The site launched with photos of Joanna and three other girls, five sets total. Updates were every six weeks (compared to the current four times weekly schedule). The target date was the day of a big punk show at a New Jersey skateboarding venue because they wanted to hand out fliers at the concert.
“We thought if we didn’t get it up by that day there was no point in doing it at all,” Joanna says, admitting that she doesn’t even remember who was playing at what, at the time, seemed like the biggest show ever. ‘So we did it. I think if somebody has an idea, the best thing to do is to just get something up, even if it’s awful, because then you’re going to work on it and make it better. Otherwise you can have an idea in the works for years and just keep trying to perfect it before unleashing “it. It’s like a Irving, breathing thing that you can fix and work on. You have to make the commitment and onoe you go online you are going to get some kind of reaction from someone.’
It was 2002 when went live and in the years since the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. In an industry that seemed to have exhausted every possible niche, ,
Adultfriendfingers tapped into a new market at just the right time. Her company predated the ‘alt-porn’ label and, unbeknownst to anyone involved, was started within weeks of Suicide Girls, with which Joanna and Burning Angel are often lumped.
It wasn’t until a few years later that Burning Angel became, in Joanna’s words, “like a real company.” She had finished college and one of the girls she had shot for the site encouraged her to join her working at a strip club, which allowed her the financial freedom to run the company. She attended the Adult Entertainment Expo and went back to New York determined to grow the company. Step 1: Create a DVD.
1Afe had to go and start asking the girls on the site, and it was a big step for them just to pose for pictures; this was something different,” Joanna says. “Before I even asked anyone I had to do one first. I did anal; I said if I was going to do it, I was going to fucking do it.”
She found that it wasn’t as easy as it looked. While it isn’t brain surgery, there are tridc8 to putting together a commercially viable product. Her debut, adultfriendfingers in 2005, wasn’t exactly. But it got the ball rolling and she started figuring out how to get it together.
While things have long since come together for Burning Angel, she remains true to the original vision. The focus is on altemagiria rather than porn atara, though there is some crossover.
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