Sir Rodney is astonished by the proliferation of review sites over the past six months. When we started our site nearly three years ago, there were but four credible competitors: the venerable Jane’s Guide, Adult Reviews.net, Monica’s Guide, and Porn Living. We sought to take the confusion and fear out of the adult Internet with our well researched, critically acclaimed “Guide to Online Erotica” and our short, funny and entirely honest reviews of adult pay sites. Clearly, consumers like what we have to say, and the unique way in which we say it, thus we are thriving despite recent developments which threaten to turn the review category into the same confusing morass in which adult entertainment online has been drowning since its inception.

The ranks of adult site reviewers swelled in 2003 to include Rabbit’s Reviews, and The Best Porn, the latter from savvy entrerpreneur Rick Muenyong, who sold adult webmaster community YNot to Adult.com and re-invested his winnings in his burgeoning review site. These worthy competitors were a harbinger of the tidal wave of imitators that have now washed ashore.

On the web, imitation is more than the most sincere form of flattery, it is a way of life. The barriers to entry are low and, as we have confessed many times, there is money to be made reviewing porn sites, since review sites are paid a commission when our readers subscribe to a site we review. Adult webmasters see review sites growing in popularity, and they jump on the bandwagon with cheaply constructed sites, ratty cartoon characters, and bad writing, in the hopes of getting their hands on the loot. They assume consumers can’t tell the difference, or they don’t care. In the past year, Sir Rodney has counted no less than two dozen new review sites, including many that have been launched by pay site operators (draw your own conclusion about how “objective” and “honest” - the two favorite catch words of review sites - these are).

This is exactly what happened with link sites in the mid 90s. The success of sites like Persian Kitty and The Hun spawned thousands of link sites which jammed up the web with “free porn” mainly as an enticement to buy memberships for the good stuff. These “thumbnail gallery” sites have been recently decimated by new government regulations that require webmasters to have paperwork on hand proving the age of all models on their site. The penalties for failure are draconian, so these experienced adult webmasters are launching lower liability “review sites” in a desperate effort to stay in business. Like salmon swimming upstream to spawn, most * we hope * will be eaten by bears before they reproduce.

In the meantime, we hope our readers can discern the subtle but very real differences between the genuine value Sir Rodney provides, and the many shills for the adult industry that have been polluting the Internet since the introduction of ftp and file sharing on Darpanet in 1980 (by the way, this is true story, but we’ll save that for another blog

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