Some readers may have noticed that in 2008 I have not been as prolific with my blogging as in past years. While some of this has to do with things like the boat trip we made last Winter, it is also because I am starting to feel like I’m covering the same ground, but not adding much to the conversation.

The simple truth is I am worn down: worn down by our misadventures with Google and PBS and Boing and IMDB and the OFLC; worn down by John Cameron Mitchell and Alison Crogon and Max Hardcore; worn down by very attitudes that make it so important to me to make my films. 

Peggy Comstock, my wife and partner, is going to take over the lion’s share of the blogging here at Comstock Films, and with your help, her blogging will be a much a part of how people find out about what we do as mine has been. As she says in her “re-introduction” post:

Comstock Films is genuinely a ‘mom and pop’ operation, which is one of the reasons Tony and I decided that it was important for me to step in and continue blogging while he pours his mental resources into finishing our next films. We rely so much on word of mouth and “guerilla marketing” to keep awareness of our little shop going, and blogging allows us not only to periodically shout, ‘Hey world, we’re here making these quietly revolutionary films about sex and relationships!’ — but also to engage in a direct dialogue with our viewers, friends, and fellow travelers in a way that means a lot more to us than it possibly can for a larger, more diffuse company.

Somewhere between this new responsitibly and everything else she does around here I expect that Peggy will roll out some design tweaks that will make it a little easier to find her blog on our site. In the meantime there’s a link in my side bar “Peggy’s Blog”. If you have a blog of your own and would like to make mention her new role here, or add her link to your blogroll, of course we are very appreciative.

But mostly, just read what she has to say. Of the two of us, Peggy is the one who is an actual *published* writer; and ultimately her “quiet girl thinking”  take on things is far more subversive than my boorish sturm and drang. So book mark, or ad to your Google reader or do whatever it is that you do. Your not going to want to miss what she has to say!

So what I was talking about when I said I saw some trends I didn’t understand is that about two years ago we started getting Google visitors on the search [real sex] and that was very good for our business. Visitors arriving on the search [real sex] were just as likely to return and ultimately just as likely to buy one of our DVDs as visitors arriving on the searches [comstock films] or [tony comstock].

What that means is we were catching and keeping customers who didn’t already know our name or our films. They were wandering the internet, looking for “real sex”, and when they wandered into our little corner they found something that was real enough to spend $28 on a DVD.

Then last December, it all went to shit. We and many other sexually oriented sites got caught in the gears Google’s ongoing fight against spam. Not only did we lose returns on [real sex], we lost returns on [comstock films] and nearly everything else. 

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