their registries are corrupted.

The AG and Microsoft have filed lawsuits against James Reed McCreary IV of The Woodlands, Texas. The suit names him as the marketer of an application called “Registry Cleaner XP.” Also included in the suit are McCreary’s two businesses, Branch Software of The Woodlands, Texas, which does business as Registry Cleaner XP, and Alpha Red of Houston.

Many other adult websites hosted by Alpha Red are moving off onto other servers or making major backups due to the instability.

I would like to seem some photos first before gauging the valuation of the prize, but make sure you keep your current IP address on hand to check if you are the winner!

• Alexa ranking of the porn star’s official website
• number of Myspace friends
• number of industry awards (AVN, XRCO, FAME)
• popularity in the search engines (i.e. number of searches for the porn star’s name)
• and search engine rankings

Fame Registry certainly has an interesting approach to tackling this problem. The rankings are, for once, not based on some dude’s opinion, and the factors can be objectively weighted in varying degrees to output the most accurate ordered list.

Unfortunately, the idea is great but the execution is poor. So I’m sorry to say that Fame Registry will become another obsolete, abandoned porn site in short time. I hope an enterprising developer will see opportunity in this concept and improve it by several degrees to make the site worthwhile for visitors.

Although the website design is not a pretty sight, that is usually my last complaint because I believe in functionality over design. But it would be proper to state here that Fame Registry needs to lose its polychrome comic slut in the header. WTF is that? The last thing I want while browsing for porn it to be induced into an artificial hallucinogenic state.

Since the core of Fame Registry is the algorithm, it would be great to see some accompanying data and statistics. A typical porn star ranking page looks like this. With nothing about the search engine popularity or number of Myspace friends, which are used to determine the porn star’s ranking.

Also, I am concerned that Fame Registry is updated manually. I expect a more dynamic process of maintaining a huge database of the world’s porn stars and constantly updating the rankings. Not just two or three times a month. It would be cool to see something that mimics the freshness and complexity of Google Trends.

In a different light, this porn 2.0 application is apparently the result of a sparked idea while programming a domain name valuation script:

A friend of mine is big into domaining which is the business of buying domain names at wholesale prices and trying to resale them for a small profit. When helping him write a script to gather data used to value a domain name, I realized the same type of public data could also be used to value a porn star, since like a porn star, the value of the domain name was based on the popularity of the words or names that make up the domain name. For example the word Love is more popular than Hate so the domain name love.com has more value than hate.com. Based on the popularity of the keyword love alone, Love.com is worth millions whereas Hate.com wouldn’t really be worth even $250,000. Those very same concepts apply to porn star names.

Fame Registry is a product of Kelli Internet Services, a network of adult sites including Meggan Malone and Brea Lynn. Kelli has a track record of developing other creative twists to the online adult industry such as Porn Star Trivia.

FAP SERVER is essentially a network of micro-niche free porn sites. FAP SERVER distinguishes itself from other TGP’s :

• offers RSS feeds such as this and this
• does not have any intrusive advertisements (at the moment)
• intuitive navigation and user experience
• does not engage in traffic trading so you don’t have to worry about clicking on that “fake thumbnail”

Thus far, FAP SERVER has 12 micro “Fap” websites, including unique ones like GhettoFap, ETCFap, and RedheadFap. All of these are located on their own unique domain names. Luckily for the founder of FAP SERVER, he was able to grab an entire handful of these *fap.com domain names because the word fap has not yet been exploited by domain squatters.

Is this concept of FAP SERVER scalable? Sure, if it wants to utterly explode its micro niche concept like Guy Kawasaki’s AllTop, then FAP SERVER better grab all possible domain names while it still can since it is not using subdomains. But it may be more worthwhile for FAP SERVER to focus on a dozen or two Fap sites and make sure the updated content is top quality so that visitors keep coming back for more.

Some users have complained about the fact that FAP SERVER only serves up images. Since the inclusion of videos could greatly amplify the amount of daily traffic, the development team may want to consider implementing a Pandora for porn concept in the near future. This would integrate smoothly with its existing interface for browsing pictures.

One aspect of FAP SERVER raises a critical alarm. Where does FAP SERVER obtain its images? Since it does not operate as a traditional TGP which uses affiliate galleries, FAP SERVER may soon be facing a flood of legal notices. Additionally, I don’t see any sign of a 2257 compliance statement which may incite even greater concerns…

Why is Ning doing this? As the year comes to an end, Ning is optimizing its bottom line, especially in today’s horrible economy. In the press release, the company states:

They don’t generate enough advertising or premium service revenue to cover their costs. Plus, our ad partners aren’t big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue.

As you may have noticed, Ning runs Google Adsense on all of its free social networks (network creators can pay a monthly fee to remove these mandatory ads). Since Google Adsense does not allow porn ads, this makes for a very awkward context for adult social networks on Ning. Thus, targeted ads do not show up and the company earns zero cents for even a million impressions.

