Review Observations

How many reviews do we really need?

Filed under Review Observations :: Posted on February 29 2008

Now despite what you may think, this post is not (alright, only partially) an excuse for not having 400, 600 or a thousand reviews on my site.
If you’ve been making your way around the “adult related” parts of the Internet for more than a few months, you’ve probably discovered that there is an ungodly number of competiting paysites in many porn niches, so surely as a reviewer I should be covering them all to help you pick the right one(s) to spend your hard earned money on, right?

Right. But I couldn’t cover them all even if I worked 24/7, not to mention that I would go broke within a few weeks if I tried, as I pay for most memberships out of my own, not particularly deep pockets (I do get some requests and free membership from site owners, but particularly the last year or so where I’ve slowed down the review frequency, I usually just strike out on my own instead and pick and join the sites I want to review).

So what do I do to ensure that you still get the information you’re looking for? I do some reseach of my own, that’s what.
The sites I’ve chosen to cover in most niches (there are admittedly a few niches I probably shouldn’t have bothered with in the first place, I have a feeling the “pregnant” category may never actually grow past one review) - particularly the sites with the highest scores - aren’t just the best among those I happen to have randomly picked out, instead they are generally considered around the net to be at the top of their respective niches among all the competing sites.

What this means is that these days I regularly find myself considering whether it’s actually worth my fairly limited time (and money) to review say another anal site, when I already know that any currently existing one I pick will be nowhere near as good as Ass Traffic, Asshole Fever and the other ones currently sitting at the top of the anal category page at Mike’s Porn Site Reviews.
Of course there are always differences in personal taste - and reviews are in the end nothing but opinions - so for one person a particular model or scene might make an overall less impressive site worth joining, or maybe he just doesn’t care for the particular content style or the models on the (based on general opinion) best sites.
But on a more general level it’s hard to argue with the raw numbers of those best sites. They have more videos and photosets than the mediocre or crappy ones. The technical video and photo quality is higher. They update more often. The site design is more user friendly. They might in some cases even charge less for a membership. And so on and so forth.

The prime example is probably VideoBox. A couple of years ago when it wasn’t the largest DVD download site, but merely the cheapest, it was easy enough to find strong points about most of its competitors - some that might even make them preferable to VideoBox in many cases. A bit pricier, but more content and perhaps DVDs from a more interesting lineup of porn studios.
These days however, it’s exceedingly difficult to come up with any reason whatsoever why anyone should pick VideosZ, Adult Rated, Adult Movie Club, DownloadPass, whatever over VideoBox. All of them impressive sites viewed in isolation (or up against each other), but VideoBox is almost twice as large as the runner up in terms of content, updates are coming several times faster, it’s cheaper than most of them, it has the most advanced site interface.
You pretty much really have to be very interested in a particular studio that you can only find on one or some of the other sites, in order not to go with the obvious choice here.

So how many reviews do we really need?
Well, more never hurts of course - and you’ll get them over time - but rest assured that in most featured niches on this site, the sites likely to be the final choices for the majority of my fellow porn surfers have already been reviewed.