Hi! I’m Simon Regal, founder and editor of AdultVisor.
I’ve been covering the adult industry since 2012. You may have bumped in to me at various XBiz conferences, or The European Summit. I usually attend 3-4 adult events each year — so if you see me around, please say hello!
How does somebody become entwined with writing about the adult industry, you wonder?
It’s a mystery to me, too. I studied Journalism at Sheffield University in England.
I never expected to spend the next decade of my life writing about porn, cams and adult games. But here we are…
My first job after leaving Uni led me to freelance copywriting for a group of escort agencies in Australia. It’s not the sort of work you talk about around the dinner table with your family, but I stuck with it and soon found a myriad of unusual work opportunities in the adult industry.
I spent a year working in Australia, continuing to moonlight as an adult copywriter, whilst roaming the beaches from Sydney to the Gold Coast. In my spare time I’d work on personal websites and dabble with Internet Marketing, roads that would eventually lead me to writing about the adult industry full-time.
During this time I launched a site called RedLightSydney.com, which covered the incredibly liberal (and legal) adult industry in Sydney.
The site wasn’t much to look at (see below!), but it grew rapidly to become the number one adult portal in New South Wales. I expanded the site to cover all of Australia, and it continues to this day as RedLightAustralia.com.
Eventually, visa issues meant I had to return from Australia. But I’d become increasingly fascinated by the inner dealings of the adult business. A stag-do week away in America inspired me to break in to new territory with a portal for Las Vegas (RedLightVegas.com). This was followed by EuroSexScene.com and AsiaSexScene.com.
The sites were a success in their respective markets and taught me a lot about writing, web marketing and… well, sex! I collaborated with a small team of sex-positive writers to cover stories, interviews and features that mainstream magazines or news websites simply wouldn’t touch.
For many publications… sex is a dirty word.
Our mission has always been to turn that narrative on its head. We celebrate sex, the sex-positive lifestyle, and the vibrant eco-system that it entails.
By the end of the decade, our portal of websites was showcasing the finest local adult entertainment on four separate continents and over 70 countries. During that time, my writing had been featured in Vice, Men’s Health, TechCrunch and countless local newspapers. Not all of the publicity was positive (“How dare you talk about the S word!“), but our internal data and repeat visitors told a different story:
People appreciated the hours of research we’d poured in to subjects that were considered too ‘taboo’ for most publications.
Why I Created AdultVisor
By late 2016, I thought I had seen it all in the adult industry.
Wrong.
You can never ‘see it all’ if you work around porn.
Nevertheless, I had grown tired of having to track the latest adult trends across half the developed world, and I wanted to talk about adult topics with more universal appeal. So we launched a portal for online adult entertainment instead: AdultVisor, the site you are on today.
Initially it was known as Red Light Network, and yes, it looked pretty fugly indeed:
Friends sometimes ask why I chose to base my career around an industry mired in controversy and smuttiness. I’ve never seen it that way. The type of people who are offended by sex and porn are not the readers we are looking to serve here at AdultVisor.
As part of this gig, I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some wonderful characters in the adult industry. I’ve also gotten to work with some incredibly talented writers, as well as hard-working researchers with Internet Search Histories made out of steel.
If you’d like to get in touch or discuss collaborations, I’d love to hear from you.
Email: simon@adultvisor.com
You can also follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit or Quora.
