Nadine Bianes, an office manager for a Southern California real estate developer, used to run a site called "Nadine's Dream," where she posted nude pictures of herself for paid subscribers. She even went to a few GlamourCon shows, weekend conventions where guys meet up with the pinup babes of their fantasies. But "I didn't like the way they played favorites with the [Playboy] Playmates," Bianes admits. "There needed to be a show where it didn't matter whether you were a Playmate, a show that focused on the girls on the Web."
So Bianes organized her own event, WebModel 2000 -- where the booth babes aren't hyping anything but themselves. Men are logging on to the show's site from as far away as Spain and Australia, she says, to snap up $15 tickets to the show, which will be held at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles on Sunday. As at the other shows, they'll get an opportunity to meet their favorite nude models in the (somewhat covered) flesh, maybe get an autograph. But, unlike other shows, this one emphasizes women who've built their own erotic modeling empires online.
"I knew guys would want to come out and meet some of their favorite Internet models," says Bianes, who planned WebModel 2000 with her business partner, James Heikka. They are expecting 1,000 ogling visitors and are already thinking about organizing a second show in Miami. But Bianes has more than new-economy entrepreneurship and Web advertising to thank for the show's apparent popularity. The first nude model she signed for the WebModel show was a playmate -- Miss October 1994, Victoria Zdrok -- who helped entice some of the other women to attend, and, surely, some of the men. Women on the Web are certainly a draw, but apparently they don't have the same cachet as the Playboy-sanctioned babes. As Bianes, who is now sharing a cut of the ticket take with Zdrok, says: "We used her name for the credibility."
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