SpankWire

Spank Wire! As The Porn Dude, a dude who catalogs all the best porno on the Internet, I know all about being paralyzed by choice. With so many options, how do I know what to pull up on my laptop when it’s time to grease the pipe? The safest bet is often one of the free tube sites. They don’t cost anything and usually have a ton of different content. Today we’re going to be looking at one of the classic video tubes, SpankWire.com.

I know some of you old-time perverts are thinking, Spank Wire? That website’s still around? Why, yes, actually. They’ve been around for more than a decade, with their popularity peaking around 2011. They’re only pulling a fraction of the traffic they did back in their heyday, but it’s still a whopping 50 million sessions per month. Let’s take a look at what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong.

It’s All Pink on the Inside

SpankWire’s got the basic tube setup you’ve seen a million times, only this time it’s got a soft pink and blue theme that seems appropriate for little girls. Instead of cartoon puppies and hearts, though, all the images are of hardcore sex. The main page is dominated by a grid of thumbnails for different fuck flicks.

When you hover over an image, you get a series of more stills from the clip. This isn’t an unusual feature for a porn tube, but what you don’t see often is the row of mini-screencaps that shows up at the bottom of the preview. This lets you jump around easily from cap to cap, so you can make sure the clip has what you want before you click through.

The default view of the main page has a selection of Top-Rated clips, followed by Trending Videos, and finally Recent Videos. There’s a View More button beneath each, plus a few more sorting options available from a drop-down menu in the header.

Sorting by Longest Videos doesn’t work exactly like it’s supposed to. The first dozen pages bring up videos with times that have to be wildly inaccurate. They’re all listed as being hundreds of hours long. I wanted to test my endurance with a marathon session of manipulating the mango, but none of these epic-length clips would load for me.

If you prefer to sort your smut by category, click the category link in the header. The most popular ones are collected at the top of the page. It’s one-stop-shopping if you want everyday depravity like Anal, Interracial, or Hardcore. Deeper niches may require a little poking to reach, but they actually have 16 whole pages of just categories. Your fetish is probably covered. For example, I see Pissing, Toon, and Wrestling on the first page.

Once you step off the front page by picking a category or different method of sorting, things change just a little. The main difference you’ll notice is more ads.

Even with my ad-blocker, the grid of clips is now broken up by some huge ads for premium porn and penis pills. Some of them don’t load, instead just giving me an empty box that says ADVERTISEMENT. There’d be room for 8 more videos per page without them, but there’s still a selection of 20 before we have to click to the next page. It’s a deep library, so it will take you thousands of clicks to reach the last page, assuming you stay in the Straight category. Gay has fewer, and there’s even less filed under Tranny.

Let’s Talk About Wild Hoes

I sorted the straight videos by Most Talked About. The number one clip is called Wild Hoes Angelina Sweet. In the screenshots you get with the preview, sweet Angelina sucks cock and gets railed in a gym. Unlike listening to meatheads grunt at my own gym, the clip looked like it’d make me grunt while beating my meat to Angelina giving head.

The 17-minute clip, watermarked with a Mikiniz logo, is a decent clip. The setup and action are nice, but the maximum resolution is just 480. Even without going full-screen, the video is fuzzy by modern standards. It’s like jacking off while wearing someone else’s glasses.

To be fair, I came before I finished watching, but I know some of you hipster dipshits refuse to watch anything that isn’t filmed in high-def. That’s why a lot of sites let you filter videos by whether or not they’re HD. Get with the times, SpankWire.

I tried checking out the comments at the bottom of the video, only to find zero. I’m not sure what they’re using to measure how much people are talking about the clips. It’s possible I checked out the site after a comment purge or some kind of server issue, because none of the videos I looked at had any comments.

The tags under Wild Hoes Angelina Sweet provide easy links to more clips with 3some, European, Peeing, and a few other categories of humping. They don’t use pornstar tags on Spank Wire, which is a bummer. If you see someone you like, you better hope their name is listed in the description. You’ll only find more if you use the search bar.

I had some buffering issues while browsing the site. A few videos didn’t load up at all, and I usually had a few seconds of lag any time I tried to skip around to different spots in a video. This was on a weekday afternoon, so it’s not like it was really peak porn-viewing hours. Of course, load times vary based on all types of factors, not necessarily caused by the site itself. I’m not ready to write them off based on this.

Too Bad Spam Isn’t Sexy

The very first time I tried to watch a video on SpankWire, I got a nasty piece of pop-under spam. It was one of those fake Blue Screens of Death meant to trick you into thinking Windows crashed if you’re an absolute fucking idiot. Granted, I’m not an absolute fucking idiot, so I just closed the window, but I don’t appreciate the attempt.

This happened with my ad-blocker turned on. A few seconds later, I noticed a message right under the SpankWire header that read, “You have AdBlock enabled and some features may not work properly. Please disable to view site properly.” Nice try, but I’m not letting you in that easily.

Unfortunately, I soon found out about those features that may not work properly. I clicked on a video called Horny Guy Bangs Two Sweet Chicks. The screengrab had two blondes in double-team action, so the man in my pants demanded to see the clip. The video wouldn’t play, instead it's displaying a message that read, “The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.”

I turned my blocker off, refreshed, and the video played just fine. The titular Horny Guy gives the younger of the Two Sweet Chicks a satisfying creampie, and even more dick-enlargement ads appeared among the collection on the side of the screen.

The weird thing is that it seems to be inconsistent. I turned AdBlock back on, refreshed, and it worked fine. My advice if you get that “media could not load” error is to try reloading the page before you disable your ad-blocker.

Look, I get it. They’re giving out the porn for free, so they need to make a profit somehow. I just wish they’d figure out a different, less intrusive way to do it. Other sites have figured out ways to make it work, and SpankWire is lagging behind.

I’ve looked at their traffic numbers, and SpankWire has been getting a little more activity lately. They’ve still got a long way to go if they’re ever going to achieve their former glory again. I feel like the basic skeleton is there, and the content is decent, but they need to make better decisions about organizing and monetizing the site.

So, is a visit to SpankWire worth it? In my opinion, sort of. It’s free, which is a great price, and their collection is varied enough to please all but the most depraved victims of pornography addiction. If you’re fine with a little spam and some non-HD clips, you’ll definitely be able to rub out a few.