As we all know, the internet is for porn and the massive traffic to a number of these adult social networks are hogging all of the server resources while not paying a dime! Put on top of that having to deal with all the DMCA takedown notices since Ning hosts and facilitates the social technology of sharing videos and photos.

Owners of existing adult social networks on Ning are feeling persecuted, and rightfully so. Ning does not even have a proper export function for these network creators to migrate months and months of user-contributed content. PleasurePrincs on the Ning Developer Forum rants:

Since I have an Adult Site, and being shut down because OTHER Adult sites don’t pay the premium charges, I have to move my content to another social network… We used to have access to our code, but now Ning has made it impossible for us to get to it. Its like being evicted from your property and not being allowed to take your furniture with you.

Although Ning is going back on its word, the decision to kill off all adult social networks is a rational choice. A simple cost-benefit analysis says so. In the meantime, we will have to discover a new social networking platform to create communities for sharing porn. For one thing, it will be difficult for any existing or upcoming web application to measure up to the capabilities once offered by Ning.

For those who are unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a revolutionary personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.

What are the current methods of discovery for new porn? You have to click and browse, click and browse, and constantly repeat this intriguing yet unnecessary process. Instead, I want an application to constantly serve up porn that neatly aligns with my fetishes. I’ll give each video or picture a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and the algorithm would adapt to my ratings.

Where is the revenue model? Once you can whittle down to the user’s core fetishes, hit him with a laser-targeted advertisement. The probability of conversion just increased by 120% (a hypothetical but realistic number). Ask any adult webmaster and he’ll confidently tell you that niche porn sites make the most money.

As more and more fast-loading, high-quality porn tube sites emerge into existence, they have made a powerful impact on the industry. On the upside, the adult industry is now embracing rather than fearing this new technology. Porn companies are quick learners, and they have learned that DMCA takedown notices are a temporary and ineffective solution. On YouPorn, there are now teaser videos uploaded by the companies themselves with obvious watermarks and banner ads on the side. All of RedTube’s videos are approved and sponsored by companies like Twisty’s and Brazzers.

XVIDEOS is a relatively newcomer that is rapidly gaining market share. Take a look at the following Alexa statistics.

What’s the difference between YouPorn, RedTube, and XVIDEOS? Check out our assessment of the three sites based on the following factors.

Quality

As its tagline states, XVIDEOS is really “BIGGER and BETTER than the others.” XVIDEO’s minimized video screen is 615×480 pixels versus RedTube’s 580×455 pixels and YouPorn’s 600×480 pixels. The difference is minimal, but XVIDEOS is the technical winner in this category.

Speed and Availability

Buffering sucks. YouPorn has done an amazing job with scaling its media delivery servers. Buffering is nearly instantaneous (on our internet connection) and the new playback-skipping feature is useful. In this category, RedTube is decent and XVIDEOS is horrible. XVIDEOS momentarily freezes up the browser when you attempt to skip to a different location in the browser.

Content Variety

XVIDEOS has a huge number of new videos (100-200) added to the database every day. YouPorn and RedTube manage to add about 15 new videos on a daily basis.

Concerning niche variety, XVIDEOS wins again. Every variety of porn you can think of is available. Check out the XVIDEOS tag cloud to see what I mean. YouPorn has a fair mix of amateur and professional porn. Then RedTube is mostly production-quality porn

Filtering and Discovery System

YouPorn allows you to filter by Newest, Top Rated, and Most Viewed. Each of these categories are able to be further filtered by time frame: today, yesterday, this week, all time. YouPorn lacks a content filtering system like RedTube, which offers Channels for Amateur, Asian, Anal, etc.

XVIDEOS combines the best of both worlds and offers Best Videos based on time frame, Most Hits, and then dozens of niche tags to narrow down the collection to your liking.

Overall

YouPorn is the winner in overall user experience. It offers the best uptime and speed while keeping a simple interface. XVIDEOS is dumping a massive amount of content onto the web, which is great if you’re looking for dozens of new discoveries daily, but it is turning into a huge mess.

Redtube, one of the most popular porn tubes, was hacked today. A Turkish hacker group called NetDevilz defaced the front page of Redtube, leaving their logo and a message that says “No Porn!!! We’re not first but we’re the best.” See below for a screenshot.

We’re interested in learning what was exploited in the tube script to gain access to the Redtube servers. This vulnerability may be present across hundreds of other porn tubes. More on this later.

So is this the final version of Porn.com? The layout and theme still look the same as they always did: awkwardly clean and minimalistic for a porn site. The content is the same too, but I noticed a couple of changed logos and graphics within the categories. Anyway, the company behind Porn.com did a great job making an up-to-date version of the one-stop porn portal with the most expensive domain name ever.

We are still waiting for another top adult industry domain name Sex.com to launch its website. Sex.com seems to be in private beta, whereas Porn.com opened up its beta website to the public to test.