March 2003

Interested bystander makes it to the top of this week's list!

FunSeeker's complaint.

And here is a response to last week's editorial.

Christie lets it loose!

Crystal wrote an excellent post!

There must be something wrong here. Is LL agreeing with me? And this one?

Crystal on Geoff Arnold.

There are no entrapment laws in Nevada?

Tia working as a cashier at the Wild Horse Canyon Ranch.

Who is GhostLady?

What's this? The Big Bad Bashy didn't scare anyone away?!

Nvbrothels was in the April 2003 Playboy Advisor.

EDITORIAL #010 :

The following is my first guest editorial, by my old friend, Doc. As I told him, I think he hit Hof's nail on the head. Given how inexpensive bandwidth is, it should be easy for the Spectator to say they will give a customer free advertisements on the World Wide Web in exchange for paid advertisements, some of which are disguised as "editorials", in their print paper.

From : Doc

To : Bashful

Date : Tue, 4 Mar 2003 17:19:05

Subject : Spectator advertising

Hi Bashful,

I happened to check out your LPIN summary today and I noticed this ongoing discussion of whether Dennis Hof pays the Spectator for the display ads. Well of course he does!! I noticed that Hof said, "I don't pay the Spectator for anything on the Internet." That could well be true. Dennis pays the Spectator for huge full-page display ads in their PRINT edition.

FYI here is a little background on the Spectator and where Dennis fits in.

A long long time ago in the wild 1960's in Berkeley, there was a little progressive/radical weekly called the Berkeley Barb. The Barb carried mostly political news of an alternative nature. In the middle of the paper there was a pullout section with ads for escorts, strippers, massager parlors, etc., which of course were rampant and quite public in the SF Bay Area in those days.

Some of the Barb's true believer anti-porn feminists of the time objected to the sex ads in the paper. A decision in the mid-70's was to separate the paper into two different papers. The Barb would be free of sex ads, and a new paper, the Spectator, would contain sex ads plus pro-sex political commentary, interviews, etc. -- ie a classy smut rag.

Well the predictable happened -- the Barb soon went out of business, unable to sustain itself financially without sex ads. And the Spectator became extremely successful. It made money on the sex ads, and it contained well-written commentary, news, and stories about sexuality and the sex biz. You know David Steinberg ("Comes Naturally"), he's a regular contributor. Excellent photography by Dave Patrick and others, coverage of California nude beaches, lots of good stuff. An all-around excellent weekly paper.

In the mid-90's, the Internet happened. Men stopped buying the Spectator for escort and hooker ads and started turning to the Internet. Also, the times changed -- even in the Bay Area, the massage parlors were shut down, the streetwalkers were harassed out of business, car forfeiture laws were passed, and so forth. There was an ordinance passed that prohibited sexually explicit newspapers from being sold in newsracks. This was pretty much a specifically anti-Spectator law. To this day, if you buy the Spectator in a newsrack you get a censored, toned-down version. To get the full explicit version you have to buy it in an adult bookstore.

With all these social and legal changes, ad revenues dried up and the Spectator could not cover its costs with existing advertising revenue. Enter Dennis Hof. All of a sudden, the MBR had full-page display ads, often two or more in each issue. There would also be hooker ads with 415- area code numbers that forwarded directly to the MBR. And "coincidentally," almost every issue of the Spectator contained a favorable article about Dennis and/or the MBR.

Ethically it sucked, but as a longtime reader of the Spectator and observer of the sex scene in general, I certainly understood the need for the Spectator to take Dennis's advertising money, print his display ads, and publish favorable editorial content about his businesses. It was either that or stop publishing for lack of funds.

That's pretty much the situation to this day. Dennis buys display ads and gets lots of favorable editorial comment in the paper. In exchange, the Spectator gets the revenue they need to remain viable and stay in business.

Men who only read the ads online often have no idea that The Spectator is actually a print newspaper with a thirty-year publishing history and a consistently high-quality level of sex journalism. All they see is the Web ads. As far as I can tell, every advertiser in the paper gets their ad copied online. Perhaps there's only a nominal charge, or maybe the Web adverts are free, thrown in as a bonus for buying print ads.

So if Dennis claims that he doesn't pay anything for Internet ads, he's probably telling the truth. Not the whole truth, just a convenient half truth. The whole truth is that for the past three or four years, Dennis's advertising revenue has been keeping the Spectator afloat financially. He pays them HUGE bucks for display ads and also gets favorable editorial support as well -- feature articles describing how great his brothels are.

Of course it's a flagrant violation of Nevada law, but if the Nevada authorities don't care, it's not our problem.

I hope some of this helped put Dennis's advertising into context for you.

Doc

Many thanks to you, Doc!

Be seeing you.

Bashful