Boogie Sites

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

I'm sitting in my office one morning, going through my e-mail, and I find a bit of spam from an online porn site called DoMeLive.com Live sex, it promises--you on one end, a heavy-breathing nude human being on the other. "Free samples," it says, supplying a password and log-in. No harm in looking, I figure, and I click.

Sure enough, the password gets me through the front door, and suddenly a naked woman lying on a queen-size bed is there on my computer screen, gazing expectantly at me. I've been doing this job so long, all I can think about is how TV-like the frame-rate is--so good, in fact, that I start to suspect a hoax. I mean, how would I know if there really was someone on the other end? It could be recorded. WAVE, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, I type, smug as Alan Turing. She waves. I run screaming from the office.

The site that I visited, it turns out, is garden variety. The technology for doing live, nearly full-motion video has got a lot better lately, and plenty of places are doing a brisk business providing live peep shows online. I talked to Scott Hirsch, a budding Bob Guccione and the 33-year-old proprietor of DoMeLive.com and the Internet Video Group, its parent company. One of the bigger cybersex sellers, IVG employs three dozen women to, er, interact with men online. They work out of a 22,000-sq.-ft. "cyberbroadcast" facility in Pompano Beach, Fla., with all the facilities, including a gymnasium for its workers. The place cost $1.6 million. No problem, says Hirsch; his business was profitable three months after it opened its electronic doors. You do the math: IVG serves up roughly 8,000 peep-show minutes a day at $5.95 a minute, a weekly take of roughly $300,000. Hirsch just bought a big red Mercedes-Benz. Also a five-bedroom house.

He fell into online porn after discovering the glories of electronic direct marketing in the contact-lens business. "We were selling $1 million a year online," says Hirsch, "and I thought, if we're doing this well with contact lenses, imagine what we could do with adult entertainment." It was easy to find customers--Hirsch just trolled Usenet for e-mail addresses. And it was easier still to find women to work in his facility. Most are former exotic dancers who were sick of the daily bump and grind and find the frictionless economy of the Internet a welcome relief. "We offer a much healthier lifestyle," says Hirsch. "We treat them like princesses."

An Internet-savvy guy, Hirsch is building his empire by encouraging other websites to be portals to his peep shows; referrers get a third of the gate. But it's a tough, competitive business. Hirsch figures there are at least five other companies like his selling one-on-one Net strip shows. How long will the appetite for cybersex last? "I figure we've got only 15% to 20% of our potential users online," he said. "The Internet is going to take off more than anyone will believe." That is, if there's anything left to take off.

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