On Fire

Ask any young adult with an artistic flair and a penchant for a good time about their ideal career choice, and you'll most likely be able to relate their answer to sex, drugs and / or rock 'n' roll. In the case of Burning Angel, one of a few indie and do-it-yourself porn sites on the Internet, it was a love of sex and rock 'n' roll that was the impetus for what has become a quickly growing independent business.
The brainchild of three East Coast college graduates - Chummy, Mitch and Joanna - Burning Angel (www.burningangel.com) combines classy but obviously DIY porn pictures with band interviews and other writing to create a unique hipster-erotic site. Still gaining steam, growing into itself and far from its final form, this New Jersey-based business had humble and honest beginnings.
"It started because my roommate and my roommate's friend wanted to start a porn company," Joanna says, very matter-of-factly, about Chummy and Mitch. "They're two guys, good friends who were always really into porn, and when they got serious about starting their company, they asked me if I would get involved because I think they wanted a female to be a part of it, and they needed a writer and they knew I was an English major. I said that I'd do it."
Joanna was on board without much convincing but it wasn't as easy as just getting the key players together. The three knew they wanted to get into pornography, but had no idea which aspect of the billion-dollar industry was ideal for them.
"At first we talked about doing movies, and I thought that I could write funny scripts for them so they wouldn't be so trashy," says the friendly and articulate co-founder and Burning Angel model, who also volunteered to be the in-house writer if they decided to go the Web route, which they eventually did. But porn is not the only thing this trio is interested in. Also die-hard music fans, Joanna, Chummy and Mitch were fired up to include music in the scope of their business. "We all wanted to do something with porn, and we all wanted to do something with music, and this site is a way that we can combine the two things together. Plus, it was getting to the point where I was about to finish school, and we were all trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives, and we wanted to start something on our own. From that point, ideas just started snowballing, and it's still happening. We're not a definite, concrete thing yet. We're still new and we're still learning, figuring out things as we go along.
"We went live on April 19th, 2002," Joanna continues, recalling the first real turning point for the site, the first major improvement and upgrade. "At first, we didn't really know what we were doing, and we took all of the pictures ourselves. I live in a house with six people, and one of my roommates went to art school for photography, and one day I was looking at his work and I said, 'I wish these pictures were of naked girls.' His photographs were beautiful and he had graduated a while before that and had never done anything with his art degree. I asked him to start taking pictures for the site. Once we got a real photographer, I think we started to shape into what we are now. The photos became very colorful and very beautiful. I think originally we were just a porn site, but now I think the pictures have real artistic merit, and I think definitely enhanced our membership numbers too."
Joanna says they noticed their first really big spike in new membership and general hit counts after polishing up the site's look. But a pretty face alone sometimes doesn't sell the goods; it takes hard work and dedication to get people to pay attention to one site among millions, especially in the realm of pornography. To promote, the Burning Angel crew papered the East Coast with a huge amount of fliers and used every opportunity to get the site's name out.
"We handed out so many fliers, which is essentially how we did all the first promotion for the site," says Joanna. "We made these little postcards, and I think we handed out like 60 or 70 thousand fliers in different states; we went to different shows and gave bands our T-shirts; we went to tattoo conventions, feminist-oriented events, even anytime I went to a bar or anywhere else - if there was something going on that I felt was remotely appropriate, I would take fliers with me. Every time I went to an event where there were a lot of people, I'd always see a jump in membership numbers, and there's always a jump when we put a new girl on the site. We got a big jump in numbers once we put up our first full penetration scenes; we got a big jump when we put up our first girl-girl scene."
The site's growing membership can be partially attributed to the frequency with which new girls' pictures are posted - about once a week - and many non-member hits come from free and regularly updated editorial content. Joanna says the site gets about five new, long, band interviews a month and album reviews, and she has plans to expand editorial content to include columns and other works. The best part is that, whether or not you're a paying member of the site, you can view its editorial content, something that Joanna is proud of.
"I definitely want to keep free stuff. I think it's cool that people can still go to the site even if they're not into looking at porn. They can still look at other things, and it's working. I mean, people keep coming back even though they don't have to pay for that stuff. One day when we're popular enough, maybe I could get people to pay to see the interviews too, but just the fact that people are reading the stuff that I write is enough for me."
Sadly, and despite the fledgling success of the site, this hasn't become a full-time job for the Burning Angel management team.
"I would like for it to be full-time, but we're just not at that point yet. I still have another job," laments Joanna, adding cheerfully, "But we make enough to keep it going, and we make enough to pay the models pretty well. When we wanted to start doing videos, we had enough money to buy a camera. We have enough money to pay all of the site's hosting costs and make fliers and T-shirts or whatever else we need. We always have enough money to do that kind of stuff, but we don't have money to spend on ourselves, like pay our rent or buy Christmas presents."
The Burning Angel team is always trying to figure out ways to increase their membership and make real money from their business. One of the most common suggestions, says Joanna, is to add a community aspect to site, a la the popular Portland-based DIY porn site, Suicide Girls. But Joanna and her partners feel that the community aspect is something that they want to avoid.
"A lot of people recommend that to us, but I definitely don't want any kind of message board," she says. "I think that our site does lack some sort of a community aspect - like the Suicide Girls site, where the girls have journals - but I don't really want to talk to the people who are looking at me. I'm not embarrassed, and I don't mind if someone sees me out in public and says, 'Hey I saw you on Burning Angel.' But even though we're an amateur site, I still think porn needs that element of fantasy and I think it's okay to sell a fantasy…plus, I just don't like message boards in general. Like I said, I think the site does need that community element, but I'm trying to figure out some creative way to do it, in a way that hasn't been done before."
In the meantime, the business continues to grow at a slower pace than perhaps the Burning Angel crew would like, but it's growing nonetheless. There's a definite movement afoot on the Internet towards this kind of pornography, with sites like Suicide Girls getting attention from Playboy Television, and other sites, like the up-and-coming Friction USA and of course, Burning Angel.
"I guess people can relate to it," Joanna supposes, adding that there are elements to Burning Angel and similar sites that make the sites more personable than a slick, expensive porn site. "There's always little blurbs that I write on the homepage about a movie I saw or The Sopranos or whatever is going through my head at the time, and the girls look like normal people, not models, and I guess they look like they're having more fun doing it. It just doesn't look sinful; it's capturing the erotic side of girls rather than placing them in a situation and making them a sex object. Also, a lot of people look at porn and they don't want to talk about it, they don't want to tell other people, and I think people don't feel guilty about looking at Burning Angel because it's not gross. And I think people like amateur porn, too, because it looks like pictures that could have been taken at your house."
Joanna, Chummy and Mitch have one simple and ultimate goal: to make a full-fledged operation out of Burning Angel, and be able to make a good living doing what they love in the process.
"I would like to be able to work on this full time. I have this image in my head of us having an office and a staff, and I'd love to have enough money to pay full-time writers, enough money to keep this going and just not have to have another job. And I think we're on the right track, things are looking good and have definitely come a long way. For the amount of money we started with, we've definitely improved a lot," Joanna says, before offering one final thought with a sinister little laugh. "Eventually, I want to have a lot of videos on the site. I studied film in college, so I think it's cool to take what I learned in my film classes and apply it to making porno movies."

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