Blackmen Digital

This site currently has 5 videos available right now, as well as 457 photo galleries, with most photos displaying at 1280x853. All videos are available in WMV and Flash Player formats to stream or download. At their highest quality, videos display at 640x480 (1400kbps). The site is updated every week.

If you’re someone that prefers ladies of an ethnic background then sites like BlackMen Digital are pretty much invaluable. Other mainstream men’s magazines seem pretty poor at knowing who the best-looking ethnic babes but this one really does know its stuff.

What was good about it as well is that it realises that by also covering the hip-hop industry that it might bump into occasional girls like Ice-T’s stunning wife Coco who might not be ethnic, but includes them anyway as they might be quite relevant.

I suppose the problem of essentially reproducing content from a print base is that there won’t be many videos to watch, and that is the case here. But that shouldn’t actually matter all that much anyway. This is, after all, an online version of the magazine.

The galleries are of a style that you’d expect from such a magazine but you won’t see much at all in the way of nudity of toplessness. But the range of models is quite amazing really, with shoots from pop stars like Ashanti to models like Vida Guerra. The galleries are small though, not the multi-shot galleries you get from most sites.

The main disappointment with the presentation here is that the site retains none of the identity of the magazine using a template layout, which was really a shame.

I have to say that the site really should have employed a full models' section as keeping track of who is on this site is incredibly difficult without one - you really have to hope you find a favourite.

Update information was pretty good though with all content dated and getting to the bonus sites was very easy to say the very least. They do try and keep a magazine feel by linking to the different issues from this company.

BlackMen Digital is an impressive representation of the print magazine in the depth that it covers many of its issues, that’s for sure. Obviously the galleries don’t contain many shots, but it’s a great round-up of what the site has produced over the last few years.

The problem is that the site doesn’t really have an identity of its own, feeling like something of a soulless exercise of just dumping all the galleries it’s got online for convenience sake. It needs more features as other print magazine magazines employ, really.