Sadly, It Really Does All Come Back to Porn

This is true.

When I started this blog, one of the things I wanted to do was share some of the stories about my experiences in the newsstand distribution industry during my early years. This was when the business was in it's hey day. There were still more than three hundred magazine wholesalers located around the country. The opportunity to bump into some really memorable characters and great people was just around the corner each time I went out into the field. The industry was more family related and less professional. Much of what we did in the business was self taught.

During my first year of blogging, I published a two part post entitled "A Year Without Porn (No, Not Like That!) Part 1" and "Part 2" which was not about how to give up porn. The post was  about how changes in the magazine business had led to me not having an "Adult Sophisticated Client" client in more than a year.

However, the post was mostly an opportunity for me to tell a story about my time as a junior high student working in my Dad's warehouse.

The two posts generated a fair amount of views, some emails, and a few comments that never went through moderation. When I received an email that seemed to question my intentions, I was inspired me to write one additional blog about the topic in which I tried to spell out what I was trying to say (Besides the story about my Dad's warehouse). The point was that I missed the publishers that I used to work with.

If you are so inclined, Wordpress gives its bloggers some great tools to work with that will help you track your audience and measure how you're doing. I do admit to occasionally keeping one eye on this data. To me the interesting stat is where the readers from outside the US come from.

In case you're wondering:

Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Russia, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil. And interestingly, one day I drew in a click from someone from Saudi Arabia.

Wordpress will also tell you what the top search terms were that took readers to your blog.

So what terms were searched for? What brought people to the Foredeck? What made people want to search out stories and information about life in the newsstand distribution business? Where the search terms related to digital magazines and their relationship with their print cousins? Did people want to know how to put a magazine onto the newsstand and what that might cost? Where people interested in how we market our products and how social media is affecting what we do?

Maybe my tongue in cheek story about the publisher who was surprised to discover that he still printed a magazine caught traction was being treated as a news story. Were readers searching for it on the net?

Nope. Most of the search terms that brought people here were:

"Porn Magazine" "Porn Mag" "Biased Magazines" "Porn Magazines"

Sigh. Some days you realize that you and the people you work with in the industry that you love will never, ever, (ever, ever, get back together. Or) catch a break.

My personal favorite search term: "Hottentot Porn." That was generated from this post: "Dear Newsweek Critics: If That's Porn, Then I'm a Hottentot".

While some twenty odd years later I still fail to see the long term appeal of porn, I've always appreciated and respected the people who do. But really? Someone actually searched for "Hottentot Porn"? And wound up here?

To be fair, a reasonable number of searchers landed here because they were looking for the  Seventeen Magazine cover image of actress Chloe Grace Moretz that I used in an article about a group of teenagers who were trying to get that magazine publisher to abandon photoshopped images of models.

To be even more fair, there were some searches related to magazine distribution that brought people here such as:

"National Magazine Distributors" "Supermarket Magazine Racks" "Titanic Magazine Articles" "Bridal Magazines" "A List of Magazine Distributors"

So all is not entirely lost.

But way way far down at the bottom of the list of search terms, this image showed up. I had to copy it into the Google Translate site to find out what this lonely searcher was looking for:

اي سكس

means "Any Sex" in Arabic.

I give up. Back to work.