So we’ve covered how I started out, as a monthly column posted on orsm.net. Let’s get into my time as a very successfully porn distributor.
My Advice Asshole site started small, hosted on geocities. I paid the ridiculous price of $20 a month to have theadviceasshole.com mapped to my geoshitties subdomain. As I grew through the fall of 2003, Yahoo! got mad about my bandwidth consumption and content, subsequently banning me from their server. Worst parts were losing the data, including somewhere around 50-60 questions/answers that where not posted to Orsm, and the loss of my domain name, which was gathering a lot of steam.
I remember battling with Yahoo! to release the domain so I could register it, but they said that they were the sole owners. After I was banned, they turned it into one of those ad placement pages, so they kept making money off my damned name. Still irks me to this day.
I forged ahead, setting up theadviceasshole.net (early 2004). I continued my advice column, started my own forum, and made my own version of Orsm’s Random Shite, called the WTF Gallery. Where Orsm tried to stay “clean” with his images, largely limiting postings to ‘R’ ratings, I thought I’d be gritty and post anything and everything I stumbled upon, regardless of how tasteless it was. I got grossed out pretty early on, and a contributing member took over the nasty stuff, creating a subsection on my site called Sanity Fades. This turns into a really weird story, which is covered in part three of the saga. You do not want to miss it.
I’ll tell you this much, I very rarely entered that section of my site. It was indeed a drain on your sanity seeing the gross shit that was being posted, so I wanted to avoid it. I focused on pictures of women instead, starting with a weekly Who Would You Do? (WWYD) feature that pitted two hot celebrities against each other in a cutthroat poll. The winner returned the following week, and took on a new challenger. We wound up with a fairly popular celebrity section on the forum, but I wanted to see and share much more.
A few of the founding members of my site and I found ways to procure the full sets of images from pay-only sites. We’d painstakingly upload them to galleries on my site, and we forced people to sign up to download the archives of the sets. It was a great ploy to get members, and we hit a high of 30-40 people online at a time, all browsing and contributing different things.
We already had a great connection with Orsm (and their forums), and after a few spats with rival sites, we actually became friends with people at BakerMedia, Phun and Microdoted. We formed some sort of an ultimate alliance where members comingled and enhanced all of the sites, without any jealousy or anger about where everyone was most loyal. Each forum had its niche: BakerMedia was tech, bullshitting, joking around, Phun had the best collection of celebrity and internet model pictures, Microdoted members were ruthless with insults and mostly focused on current events, while Orsmforums became an aggregate of all the types of content..
TAA.net really hit a groove with amateur pics, though. Whether the girls had willingly allowed their boyfriends to post pictures of them fooling around, or if they came out after nasty breakups was inconsequential. We became a museum for these pictures. Around the same time as we were picking up loyal members and decent hits, Maxim became the magazine of the millennium, and girls were going around posting pictures of themselves to get some of that girl-next-door fame.
We fell in love with a big-assed Latina, Keyra Augustina, and it soon became our primary drive to find and syndicate every picture she slipped out to the public. It was so hot from the combination of her body being amazing and that she never showed her face. As you can clearly see, from the google results, she turned out to be a butterface. It’s alright, though, we were thoroughly enthralled with her.
I hit the jackpot one winter afternoon, finding a video of Keyra doing a little striptease. At the time, videos weren’t really big yet because you’d have to set your computer up to download long clips over night, or you’d download 45 second clips over an hour and be disappointed by the quality and content. I didn’t care that the video was five megabytes and that it was going to take four hours to upload. I knew I had to get it posted as soon as possible to capitalize on the opportunity.
I got the video published around 9:00 pm and my site crashed around 11:30. I accrued over a 100,000 hits over the two hours and melted my shared server with more than 2,500 people at a time requesting the file each second. I was shut down that night, learning that ‘unlimited bandwidth’ was most certainly not unlimited, and had to upgrade to a dedicated server before dawn the following day. The popularity of my site skyrocketed over that weekend, and I started to average 20,000 views per day. Over the next six months, my site broke into the top 50,000 on Alexa’s rankings, the highest ranking of 46,000 coming over the summer of 2005. I’ve got screenshots of it on a DVD somewhere, but I was unable to find them for this post.
Through trying to verify dates and timelines to the best of my ability, I was reacquainted with the Wayback Machine, and my ranking was good enough that my site was archived with some regularity. The peak of my site from 2005 into 2006 is fairly well maintained. It’s pretty nostalgic for me browsing this old stuff. Pictures aren’t stored, so you’re stuck with only the text content, and apparently the CSS isn’t stored reliably, so some pages look like shit.
What’s cool, though, is that my advice section is mostly intact. If you read any of my answers in yesterday’s posts, you’ll notice the refinement in my style after doing it for a few years. Sure, there’s still some that are flat out mean, but mostly they’re well-rounded satire. I touched upon social issues, made wild conjecture, shared second-hand medical advice, quoted Confucious, name-dropped my famous firends, and my wife even makes an appearance. Awesome stuff.
I was popular enough to have merchandise too! I made a few bucks off this stuff, and that money was rolled right back into hosting the site. I wonder if any of the people out there that bought a shirt or a hoodie still have them. I loved my hoodie, but it was thrown out long ago after ripping. Such is life.
My site was huge, I was having a ton of fun being an asshole, and arguably there was a time where I was internet’s most well-known asshole. Sure you can throw Maddox at me if you want to, but I never bought into him. He’s really overrated, and I don’t think he’s ever been as socially engaged as I was. He certainly didn’t have a solid network of contributors around him, or the support of what should have been rivals and competitors, but I digress.
As we all know, aside from those that think dionsaurs and humans co-existed, what goes up must come down. The fun came to a crashing halt in 2006, and there’s a lot of drama to unfurl and dissect. Let’s see if I can get it all together before tomorrow, when I unleash the exciting conclusion of The Advice Asshole Saga.
As an added bonus, I’ll drop the bombshell of who shot J.R. You don’t want to miss it, especially if you’ve been living under a rock for the last 31 years!
