CONFIRMED: Jeff Gannon was an adult porn webmaster

This diary will be crossposted on my weblog, UnFairWitness
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/123054/5928

CONFIRMED: Jeff Gannon was an adult porn webmaster
by textextex
Tue Mar 8th, 2005 at 09:30:54 PST

While Jeff Gannon's colleagues at the "conservative" news website
GOPUSA.com were writing about pornography in this manner -

April Shenandoah...We are allowing the devil to vomit all over our
children, and we elect political officials who gladly swim in the
same puke. We should be doing everything humanly and spiritually
possible to drown pornography in its own vomit... link

Jeff "Bulldog" Gannon not only was posting pornographic pictures of
himself to sell gay porn on the internet, he was operating as a porn
webmaster himself.

Diaries :: textextex's diary ::

Thanks to the excellent investigative work of blogslut, here , we
now have definite confirmation that James Dale Guckert aka "Jeff
Gannon" was an adult porn webmaster. Read her entire post for the
background, but here is the official statement of MALECORPS, one of
the sites to which James Guckert signed up as an affiliate:

A few years ago, www.MaleCorps.com provided individuals and
affiliates with the option to have their own home page on the site
for marketing purposes. Potential members would see each
individual/affiliate's personal page and subscribe to see their
photos. The revenue would then be shared between the affiliate and
www.MaleCorps.com. This is the full extent of the relationship
between www.MaleCorps.com and Jeff Gannon. All his photos were
removed from the site about two years ago.

For the past few years, many steps were taken to avoid such
occurrences, including the removal of all personal web pages,
classifieds and listings from www.MaleCorps.com, as well as the
cancellation of the affiliate program in order to keep a better
control over the Male Corps trademarks and copyrighted information.
As it stands, the site solely provides erotic photos and videos of
models on their own, not involving any sexual activity, as well as
links to third party providers. It is also noteworthy that the Male
Corps web site has never been an escort service.

Because few of us are familiar with how the adult webmaster business
works, blogslut has graciously written a Porn Biz for Dummies
explanation:

Adult Affiliate Links: How They Work

Adult webmasters sell porn any way they can. They build little pages.
They submit galleries to TGPs (thumbnail gallery posts). They make
mini-paysites via an AVS system. Some go bigtime and create a paysite
but most adult webmasters make a living by selling other people's
porn. It's called an affiliate program and this is how it works:

The webmaster finds an affiliate program either by clicking a
WEBMASTERS link on a porn site, searching for a program via a search
engine or by visiting an adult webmaster resource site.
The webmaster signs up for the affiliate program by submitting
personal information. A webmaster living in the US is required to
provide full name and mailing address as well as either a social
security number or tax id number. The webmaster must agree to the
terms of service of the affiliate sponsor. If the webmaster is
approved by the sponsor, the webmaster will receive a confirmation,
primarily by email.
Once approved, the sponsor will issue a UNIQUE REFERRER ID to the
affiliate webmaster. This ID is the lifeblood for the affiliate
webmaster. If a webmaster neglects to include this ID on any text
links or graphic banners that lead to the sponsor, there is no way to
track sales generated by the site. The affiliate webmaster creates an
adult page and places text/graphic links for the sponsor on that
page. Sponsor/Affiliate links look like this:
http://mysponsor.com/referrerID=1234 or this:
http://mysponsor.com/ID=me or even this:
http://malecorps.com/x/usmcpt

The affiliate webmaster creates a page and embeds the REFERRER ID
into all the links that lead to the chosen sponsor. Then the
affiliate webmaster promotes that page in the method preferred for
the type of site. If all goes well, the affiliate gets a lot of
traffic to their page and some of the visitors click the REFERRER ID
links. For example, links from Gannon's USMCPT site take the surfer
to the sponsor's site, MALECORPS. From there, the surfer decides
whether or not they want to buy what MALECORPS is selling. The
sponsor's product could be membership to a paysite or adult ezine.
The product could be membership to an online personals site. The
product could be adult toys. Whatever the product, once the surfer
buys, the affiliate webmaster gets a credit because the surfer used
his UNIQUE REFERRER ID. Jeff's unique referrer ID for his affiliate
page to MALECORPS.com was http://malecorps.com/x/usmcpt. (NOT a work-
safe link.)
Profile Pages vs. Affiliate Pages

Many of the Guckert links are online profiles. Some of these profiles
might be from sites that offer a free listing to anyone who signs up.
They are not necessarily affiliate/sponsor accounts. These profile
sites are a lot like the phone book, everyone gets listed but the
ones who pay have their entry highlighted so it stands out among the
other listings. The profile sites make their money from their paying
members and they use the images and profiles of those members to draw
in more surfers, etc.

