"An adult site needs to be attractive visually but one should never sacrifice their potential customers to long load times."

Perhaps you already know my dirty little adult webmaster secret.

I still connect to the Internet with a modem. Unlike 95 percent of my peers I traverse the net at 56k, 40K actually. It’s kind of funny this should be a shame issue considering that less than five years ago we were all connecting on modems. My friends in this business express amazement that I can endure such primitive conditions.

My interest in the Internet is textual on both personal and professional levels. I write for a living and when I surf the web I mostly look for news and information. I don’t usually have to deal with downloading or uploading images and videos. I don’t need to review galleries or submit AVS pages to search engines. Whereas I have done and will do such things in the future, I won’t do them on a grand scale like most of my peers.

I kind of like not using a broadband connection. To me, broadband content is severely lacking and doesn’t justify the price of cable, DSL or ISDN. There are a few short movies and the occasional news broadcast I would like to see move fluidly on my screen but that’s about it.

I snag an eighties song or two off of peer-to-peer networks but I think downloading full-length movies from the net is a bit silly. For me, the information highway is just as fascinating at 56k. The only time I really have any trouble is when friends I chat with on instant messaging software bitch because my replies have a whole ten second delay. I enjoy scooting along at 56k and I am not alone.

Internet tracking site Emarketer predicts that broadband usage will reach 117 million by 2004. That’s a lot of people but at the present time there are around five hundred million Internet users overall. Of that five hundred million only 32.5 million of them get their net through a big pipe. Roughly 468 million are still on 56k.

Even two years from now only one fifth of the world will view their Internet with a broadband service. In other words, most of the world and your potential surfers are and will be on dial-up for a long time. Looking at some of today’s adult websites, I think there are some adult webmasters who forget that.

Applets, Flash animations and bloated PhotoShop logos abound on the adult net. I’ve been to numerous paysites where I’ve waited and waited for the graphics to load just so I can find the tour button. I’ve been many times tempted to back out of a TGP site because their damned logo took longer to download than their gallery listings did. I’ve even found adult design sites that are guilty of violating the rule that no front page should take any longer than 50 seconds to download on dial up.

An adult site needs to be attractive visually but one should never sacrifice their potential customers to long load times. Like it or not, the lion’s share of your potential customers are still creeping around on dial-up connections.

From paysite member’s areas to free video clip galleries, the adult Internet is filled with content that's too much to download for the average surfer.

This does not mean we should only feature static images and textual content if we want to reach the masses. This is not meant to suggest that there’s no place for Flash cartoons, live webcams or movies on the adult net. After all, there are predicted to be 38 million broadband users in the US by 2004.

The Asian-Pacific region is expected to skyrocket to 50 million broadbanders in two years. Broadband use will grow but unless some new ingredient is added to the mix, that growth will be slow coming. A site that blocks out four fifths of porn surfers because of the enormity of it’s content will experience slow growth too.

As a dial-up user, I am in a minority among my fellow adult professionals. As a typical web surfer I am the norm. I will get hooked up to a big pipe some day when the price gets to a reasonable level. In the meantime take into account that you may be a cutting edge adult webmaster with a big pipe but most of the world is not.