Las vegas- As the Adult Entertainment Expo reaches its close, another adult-industry convention comes to Las Vegas to take its place.
Internext Las Vegas 2009 runs today through Wednesday at Rain in The Palms, helping connect digital-media businesses in the adult industry.
In an unofficial kickoff, OG Adult Caberet hosted the ninth Girls of the Internet party Sunday. Featuring adult talent known primarily for their Web sites rather than being in films and on DVDs, the party took over one side of the club with models, fans and plenty of photographers.
“A lot of the girls live in various parts of the country,” said Brad Fitzgerald of sexygirlscash.com, one of the show’s sponsors. “So they don’t get to meet each other and that’s part of what this party is about — letting the girls hang out and have fun.”
The girls were definitely having a good time, posing for photos, chatting amongst themselves and — since the event was at a strip club — dropping their tops more often than most of the AEE events.
Fitzpatrick said about 80 girls registered and he expected about 400-500 people to attend. Those numbers, unlike AEE attendance, are actually up from last year.
Unfortunately for the conference itself, attendance at Rain is almost assured to be down thanks to the nightclub not admitting anyone under 21. The conference previously was at the Sands Convention Center, which allowed the models — many of whom are still under the legal drinking age — the opportunity to market themselves and their sites to potential business partners.
“It’s always better when the girls are there to meet webmasters and promote themselves rather than just have their webmasters talking for them,” said event headliner Hailey Young.
Many of the adult performers at the party were of the amateur and pro-am variety, fitting into a number of niches in the industry (such as MILF, BBW and other fetishes). With so much emphasis on the bigger distributors and production companies at AEE, it was nice to see some sort of spotlight shown on the people who are in the industry pretty much on their own, without a contract job.