There’s a novel based on a real-life Texas family, called "The Bone Pickers". On the High Plains, this family made a passable living by walking the land and collecting the bones of slaughtered Buffaloes and other animals that succumbed to the desert heat. They would cart their vulture-cleaned, sun-bleached cargo to industrial plants that would fire the stuff into char to produce bone black for ink. These were the days before decent irrigation when farming was a total crapshoot for people living in the Panhandle. It was also the direct aftermath of the Wild West era, when the Buffalo were plentiful, the American Indian was still relatively autonomous and the Industrial Revolution had yet to gain steam. After vast herds of Bison had been hunted to virtual extinction, the last tribes of Comanche, Kiowa and Cherokee were rounded up and carted off to reservations, all that was left was hundreds of miles of dried bones and Caliche.
| "We’ve got a long and painful slog ahead of us. A lot of us won’t survive as adult webmasters. Those of us making money are going to have to triple our efforts and even that might not work." |
Our industry is in trouble. Real trouble. Blame the economy. Blame the Tubes. Blame the freeloaders. Blame anybody you want - it won’t change the fact that we are hurting. Maybe surfers are saving their money because they have little to spare. Maybe they’ve given up paying for porn because there’s just too much free shit out there. Maybe we all got a little too used to the high life and spent our assets on cars and bullshit, like so many wasted carcasses, when we should have been planning for the famine. It really doesn’t matter how we got here because here is where we are and there’s no going back. They days of wide-eyed surfers, gobsmacked by the shiny Internet are over. Their computing machines are as ubiquitous as their televisions and not nearly as fascinating as their iPhones. People are never going to stop wanting porn but the question we have to ask ourselves is:
In the meantime, we’ve got a long and painful slog ahead of us. A lot of us won’t survive as adult webmasters. Those of us making money are going to have to triple our efforts and even that might not work. What’s worse, many good adult Internet resources are going to fall by the wayside, from sponsors to content providers to hosts and the rest. Those perks we’ve grown accustomed to like car giveaways and open bar parties will be few and far between. We’ll be lucky if general payout rates maintain anywhere near the levels we’re used to. And sadly, while the honorable BONE PICKERS are here, so are the scammers and cheaters and they are legion.
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Every single effort our industry has made to weed out bad practices like auto-installers, misleading sign-up forms, content theft, affiliate shaving, pop-ups, site-jacking, spyware and illegal content... well, that crap is making a return. People do awful, terrible things when the money gets thin. It won’t be pretty. Some of you will do stuff you never dreamed of doing, only to find the payoff wasn’t worth the effort. I have something say to you:
You see, I haven’t told the rest of the story about the Bone Picker family.
After years of making a bare living, collecting bones, the Bone Pickers were able to afford a small piece of land. One day, they were digging a well on that land. After digging and digging they hit upon something a hell of a lot more valuable than water. They struck oil. Within a few weeks, the Bone Picker family became one of the wealthiest in the Texas Panhandle. They ended up owning a newspaper, an oil company and numerous other prosperous entities that still exist today. I won’t name the family. The fact is, the Bone Picker family was so wealthy and so powerful that when the fiction novel, based on their life, was published, they literally bought every single copy. Members of that family are still around and are still very wealthy and powerful. Their family secrets don’t seem so dirty in these modern times of free online porn and upshots of Britney Spears panties. The book was finally re-issued in 2002.
I guess the point is, when times get tough, there are those who take the easy way out and then there are those that continue to do the hard-but-honest work, the bone-picking work, and those are the people that eventually strike oil.