An except from my book Running with Wolves: Sex, Scandal and Seduction, which covers two decades of the behind the scenes of the adult industry, the largest erotic library in the world and the Naked Gold Rush, otherwise known as the launch of girly pics to the Internet.
It was around the year ninety-three or ninety-four, when one hot California day, an ultra-shiny red sports car pulled into the rustic dirt drive at my ranch office. In a cloud of dust, out stepped Calvin in full suit and newly shined black shoes. I knew Calvin as the owner of a very successful phone sex biz. He was a shrewd businessman and had made a fortune in the audiotext business. I’d get regular visits from his staff to license my images for his phone ads; this time he was here himself for something very different.
“I wanna buy photos for this brand new thing they’re calling the WORLD WIDE WEB.”
I had heard of some new “Bulletin Board” thing on the computer. Someone else had contacted me recently about a fan site with my cheesy B movie acting pics. I was a little miffed at the fact that guys seemed to be sharing images of me and I wasn’t involved in collecting any money out of it and my wheels had already been turning on how this could somehow turn a profit.
Calvin explained excitedly about what this new “Internet” thing was and how there could be thousands of people looking at these places called “domains” and how he wanted to make some of these domains with sexy photos. He was convinced this thing was going to be massive.
He wanted me to license him some new rights no one had ever heard of;
THE RIGHTS TO USE IMAGES ON THE INTERNET
I offered to license him images at the same rate as the phone pics; for a hundred a photo.
“I’ll take five hundred.”
It took a millisecond to do the math and figure out that I was getting fifty thousand dollars!!! So convinced was he about this new Internet thing, he chose five hundred pics and left me with a whopping big check!!! I was not technically savvy at all. Couldn’t even type a letter; I had a secretary I relied heavily on for that. But I was intrigued to know why this man would invest so much. He had made millions before and it wasn’t on bad decisions. I had my secretary look up these things called “domains,” and soon discovered, you could get one of these for about fifty dollars. I started to dream about what this could mean if computers could be connected all over the world. Not only for sharing and looking at sexy pictures but everything, the incredible things that could be possible. And if this was true, and ultimately, we’d all be talking over computers, like Calvin said, what other kinds of services might be on there?
I made a list of potential names for “website” domains that might be useful in the future if this really happened. I gave the list to my secretary to try to figure out how we would go about registering these things. There were a hundred names on my list. Some sexual yes, but also general things that might be useful. All were available:
Boobs.com, Girls.com but also Cars.com, Flights.com, Movies.com, Tickets.com, Books.com, NewYork.com…all were available!!! At that point you could’ve registered CocaCola.com (I thought probably would not be wise, but you could!). Sex.com had just been taken; everything else was up for grabs.
I went to run it by my husband and showed him my one hundred wish list.
“I want to invest in this. I want to buy these names. They are fifty dollars each. The entire investment is only five thousand.”
My husband went ballistic and immediately shut down my little plans.
“You are stupid, stupid, stupid!!!” he snorted, “This is a ridiculous idea! And that guy’s a MORON to invest in this Internet thing, mark my words, he’s going to lose everything; the Internet will never work!”
Of course, that Stupid Stupid Stupid list would have been worth billions today,
Cars.com alone made history as the largest domain sale ever, it was recently resold at $1.6 Billion https://www.autoremarketing.com/technology/cars-com-sold-for-1.8-billion
And Calvin?... Well, let’s just say he didn’t lose everything!
…. Read this and other juicy behind the scenes history of the sex biz
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