My Name is Billy Watson
My pet wasn't named Billy, nor did I grow up on Watson Street.
No one uses their real name in porn. Well, that’s not true: Dana DeArmond does; Julia Bond did (until she retired from porn and started this completely bat-shit crazy YouTube persona “Rude Ruth”); Valentina Nappi really is Valentina Nappi, and she’s always said, “I use my real name to bring shame to my family.”
I invented Billy Watson when I started a part-time gig as a sales “affiliate” for a porn site called Blacks On Blondes. This was 1998. (I’ll talk about why I chose that site later.) Affiliates were some of the first-ever gig-worker jobs in technology, and the gigs were literally open to anyone. I mean any one. All you needed was a computer and an internet connection and some super basic coding skills. So here’s the gig: learn how to write 15 or 20 lines of simple HTML; direct people (ie “traffic”) to a porn site; and, if your “traffic converted”, you earned a sales commission. Pretty simple, right?
To break it down a little further, I used an HTML editor called “Hot Dog” to create a "thumbnail gallery page" — a simple, single web page that showed off 15 dirty pictures. I would then submit that web page’s URL to a "TGP" — a "thumbnail gallery post site". And that’s it. Time to start counting your money.
In other words, think of the TGP as the person who hands out those tasty little food samples at Costco. A very crowded Costco on a Saturday afternoon in Southern California. Meaning some of the popular, pre-2000 TGPs had a ton of traffic. Hundreds of millions of “hits” a month. Traffic eventually ended up at maybe a couple hundred porn sites.
(Even now, I’ve read in more than one study that at any one time, 75% of the world’s internet traffic is looking for — or at — pornography.)
You remember any of these names — "The Hun" and "Sex Hungry Joe's" and "The Adult Buffet" and "Persian Kitty" and “The Green Guy”? Even though my friends called them “porn sites”, they were really TGPs. And to my knowledge, The Hun is the only one still in existence.
Where did my 15 dirty pictures come from? The ones I used in my page? I got those courtesy of Blacks On Blondes. For a part-time adjunct English Professor struggling to get tenure and buy a round of beers on a Saturday night, being an affiliate was a decent side hustle — and a very secret one. For a couple hours of work a week, I could cover rent.
It sounds ridiculous, but I wanted to brand my TGP pages with a name. Enter “Billy Watson”.
Inventing a porn name isn't as easy as choosing your pet's name followed by the street you grew up on, although maybe that's worked nicely for a few. I know I wanted to steer clear of ridiculous names: no Master Blaster or anything ending in Power or Powerful or Steel or any other kind of heavy or precious metal; nothing pointing West (“North” and “East” and “South” were already taken); and no places like Delaware or any other state.
Billy Bitcoin? Of course not. We all know there were no real bitcoins in 1998, just like there are no real bitcoins in 2024.
For some unknown reason, Billy Watson popped into my head. I really wished I'd have called myself Billy Shears. Way cooler. But no, when my brain said “Billy Watson” I laughed really hard, decided “it’s Billy Watson for me!” and here I am today, stuck with a ridiculous name.
(A quick Google search turns up a 94-year-old actor named Billy Watson; "Whipper" Billy Watson the Canadian professional wrestler; Billy Watson and the International Silver String Submarine Band; and, finally, a soccer player named Billy Watson who started his career in Scotland, then moved to England, and then ended it in United States.)
(Another digression: I've often contemplated writing about the greatest porn names ever invented, which would have to include Alexis Texas, Cherry Poppens, Faye Runaway (below, prepping before her scene), and…? I dunno. Leave a comment and help a brother out.)
After I invented my name, I had one very difficult thing to do: tell my parents exactly what I was doing to make spare money. (Yea...that's the way I roll — my folks have been and still are an important part of my life). I was a part-time adjunct professor, teaching ENG067 (basic sentence structure), ENG077 (basic paragraphs) ENG101 (the 5-paragraph essay) and ENG102 (the dreaded research paper) — and I was currently promoting two porn sites.
I already mentioned Blacks on Blondes, but I never mentioned either sites to my folks. I was also sending traffic to a site in Japan that specialized in the “Bukkake” fetish: picture a woman in a large warehouse with anywhere from 35 to 50 men masturbating furiously around her until they ejaculate all over her body — sometimes clothed, sometimes naked.
My pal, Jay-the-Postman, who had quit his gig at the post office to become first an affiliate — and then a full-blown adult webmaster who owned a pay site and who taught me the affiliate gig — said, "Promote these two sites, and if you put in a couple hours a week, you'll make a couple grand a month. Easy."
And it was easy. "So…anyways…that's where the extra money is coming from, Mom and Dad. I promote online porn." They looked at me for a second. My Dad went back to his Italian sausage and peppers. My Mom shook her head in disgust. Then she asked, "and what do you call yourself?"
"Billy Watson," I said.
She looked at me with this sort of are-you-kidding-me-face and said, "before my mom married your grandfather, she dated a man named Billy Watson."