GayGeek

Does C1R deliver what it promises on the outside?

This is the home of Chi Chi LaRue and Dirk Yates, and the homepage boasts of winning a best website award this year. So you'd expect it to be good. And on one level, it is. There's masses and masses of content; it would take you years to see it all. But at the same time, it's a thoroughly frustrating experience -- to such an extent that you have to ask whether it's worth the money.

What's good about C1R? What needs improvement?

First, this is a site with a vast amount of content. We're in the world of All Worlds Video, Rascal Video, Catalina, and Dirk Yates, so the back catalogue is huge, with hundreds of videos on offer. There are more than 5850 models featured, more than 1500 Live and Raw webcam shows, and more than 750 from Dirk Yates Live. Many models have hundreds of photos (there are more than 1250 of Blake Riley, for example); many videos have galleries of photos too. You could clearly spend a great deal of time here.

But you might spend quite a lot of that time frustrated. With the released videos, for example, Premium members get five free ones per week. But they're designated by the site, and won't necessarily be the ones you want to watch. All the others have to be rented, or viewed through pay per view, and given that you've already paid once, the prices are pretty high. Many (but not all) videos have a trailer you can watch, but we all know that trailers aren't ideal (and to make matters worse, many of these have a full minute at the start of FBI warnings and studio intro). You get 30 free minutes a month, which sounds like quite a lot, but it isn't. It's a third of a video, or a minute a day.

Then there's the Live and Raw and Dirk Yates webcam shows. Each one lasts around two and a half hours, so you're unlikely to want to watch them in real time. Often, 45 minutes goes by and the guys aren't even naked. There's lots of faffing about, and when the models go off on a break, a clip of a porno film pops up. Given that this comes from a company which makes videos, couldn't they have edited these shows down so they move along at a reasonable rate, and showcase the best action? Possibly there wouldn't have been much left, because frequently the amount of fucking is minimal; sometimes there doesn't appear to be any at all. To put Blake Riley and Vance Winter on a bed together, let two hours go by, and have no fucking must surely be a crime. Frankly, I got bored wading through the boring dross to find the couple of minutes of decent action.

Even the photo sets are annoying. Take the 1250 of Blake Riley: they cover 79 pages, yet you can't jump straight to somewhere in the middle; you have to wade through page by page. And when you've gone 30 or 40 pages forward, is there a way of getting back to the Blake Riley index page? No; you have to go back to the models page, and start again. Navigation is a real issue. It's easy to keep going forward, but there are no quick links back again, without going to square one.

What's more, you can't download any of this stuff. Find something you like, and you'll have to stream it if you want to see it again, and if you let your membership lapse, you won't be able to see it at all.

So while there's a lots of stuff, lots of it isn't up to much, more turns out to cost extra, and you can't keep any of it.

How is C1R unique?

This has got to be one of the most content-rich websites out there. But it's also one of the most frustrating, and must come near the top of the league for trying to get you to spend even more money.