By the way, Billy Watson is hardly the outdated stereotype of the Porn Valley pornographer.
You Know What You’re Going to Get Earlier in the day, I talked with a director who specializes in online porn. Billy Watson shoots for the Dogfart Network (twenty-plus interracial sites) out of his own studio in LA.
Twenty-three-year-old porn veteran Gracie Glam stops by to pick up Andy and I introduce myself. After Gracie strips off some of her duds, Billy takes a few minutes to do some quick polaroids for his private collection. In the meantime I discover that I’ve missed an email from Tara Lynn Foxx about dinner. I’m sure she would have stopped by the Smut Den as she is a veteran of blacksonblondes and like everyone else, loves Billy Watson. The hour is later than the former college instructor had planned so everyone is gathering up their stuff.
Billy Watson and I compare our minimalist histories of porn watching and admit we knew little about it when we were introduced to the industry. Billy entered by happenstance through a friend who worked affiliate programs, guiding traffic to websites and getting a take from each member. The most common tactic was to steal content or lease it by licensing a DVD, then resell and resell some more. It was fast money early on.
I invented Billy Watson when I started a part-time gig as a sales “affiliate” for a porn site called Blacks On Blondes. This was 1998. (I’ll talk about why I chose that site later.) Affiliates were some of the first-ever gig-worker jobs in technology, and the gigs were literally open to anyone. I mean any one. All you needed was a computer and an internet connection and some super basic coding skills. So here’s the gig: learn how to write 15 or 20 lines of simple HTML; direct people (ie “traffic”) to a porn site; and, if your “traffic converted”, you earned a sales commission. Pretty simple, right?
