Private Magazine Review
Date:January 17th, 2007
Score: Full 4/5
Niche: Classic Magazine
Main Draw: Private Magazine has been around for quite a long time – 1965 in fact. If you don't remember Private magazine, you might recall some of their other works such as Pirate, Sex Magazine, or Triple X. This is a great archives site with a ton of content and lots of little extras.
Design: This is a very pink, very clean and uncluttered design that presents all the content to you. It has a definate magazine style feel to it, with a site layout commonly seen in mainstream magazine portals.
Navigation: Most of your navigation takes place via the top bar, which presents you with quite a few choices: Stars, Live Sex, Magazines, Movies, Sextras, and Forum. Gallery navigation is handled by the standard options, and you can also save your favorite photos (50 total) or view them in a slideshow.
Pictures: There are several sections with photosets, each with a special theme. All of the photosets have high quality magazine style photography. Spotlights are exclusive photo sets with their featured models. There are 113 models in this section, each of which have 4 photo sets. The next section are the Star photosets. These sets range all the way back from 1998 and contains over 865 phtosets. The women featured here are beautiful known and unknown glamour models.
Movies: Private features a complete collection of Private label movies. Each movie is divided into three clips that can be streamed or downloaded at low medium or high quality. You can take a look at screencaps of the movie, buy the dvd if you'd rather get comfortable on the couch, or flip scene by scene. The production of the movies is very high quality, especially considering they're one of the few porn producers that have figured out not everyone likes a camera with the shakes. There are 290 full DVD quality movies available in this section.
Magazine: Private does a great job in preserving their long magazine history. Full scanned copies of every magazine that Private produced starting from 1965 (which includes Private, Pirate, Triple X, Sex, and Special Editions) are available on the site in both PDF and JPG format. This is the true, unaltered version of the magazine, and it's a great addition to the site. I'm always surprised that more classic magazine sites don't do this, so I'm very happy that Private recognizes the curiosity of their members and helps to satisfy it.
Speed Everything was fast, from the browsing to the streaming.
Originality Private draws upon its many years in the porn industry to show off their exclusive work.
Overall Ease of Use I have no issues with the site itself, everything was clear and easy to use. The downloaded movies are another story, but I'll get into that in the Annoyances section.
Updates The site is updated weekly, with a listing of everything that got added that week right on the member's home page.
Extras: There are a bunch of extras on the site, some good, some bad. The majority of these are in the section Sextras, although others are strewn about the site. Photo Stories are very short stories that accompany galleries. They range between good and 'why are they here' and there are 272 of these.
There are also full length stories in the Stories section that are much better if you're looking for a literary kick. There are 72 of these to tickle your fancy. If you want to pretty up your computer desktop, there are movie wallpapers and a calendar (although the link wasn't working for me for the calendar).
The live sex section has the standard 3rd party plugins that you've probably seen in other paysites. Some of them are just teasers for an upsell (you only get 5 minutes in the one live chat) while others simply gave me javascript errors in Firefox. I wasn't feeling sufficiently motivated to load up IE and see if it works over there. The one Sextra section that really caught my interest was Porn Art. This has Comics, CGI, and othrer artistic expressions of sexuality. You get 89 of these. There's a Daily Pussy section that's thrown in there with all of their images broken.
Annoyances There's a lot of good in this site, balanced by a ton of bad. While I understand the draw of third party plugins, don't bother to throw them in if they aren't working properly for people of all major browsers.
Broken links and sections around the site also proved to be big bumps in an otherwise smooth and pleasant browsing experience. Finally, the big problem. Their downloaded movies have DRM. Now that's fine, I understand wanting to protect your copyrighted media. However, do not make it impossible to watch this media because I cannot connect to your damn license site.
I tried again and again to make the downloaded movie contact the server and get the required license file to be able to play the downloaded movie. It never happened, and that annoyed the hell out of me. It just seems like there's a certain lackadaisical feel towards all of the little things of the site which, when considered seperately don't amount for much. When you get this many broken links, random movie problems, and non working plugins – it just screams sloppiness.
Is It Worth it? I obviously have my complaints, but Private's full magazine scans and high quality exclusive work really wins me over. It sucks that the downloaded movies don't want to play nice, but the streaming movies do work fine for me and they look great. All the little extras that do work are pretty good overall, along with the mainstays of the site.
Price: 19.95/month |17.95 a month for 3 months recurring |12.95 a month for 12 months recurring
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Free Samples: Gallery One | Gallery Two