Spanking Blog: Adult Erotic Spanking At Its Best

Hey everybody, Bethie asked me to pass the news about her latest project. It’s called Bottom Seek, and it’s a spanking personals site with a ton of social networking features “for male spankees and the people who spank them.”

As a lot of you know, Bethie has been running a 100% free spanking personals site for years now. Unfortunately, that site runs on some very clunky and somewhat feature-limited software with no reasonable upgrade path, and the “100% free” means there’s no way to pay the thousands and thousands of dollars it would cost to hire done all the custom IT work she’d need to migrate that userbase into new, modern, feature-rich dating software. So, it “is what it is”, and though she plans to keep running it, there’s simply no practical way to give it all the nifty web 2.0 and social networking features people expect these days.

In running the place, though, she’s learned that there are some seriously under-served and under-appreciated sub-niches in our spanking fetish. And one of these is in the area of men who want to be spanked: there seem to be a lot of of them, and they seem to have trouble finding anybody to spank them, and they don’t always mix easily and comfortably with the rest of the spanking community. (Often they do, but not always.) Whether they are looking for a woman to spank them, or another guy, these male spankees don’t always get treated with respect by the more “traditional” dominant male spankers and submissive female spankees, the result being that Bethie has spent a fair amount of time sorting out culture clashes between these groups when they interact.

Hence: BottomSeek. It’s intended primarily as a site for guys who want to be spanked and people who want to spank guys. The software has a ton of integrated social features, and as Bethie explains:

It’s a multi-featured site that includes chat, IM, forums, member created blog capability, photo uploading with various album options, multiple search options for finding that right spanking partner, and it even has a phone app available for downloading.

Besides the different features and focus group, there’s one other obvious difference between SpankFinder and BottomSeek; after a short term Free Promotional Membership there’s a small charge for membership for men. I think it’s small anyway. The memberships are $2.95/month or less than $2/month if you choose a longer term membership. The truth is I wouldn’t even charge that much but I’ve learned some lessons from running SF.

I love SpankFinder and it’s always been a labor of love for me, but there has been some cost to me that I can’t ignore. Besides the obvious server costs, I spend a lot of time and energy in the background just keeping up with the day to day tasks that need to be done. I’ve learned that free is good for the community but next time I was going to have to find a way to justify my own costs. That’s why I’m going this route. If it works then it means more for the people who join as the site grows and becomes more active.

If you are a male spankee, a man or woman who enjoys spanking male bottoms, or are just curious come by and take a tour. Right now I’m offering a free 10 Day Promotional Membership. That should give you time to take a good look around, try out the features, and get a good idea of what I’m trying to build.

Bethie’s a little nervous about the idea of charging for this new site, but I encouraged her. I was afraid she’d be overwhelmed if she tried to grow a second community in her “free time”, this time using software that wasn’t free and that is going to be much more intense on server resources and bandwidth because of all the nifty social-networking features. But the price she’s charging is only about 10% of what traditional commercial dating sites charge, which means it will still be an enormous bargain if the community takes off and works. That’s only going to happen, though, if she can afford to put the time into it. So, building a little bit of revenue into the plan seemed essential.

So, are you a guy who wants to be spanked? Or somebody who likes spanking man-butt? Get to BottomSeek! And remember, the sooner you get there, the more likely you are to get that perfect member-name before somebody else beats you to it…