Well something is definately up.

On November 7th, the day after I posted Real Sex, Nina Hartley, and the Googlebot, our Google-driven traffic dropped by 40%, and has stayed there for the last week.

Okay, fine. No one, not even Comstock Films is entitled to high Google rankings.

But while our overall Google traffic has dropped by 40% in the last week, our visitors on the search [nina hartley] have doubled, and that’s on top of the ~400% increase reported in my first post. In fact, [nina hartley] is now our #2 search term, outranking [real sex] or even [tony comstock]. (Meanwhile, our visitors on the search [real sex] have virtually dried up altogether.)

I’m not happy about losing our [real sex] visitors; they were among our best search related customers (second best actually.) But I’m even less happy seeing that once again, Google seems to be dicking around with their sex-related search just ahead of the holiday season, and in there dicking around, they seem to have come up with a picture of our site that just isn’t accurate. We’re getting visitors we shouldn’t get, and people who are probably looking for exactly what we offer are getting sent somewhere else.

I’m a filmmaker, but I am also a merchant, and like any other merchant, this is an important time of year for us. In the last year we’ve done a lot to be less dependent on search-driven sales to make ends meet, but those sales are still an important part of how we’re able to pay our bills. A 40% drop in Google-driven visitors can’t be good for us, and could be very bad.

Google’s search algorithms would seem to have undergone another fairly major revision, at least around sexuality. What makes me say that? In the last month, people finding their way to ComstockFilms.com on the search [real sex] have fallen by about 80%, while people finding their way to ComstockFilms.com on the search [nina hartley] have risen by about ten-fold. Yesterday we actually got more visitors looking for Nina Hartley than we are looking for real sex, which probably isn’t good for Nina, Comstock Films, web-searchers, or Google for that matter.

I suspect this has something to do with the Googlebot trying to distinguish between spamblogs and original content, but who can know for sure?

The good news is that this hasn’t had nearly the same effect on us that the Great Google Disaster of 2006 did. Since last year we’ve taken steps to make sure our fortunes aren’t so dependent on the visisitude of inscrutable Googlebot.

From the Nina.com Forum. Says Nina:

“Percentage-wise, I’d conjecture that less than 15% of women have real orgasms at all. Five percent or so have them regularly, as they are women who come easily. Aria is in this catagory. Her orgasms are real, as she can have them several different ways.

“As for me, personally, my philosophy has always been this: my orgasm is not the reason I’m on a set. So, I don’t care if I have one or not, and I don’t particularly try to have them. I don’t particularly try not to, either, it’s just not important. My kink is doing a scene, having the different partners, knowing that people are enjoying the show from their homes, putting on a good and believable show. I have always done things on camera that I do at home already, for free, so I’m always having a good time. In over four hundred tapes, close to a thousand scenes, there are only five or so that I really hated all the way through.

“Remember, I’m a performer. I love what I do, and that what I do is sex, but the mission objective is to leave behind a good, hot, fun, timeless scene that will please viewers always.”

I understand exactly where Nina is coming from on this. Films, even documentary films, are illusions. They are shadows dancing on a wall, or phosphores flickering on screen. They have an effect on us not because they are real, but because they they appear to be real. A performer’s job, whether she’s a hoofer on Broadway, or an adult actress is to make it look like she’s having the time of their life, even on the days when she’d really rather be doing anything else. The thrill comes as much, or more from making the audience happy as it does from the dancing, or the sex.

When I first set out to make erotic films my “mission objective” was to create an entertaining, explicit, convincing, and arrousing depictions of sexual pleasure. From there I took into consideration my limitations of talent and resources, the limitations of the market for sexually explicit films (especially for sexually explicit films made with the intent to arouse,) and the formal effects of explicit depictions of sexuality on various film genres.

That’s a fancy way of saying I decided to make movies of real couples having (and enjoying!) real sex it was because I didn’t think I had the talent or the money to fake it in a convincing and entertaining way!

To that end, I find people who see working with us as a chance to share something about themselves and their sexuality with the world at large. I do my best to make my set (both the love-making set and the interview set) a place where people can relax and be themselves, a place where what is unique and special about them, as a sexual being and as a human being, is valued, indeed prized.

It all sounds embarrassingly touchy-feely, doesn’t it? It makes our set sound like some sort of encounter group or other relic of the 70s; before herpes, before HIV, before sex became so fraught. (In 1975 I was nine years old, so I’m really just going by what I’ve read or been told by people who were in the thick it.)

Well in a way I suppose it’s true. I try to create a set that is insulated as possible from all the worries that can make it hard to relax and enjoy sex. The thing I always tell my crew is that we have to make the set a safe place. We’re going to be asking people to reveal themselves in the most intimate ways, and we have to create an environment where it is easy, even pleasurable for them to open up; to each other, to me, and through that, to the audience.

Come to think of it, that’s what couples do for each other when they make love, and maybe that’s what makes the lovemaking in these films feel so wonderfully intimate and private, even what it’s happening for the whole world to see!

Other than my own productions, I’ve never been on a porn set. Everything I know about how other people shoot explicit sex comes from discussions with porn makers and performers, and from what I can infer from looking at the results; and mostly what I can infer is that “the formula” for making porn is very different from making love, or even for having good sex.

Marie and Jack alluded to this during their interview in Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story. When they made their decision to pursue a porn career, they rented a few porn videos to get a better idea of what would be expected of them:

JACK: We only started watching so that we knew what we were supposed to be doing. Like if we were going to work for a particular company, we’d rent one of their movies to see, you know, how they shot.

MARIE: It was like the same positions every time; doggie, missionary, reverse.

You can see this passage on our video podcast in Episode 1 of Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story

Responding on her bulletin board to a fan’s lament that contemporary porn lacks spontaneity, Nina Hartley breaks down today’s typical approach to shooting a sex scene even further. Says Nina:

Yeah, things were different when I started.

It gets boring, certainly.

It does sound boring.

Our approach to shooting a sex scene is a little different. From Hunter James’ interview in the May issue of DNA Magazine:

DNA: You’ve had sex on camera before. Can you tell us about your previous experiences and how they differ from Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together?

HUNTER: When you make porn for a studio there is usually a lot of direction: suck his cock, move your hand out of the shot, say this and say that. For this they just turned on the cameras and let us do what we do normally, without interruptions.

In the behind the scenes featurette Damon and Hunter: The Making of a Love Scene, which is included on the Damon and Hunter: Doing it Together DVD, Peggy and I lift our skirts a little, reveal our secret formula as it were.

When you watch The Making of a Love Scene, you’ll see that our approach is rather different when compared to what Marie and Jack or Nina Hartley describe. It’s born out of my background as a documentary filmmaker, which is mostly about finding interesting people in interesting situations, and then doing our best to stay out of the way while we try and keep up.

It’s not the only way to shoot a sex scene. It might not even be the best way. But it’s not boring, at least not to me. I don’t think the results are boring either, and I hope when you see our films, you’ll agree!