Tour Link: Tour Suicide Girls Here
Videos: Over 1000 (320x240, Streaming Flash, ~5 min. per)
Photo Sets: Over 3000 (~1200x734, ~50 photos per)
Update Rate: Daily
Exclusive: Yes
Search Engine: Yes
If Porsche is a hedge fund with a car manufacturer attached, then Suicide Girls is a social networking site with a porn site attached. The impressive thing is that each company succeeds astonishingly well in both its primary and secondary objectives. Suicide Girls (SG) was one of the earliest sites to aim at a market of a mix of the cheesecake pin-ups of the 40’s and the styles coming out of the alternative subcultures. This site was developed by women to tap the supply of immodest, beautiful young women in these subcultures and to make some profit for everyone. The business model worked, and soon new models were coming out of the woodwork.
The basic idea is that women can sign up, submit photos and if those photos are chosen by the editorial staff (mostly ex or current models themselves), they will be paid as well as receive a lifetime membership to the site. Of course, the influx of money comes from the discerning customers that simply want to see naked women sporting strange haircuts, tattoos and piercings. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of people interested in that product.
Suicide Girls has always had a strong social networking element to it that has managed to overtake porn as the lead interest for many users. The site is used for dating, for publicizing music events, for keeping in contact with friends and so on. Many people came for the porn but stayed for the friends they made there. The forums are very active, and every member has their own page where they can fill out an extensive profile, post blog entries, link to their favorite models and photos, post their own media, etc. Everybody can comment on everyone else’s stuff and everything is interlinked. The community aspect is really what makes the site so marketable, influential and well received. They’ve even got large advertisers interested. How many other porn sites have you seen featured on CSI?
The sheer volume of models means that if any aspect of SG's style interests you, you will find a model representing exactly what you are looking for. The downside is that you may be sifting through a lot of models. As a resource for softcore, pin-up photos of women with alternative styling, SG is unparalleled. The models cover a massive range of styles – you’ll see spiky haired punk girls with intricate tattoos, pale skinned Goth girls with strange piercings, Flappers harking back to the roaring 20’s, stocking adorned women that look to have stepped right out of a 40’s pulp novel, 50’s greasers chicks and the roller-skating waitresses; hell – some even go back to the Victorian era fashions what with all the interest raised by Steam Punk. No other site can really compete with their selection. The fact that their models are amateurs also means they won’t be running out of them any time soon.
One of the irritating aspects of Suicide Girls is that sorting through its massive collection can be confusing and daunting at first. SG does have database of its models – but it only sorts by age or country. The photo sets have searchable tags, but you can only search one tag at a time. Also, being user done, the tags are inconsistent and not exactly thorough, but at least an attempt has been made.
The amateur nature of the models is both good and bad – they have all types, but this means that the editorial staff has to be much more lenient. The sets all represent an aspect of the SG culture, but I find many of the models to be rather uninteresting. At first this can be off putting, but you must persevere. The content ye seek is in there; you just have to spend bloody hours searching for it. The wonderful thing is that once you find one model you like, you find many more – because they are all linked together via member preferences, by photographer and any other connection the site can think of.
Suicide Girls, like most online membership businesses, wants to keep its members on the site and paying month after month. To this end they keep the monthly fees quite low. On the other hand, they take an approach to their content that will annoy longtime porn surfers quite a bit. They make it irritatingly difficult to download their content for viewing later from your hard drive. This means no zip file downloads, no video files available in anything but streaming flash – they even hide the thumbnail galleries to such an extent that most downloader programs won’t work. To their defense, their update rate is quite frequent and if you become friends with many in the community, you’ll quickly find the price worthwhile, especially if you buy it a year at a time. However, as a porn hoarder, I do find it frustrating that I can’t easily add SG to my collection.
The trick is remembering to not approach Suicide Girls like a porn site and instead as an online community. That means that you aren’t getting traditional porn site construction – the site requires a substantial investment of time from the user to get the full experience. Unlike most porn, these models aren’t nameless bodies displayed only for viewing pleasure. You can actually learn quite a bit about each model and even potentially become friends with them. It is like MySpace but with more editorial weeding and lots more naked women. I’ve always said that the one thing MySpace was really missing were more nipple rings.
Check Out Tour of Suicide Girls
Posted by: Toadsith on May 9, 2009
Rebel Tags: Website Reviews, Alt Porn Sites, Photography Sites, Piercing Sites, Social Network Sites, Tattoo Sites
