Happy holidays perverts! I hope you are having a great time among your loved ones or will be around them soon. If you are struggling or need mental support over the holidays, you can find an overview of international help hotlines here.
Like every year I want to take the Christmas days to reflect a bit on the past year. 2023 sadly has yet again been a year with horrible outbursts of violence and hate. One of the founding principels of ToyTorture.com has been that this website is unpolitical, beliving in the unifying force of love and kink. But be assured that me as the person behind this little website has been deeply affected by what is going on in the world.
This development has partly been fueled by the transformation of Twitter into a cesspool of verbal violence and misinformation. Luckily my filter bubble is still holding up quite well. But I can see how this once flourishing space of kink life and discourse is slowly dissolving. So many important, knowledgeable and witty voice have been silenced or have gone silent. It feels like the Tumblr purge all over again! This fortifies my decision to host ToyTorture.com on my own and not host or post my reviews on one of the major platforms. A few months ago I started getting active on Bluesky and Instagram. If you like, give me a follow there!
For years Twitter has been the main driver for traffic to my website, especially after Tumblr died. Due to not having Twitter Blue, the reach of my tweets has gone done dramatically. This in combination with changes to the Google Algorithms sadly meant a drop in traffic to my website. Luckily ToyTorture.com has and always will be a non-commercial hobby so it just makes me a bit sad that less people see the work I put into this little website. If you like what I am doing or find something interesting retweet, reskeet or talk about it. Seeing peoples’ relationship, sex and kink life improve through what I write encourages me to keep going.
Not being dependend on traffic and revenue from ToyTorture.com also means that I have not been effected by the most drastic change in the adult toy review scene: The Apple Privacy Update. This update among other things blocks the URL suffix used to attribute affiliate purchases on all Apple products. This has caused a steep drop in income for all reviewers depending on it affiliate networks. So I predict for 2024 many websites closing down or shifting focus. Again, ToyTorture.com will remain non-commercial and independent even though hosting costs, etc are not cheap. But I have always considered this my way of giving back to the community by helping kinksters finding the right tools to make their fantasies come true safely.
This website being a hobby is also reflected in subtle changes some of you might have noticed. Most notable reviews are becoming more and more infrequent. The Sunday-6pm-review is sadly a thing of the past. When I started writing kink toy reviews I was undergraduate student with plenty of time on my hands, especially when I became single again. These days are long gone. As a mid-level executive with a fiancée my priorities have shifted in the past years leading to the one review per week being an unsustainable frequency. Also, after 11 years I have written almost 500 reviews, blog entries and 101s. This means, I have covered almost all relevant toys. Of course there are still some very interesting and innovative toys out there which I will review! But for better or for worse the days of regular reviews are a thing of the past.
This does not mean that ToyTorture.com will go offline anytime soon! On the contrary, the past year has shown me more than ever how important such a website is as lighthouse leading kinksters new and old to high quality toys! Due to the global economic situations many kinksters have started looking at less expensive toys, mostly manufactured in Asia. While there are some great kink brands in the Asian Pacific region (ForFun in Bangkok or Army of Men in Sydney), many are not meeting the high standards you would expect from products made for intense body contact. In 2023 the messages asking about advice how to deal with allergic reactions after playing with leather toys & gear probably contaminated with Chrome-6 or silicone (anal) toys being colored with paint not being made for body contact have skyrocketed. So please, before buying cheap kink toys of Temu, Wish, Alibaba or even Amazon and eBay, consider the hidden costs and please be save!
This has been a surprisingly long end of year message. I want to close with thank you for your ongoing support of ToyTorture.com! All your messages, reader questions and kind words at events encourage me to keep on going. Thank you for reading what I write, even when I sometimes rumble on. For 2024 I wish you all the best, fun, kink and unexpected connections and look forward to meeting many of you at kink events, sex parties and prides throughout Germany – especially if you want to top me.
