Bondage Blog

Yes folks, that’s right — today marks the 7th anniversary of the first post to Bondage Blog. Back then I wrote:

For all the sex blogs, kinky blogs, and BDSM / slave journals out there, there’s never been a blog devoted to exclusively to bondage. Now there is. Bondage Blog is intended as a celebration of the beauty of the tied female form and the pleasure to be found in consensual bondage sex. Expect links to entries at other blogs that talk about bondage, links to news stories about bondage, and links to bondage art and erotica wherever such goodies may be found.

I also expect to show a fair number of bondage pictures and artworks here – whatever tickles my fancy or might tickle yours.

I think back over these last seven years and it’s amazing how much has changed in the bondage world. For one thing, before Sex and Submission launched in 2005, nobody in America was making BDSM porn that mixed bondage and explicit sex. They didn’t dare; it was considered too risky. The only exception was in print — Taboo Magazine from Hustler. (Most of the photoshoots from that magazine since its inception are available online with a Hustler’s Megapass online subsubscription, which I consider one of the best deals in online porn for this reason alone.) But online? Until Sex and Submission, you had a lot of faked stuff — where penetration and bondage never happened in the same shot — and some isolated European arty stuff, and that was about it. When I blogged here about the new site, I said:

It’s always been puzzling that we combine bondage and sex in the bedroom, but we can’t get them combined much in our porn. I’m hoping Sex And Submission is the start of a new trend that fixes that glaring omission.

And was it ever! Bondage porn hasn’t been the same since. Once Kink.com took the risk and proved that sex and bondage wouldn’t result in instant obscenity arrests, there was an explosion of sexy bondage porn, and we’ve been reaping the benefits for half a decade.

There have been a lot of other changes, too, in the seven years that I’ve been blogging about bondage. Just a few of the others include:

• Bondage porn blogs themselves have exploded, and are starting to diminish again. When I started, blogging was huge on the mainstream web, but sex blogs were fairly new and novel, and somewhat rare. There were lots of BDSM lifestyle bloggers, especially on places like LiveJournal, but nobody much who was blogging about bondage porn and pop culture. Within just a couple of years, though, there were dozens, then hundreds, then… the number became uncountable. For awhile, there was money to be made (a little anyway) by setting up a free blog somewhere like Blogspot, feeding it with porn via the RSS feeds provided by affiliate programs, linking it with a network of similar fully-automated robot spam-porn extravaganzas, and letting the search engines feed you enough traffic to make a profit (not hard since your costs were close to zero). That’s mostly stopped now, due to the free services cracking down on spammed porn, plus changes in the porn business.
• Culturally, people are a lot less excited about blogs (and about the web in general) than they were seven years ago. Back then, the web was spiffy and exciting; now, it’s just a background utility, like the electrical grid. People are no more excited about “going on the web” than they are about “going on the street”. People still look at blogs — and I still have traffic — but they “live” other places on the internet — on Facebook, in their Twitter feeds, on Tumblr dashboards, and gosh-knows-where. One measure of this is that I get way fewer comments on my posts than I used to, despite having far higher traffic levels than I did “back in the day”. People are coming and people are looking, but they aren’t as engaged. This kind of blog isn’t the kind of place where they interact with the internet world any more.
• People buy a lot less bondage porn than they used to. I do this for fun, but it’s also a business; I’ve got advertising and affiliate links and a managed hosting package that isn’t cheap. And as businesses went, it used to be pretty simple. Get traffic, send traffic, make sales, profit. But in recent years — really the last three or four, according to my sales statistics, but especially in the last two — there’s been a sharp decline in the number of people who are ready/willing/able to purchase online porn. They still come, they still view, they just don’t whip out the credit card. That’s caused … interesting … waves throughout the business, with lots of porn producers going out of business or having financial difficulties or … as is typical whenever business are in financial difficulty … getting hinky about paying their debts to people like the affiliates (raising my hand here) who send the traffic. These changes are probably structural and probably permanent, like the ones that shook up the music industry starting back in the 1990s. They make it more of a challenge to pay the expenses of keeping the blog going and to keep me in beer, and they change who is making porn, but so far, they don’t seem to have really reduced the amount of cool bondage porn being made. So, not yet time to panic. (Another nice thing about these changes: since there’s no longer much easy money to be made selling porn as an affiliate, the huge spammy networks of automated porn blogs appear to be dwindling and going away, presumably due to lack of profitability.)
• Our U.S. culture has become much more accepting of BDSM and kink. Obviously there’s still a long way to go here. But when I started writing this blog, it was still routine for print magazines to run jokey articles about kinky topics full of “look at the freaks” derision. These still crop up, but are becoming rare; and in their place, we are getting more and more fetish fashion shoots in mainstream fashion magazines, more sympathetic kinky characters in movies and on TV, more handcuffs on the fashion runway, more celebrity interviews where we hear an unabashed fondess for kinky sex… Kink is coming to be understood by vanillas as something that happens throughout our culture, not merely as something that only a few weirdo freaks do. It’s not mainstream, but it’s becoming an accepted alt culture, and that’s really refreshing.

So, what does the future hold, for bondage and for Bondage Blog?

I think the bondage porn business is going to continue to change radically. Right now all the major porn producers (not just the BDSM producers, but including them) are scrambling wildly to figure out how they can survive in a world in which few people pay for porn, and the old “monthly subscription” model has gone the way of Lindsay Lohan’s virginity. Frankly I don’t have a clue how it will shake out, but I remain supremely confident that my fellow kinky horndogs will want to keep looking at freshly-made dirty pictures and movies, and that some sort of economic model will evolve to allow them to do so.

As for Bondage Blog, I plan to keep with it, unless technology and internet culture changes so much that nobody comes to look any more. I’m also trying (see my new Twitter account ) to follow some of the bondage conversations to where people “live” these days, so that I can bring some of that back to the blog. (I welcome suggestions on how to do that better.) Business-wise, the handwriting is on the wall — I’m not going to support this enterprise by taking an affiliate cut of (non-existent) porn subscription sales in the second decade of the 21st century. The recent redesign offers more valuable display advertising options to advertisers, a few of whom have taken advantage of the new zones; that may serve until the next internet business model comes along. We’ll see. It’s tough to plan a business model for a porn blog when the big guys who make the porn don’t know how or whether they are going to survive the next nine months. Luckily for me, my costs aren’t so very high, and Bondage Blog has always been in substantial part a labor of love. I can keep doing it for a long time — not forever, but for a long time — before the profit problem looms too large.

First and foremost, though, I plan to keep doing what I’ve always done — showing and linking my visitors to the best bondage pictures and resources I can find. I’m also trying harder to provide good identification for the pictures and artwork that I post; the longer I do this, the more frustrated I become by the people who strip away attributions and hide sources. So, when I can, I’m trying to improve my own practices, documenting where stuff came from to the best of my ability.

As I mentioned above, I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on how I’m doing, or how I could do it better! What do you think I should do, to make Bondage Blog vital and interesting for the next seven years?