What Nerve! It's Not Just Sex

Remember Nerve.com, the web magazine that made a splash in the late '90s for its highbrow approach to sex?

Today the site launches the Remote Island, a new blog devoted to television. As of now it has not made its official debut, but bloggers have been posting to the page since Wednesday and you can reach it here.

The Remote Island joins existing Nerve blogs Scanner (general interest), Screengrab (indie films), The Modern Materialist (products/gadgets), and 61 Frames Per Second (video games) - the latter two were launched in the last two months.

You may notice that for a site self-described as a "smart, honest magazine on sex," a lot of those blog topics seem decidedly PG.

It's all part of an evolution that Nerve has been quietly undergoing as it broadens its content to appeal to the tastes of the relatively tight knit demographic that frequents the site: young, urban, educated, and as it turns out, as interested in indie culture as sex and relationships.

"Most magazines pretend to be general interest and are really about sex - ours pretends to be about sex and is really about a lot of things," says Rufus Griscom, C.E.O. and founder of Nerve.

In 2006 the Nerve brand even went so far as to expand into the baby business (all that sex leads somewhere, right?) with Babble.com, a separate web magazine for a new (read: hip) generation of parents. The success of the three blogs on that site served as the impetus for the Nerve site to expand its own offerings more.

"I think from our perspective, asking what a magazine online should look like today, a whole range of compelling blogs is a part of that," Griscom says.

He says that while the site's traffic remained fairly steady for four or five years, in the past six months it has grown 50 percent, to 1.1 million unique visitors per month.

Griscom credits this to blogs, which get about 15 percent of the site's traffic and are doubling in traffic every couple of months, as well as new monthly pop-culture "top 50" lists that have caught on among users (May's list is 'Top 50 Commercial Parodies).

Nerve's more broadly themed new topics of coverage only complement, rather than supplant, its focus on sex. Nerve personals (an online dating community), photography, video, personal essays, and fiction on the topic still account for the bulk of the site's traffic.

Liz Gunnison