IN THE BIZ

What does an American think of when he hears the words “Sweden” or “Denmark”?

Generally, Sweden is associated with meatballs, or more commonly, the willing, big breasted, Swedish blonde wearing Tyrolean lederhosen and talking like the chef from the Muppets, “Tudey ve-a veell leern tu du zee svedeesh meetbells.” At the best, Denmark is usually degraded to being the capitol of Sweden, if not the occasional “Danish Pastry” comes to mind first.

But a fact that not many people are aware of, is that the two small countries located north of Germany and west of Russia, were the pioneering countries within the field of liberalizing pornography.IN THE BIZ

What does an American think of when he hears the words “Sweden” or “Denmark”?

Generally, Sweden is associated with meatballs, or more commonly, the willing, big breasted, Swedish blonde wearing Tyrolean lederhosen and talking like the chef from the Muppets, “Tudey ve-a veell leern tu du zee svedeesh meetbells.” At the best, Denmark is usually degraded to being the capitol of Sweden, if not the occasional “Danish Pastry” comes to mind first.

But a fact that not many people are aware of, is that the two small countries located north of Germany and west of Russia, were the pioneering countries within the field of liberalizing pornography.

In 1969, Denmark was the first country to legalize pornography, and through the seventies Denmark became the major supplier of sleaze to the sex-starving masses of the world. In the fifties, Sweden was the first country to introduce sexuality education in public schools, and from there derived the infamous stereotype of the blonde, busty and sexually liberated Swedish woman: “The Swedish Sin”. The liberal Scandinavian attitude towards pornography is suggested by these facts.

In Denmark you can, without restraint, find any type of hardcore magazines displayed openly on the newspaper rack, and in the Copenhagen equivalent to Amsterdam’s “Red light district,” you will find the most popular and classy hotels side by side with sex-shops and brothels.

At this point it would seem reasonable to deduce that the Scandinavians could be fed up with hardcore porn constantly pouring in from all directions. But the statistics show that the industry is alive and kicking.

Even though the current Danish export of adult products is close to non-existent now as compared to the seventies, the top search words among the national search engines are “Sex,” “Porn” and “Camping”.

The Swedes are doing a lot better on the export scene. A Swedish name that might ring a bell is “Private”, an industry giant in production of popular adult movies and worldwide distribution.

Now it might be appropriate to introduce yours truly, just to verify that this article is straight from the horse’s mouth.

Since 1997 we have been running the most popular thumbnail gallery post in Scandinavia: www.Free6.com. Furthermore, we are involved in the phone sex, online sexshops and the magazine business, and our most recent project is an online content shop (AbsoluteContent.com) with some in-house productions. Hence, without beating our own drums, we can claim to have a finger on the Scandinavian sex pulse.

“So why did you become so damn popular?”

Your typical Scandinavian TGP site is usually a bad clone of the likes of The Hun and Thumbzilla, stuffed with consoles, blind links and circle-jerks just waiting to happen. So instead of jumping on the bandwagon, we tried hard to make a difference.

The traditional TGP site is linear, with the usual 40-50 daily link blocks on top of each other. Obviously, this is a classic and user-friendly interface, but in the long run it proves to be very limited and tiring. Instead, we chose to group all incoming links in static categories located in a classic left-sided menu. We also did a Newest Links category, where the 150 newest links will be displayed for two hours and afterwards spread out at the top of the appropriate categories.

Furthermore, we added a rather unique search function, which allows the visitor to search freely among the over 230,000 submitted links. As a feature of interactivity (interactivity = stickiness) we let the visitors share their opinion about a gallery on our Top 100 list. The fact that the entire site automatically regenerates every two hours and in the process cleans up the site for bad links, gives the visitor an impression of a dynamic site that constantly is renovated and updated with fresh material, even if you visit the site several times a day. Additionally, this method gives our webmasters more traffic on a single gallery compared to the typical linear TGP model. A visitor can enter a webmasters’ gallery in the newest links area, the subcategories, in the search, and finally, if it is voted to be a quality gallery, at the Top 100 list. All in all, a gallery gets a longer life span than usual and consequently more profit.

“Hey! Cut to the chase! How do I earn money in Scandinavia?”

Scandinavians still have a broad scepticism when it comes to online credit card billing and a simple fear of being ripped off, so the answer must be dialers. Unfortunately, through the last couple of years the dialer market in Scandinavia has been experiencing a lot of webmasters with a “Hit ‘n Run” mentality, giving dialers a bad name and ruining the game for us who try to do clean business. It is truly exhausting to present an honest product, when the media explodes with stories of people paying outrageous amounts of money for something they didn’t even know they bought. But still it is absolutely possible to profit on dialers, since over 85% percent of all Scandinavian Internet users still have modem or ISDN. It should be mentioned that broadband dialers slowly are starting to pay off.

With our dialer, the customer accepts a one-time payment, and is granted access to our content for 24 hours in contrast to the usual “per minute” charging. A modem pool identifies the customer’s telephone number and with assistance from a phone company, we receive the address to send an invoice. This drastically increases the rate of paying customers.

Concerning the presentation of your product, it would be wise to strive for something different. A personal theory is that to a Scandinavian, the typical glamorous splash-site seems far too American as is the “Click here and we will charge your credit card” line. They have seen one to many of that kind. With our experience, we feel that you achieve more with clean, personal and down to earth entry pages, and it absolutely won’t hurt with a bit of assurance about what the customer is about to buy.

So even though Scandinavia is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey, the business is still hot if you make a little effort.

Tim works for AbsoluteContent.com, and is based in Sweden. The company also runs ten other adult sites including www.webspace.se, freehosting server www.freesexspace.com, and eShop www.eroticpassion.com. Please contact tim@free6.com for more info.