Guckert absolutely submitted his profile to these sites, but he may
not have made any money from the effort. Keep in mind that the
profile sites like StudFiles and MaleTreasures probably don't set
appointments between escorts and clients. If they do, they're in big
trouble. I imagine that their members sign up and then are able to
exchange emails or chat with other members. If the members hook up,
it's not the site's problem.

My guess is that Guckert used these profile accounts to troll for
members. From all I can tell, Jim/Jeff never built an actual, working
paysite of his own. He built free adult pages either through these
profile sites or he built pages to market his affiliate sponsor. In
my opinion, James was a crappy adult webmaster. He should have dumped
the profile sites and just stuck with the affiliate sponsors. But, I
digress.

Here's the easiest way to tell the difference between a profile page
and an affiliate page:

Look for a button or text link or banner that reads: WEBMASTERS

If you see that, you know Jeff was using this page to make money from
Internet porn.

That is the case with Jeff's MALECORPS profile. Clicking
the "WEBMASTER" link in that profile sends you to this page.
(Screen capture of MALECORPS affiliate sign-up page linked from
Jeff's USMCPT profile from archive.org)

It is confirmed that Jeff was an adult webmaster with an affiliate
page on MALECORPS. There are many Gannon profile pages on the net
and we're in the process of determining which of them are affiliate
pages and which of them are Jeff's personal profile sites and the
purpose of each site. A sample of sites that are being checked out
(NOT WORK SAFE LINKS!) HERE.
(ED:This is linked to separate page acct. offensive links.)

We almost hated for this part of the investigation to move forward
now, because Jeff will of course whine that selling porn on the
internet is a personal lifestyle choice and that we're picking on him
for having gay porn affiliate pages all over the internet in addition
to his apparent escort sites. In his latest apologetic posted on his
only journalistic outlet at the moment, Jeff says,"They dug deep for
dirt, dredging up things long past and erecting a fantasy world
worthy of a Vince Flynn novel. What they found is domain names and
sexy pictures..." No, what we found was an adult webmaster who had
affiliate pages for a gay pornography site who used nude pictures of
himself to sell gay porn and to sell himself. As for "digging
deep", it's all a mouse click away. Dig here. As for "long past",
two years ago MALECORPS pulled Jeff's affiliate page for their own
reasons and not by Jeff's request at a time when he was already
lined up for his White House day pass as a "conservative
correspondent" for GOPUSA.

In the first page on Jeff Gannon's old website
TheConservativeGuy.com, he writes, "But I'm not a bad person, and the
values I have are the same as those of conservatives......But the
truth is conservatives are Americans who share a basic set of core
values." Jeff put that statement online in June of 2002 when Bulldog
was actively flogging gay porn on the internet.

What values do the known self-proclaimed conservatives Jeff Gannon
is most closely associated with - at GOPUSA.com - share? Let's
look at a couple of quotes dealing with Jeff's line of work,
pornography, from his fellow GOPUSA writers:

Christopher G. Adamo......only a few feet away inside the library,
pedophiles and pornography addicts are enabled to indulge in their
cravings for indescribable perversity over the Internet...link

Jimmy Moore...The unashamed and in-your-face activists involved in
the gay agenda, the millions of people, including children as young
as 12, having sex outside the sanctity of marriage, multitudes of
married men and women who are actively engaged in adultery, the
spread of pornography, especially on the Internet and many other
forms of sexual perversion have sent our country on a one-way ticket
to destruction....link

Jeff himself wrote, in an article about "rape rooms" in Iraq, "An
adjacent room is where the rapist will prepare himself by viewing
pornography...." (ed.... Maybe he looked at Bulldog pictures on the
internet!)

The issue for those of us investigating Gannon is not that he is
a pornographer, but the hypocritical spectacle of a person who
claims to represent the anti-pornography, anti-gay Moral
Values "conservatives" being a webmaster who trades in gay
pornography.

This investigation is, as they say, developing.....

This diary will be crossposted on my weblog, UnFairWitness
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/123054/5928