drivers of innovation?
This
page considers debate about online adult content as a
driver for commercialisation of the web and non-commercial
activity.
It covers -
saviour of the net or sewer
In discussing the Sex.com domain dispute in 2001 we noted
the words of one site owner that
Porn
is the savior of the Net. It's the crazy granny in the
closet that no one talks about.
For
others it seems to be the relative about whom they just
can't stop talking.
A critic thus claimed
in 2000 that
The
"dirty little secret" of Al Gore's ostensible creation,
the Internet, is that the so-called prosperity it is
fueling, is actually being driven by American Baby Boomers'
craving for smut. That's right. Pornography. Cybersex.
In politically correct lingo, the Internet is now America's
"personal choice for in-home sex-care providers." In
fact, evidence now in the public record, demonstrates
that what is actually driving the so-called "technology
market," is a rock-drug-sex counterculture-inspired
buying frenzy, which official government agencies factor
into their fake economic figures.The "dirty little secret"
of Al Gore's ostensible creation, the Internet, is that
the so-called prosperity it is fueling, is actually
being driven by American Baby Boomers' craving for smut.
That's right. Pornography. Cybersex. In politically
correct lingo, the Internet is now America's "personal
choice for in-home sex-care providers." In fact, evidence
now in the public record, demonstrates that what is
actually driving the so-called "technology market,"
is a rock-drug-sex counterculture-inspired buying frenzy,
which official government agencies factor into their
fake economic figures.
As
we have suggested in discussing the dot-com boom
and domain name speculation,
the "buying frenzy" was another episode in the
long history of behavioural finance and shouldn't be attributed
to iffy figures from government agencies or voracious
demand for adult content. Few adult content providers
were floated during or after the bubble; among those that
were the differential between their prices and reported
earnings were less than those for a range of dot coms
such as Amazon.com or Yahoo.com.
the engine of innovation?
Larry Kasanoff of Threshold Entertainment is reported
as commenting
that adult content was the first
in cable TV, it was first in home video and first on
the Internet. So while we're all wondering what types
of entertainment people will like on the Net, some guy
named Rocco down the street is making $24 million a
year selling porn. And not because he reinvented entertainment,
but because he gave it to the public in a better way.
So you know what? Porn is great for all of us. We should
all study it.
Lewis Perdue's Eroticabiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet
(New York: iUniverse 2002) was promoted with the claim
that
Whether
you call it adult content, smut, erotica or pornography;
whether you consider it disgusting or titillating, the
facts are clear that without business and technical
pioneers in the online sex business, the World Wide
Web would never have grown so big so quickly. Without
consumer demand for big, bandwidth-hogging sex pictures
and streaming video, Cisco would never have sold so
many routers and Sun Microsystems so many servers. Without
programming pioneers trying to perfect video streaming
software that would deliver images of copulation and
procreation to paying customers hooked up with a 28.8
kbps dial-up modem, it is unlikely that CNN would be
effectively delivering news clips of global breaking
news. Without sex-oriented chat
and forums to sustain its early years, America Online
might never have survived. The e-commerce payment systems
that are so common today would be in a far more primitive
stage of development, security and usability. Indeed,
without advertising from sex sites, Yahoo! would be
just another Web company with a bloody red bottom line.
Porn
entrepreneur David Cruz similarly asserts
that "expansion of the Web's infrastructure was largely
paid for by porn revenue" -
Companies
like Amazon.com and Yahoo would have never made it if
it weren't for the men and women who provided a compelling
reason for people to go to Circuit City, buy a computer
and sign up for cable modem service.
In
Australia Internet.au quoted a web developer as
boasting
The
technology used by the sex industry is definitely at
the forefront of Internet development. The majority
of technology passed on to the corporate industry has
stemmed from the sex industry
with
the claim that of $3 billion spent on internet development,
80% "has originated from the sex industry".
That is an interesting figure but one might question its
derivation and meaning. $3 billion spent globally? In
Australia? Over how long? And for what ... servers, software,
wetware?
Frederick Lane,
author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography
in the Cyber Age (London: Routledge 2000) argues that
adult sites have been fundamental in building consumer
confidence about online use of credit cards, finding ways
to deliver multimedia over slow connections and otherwise
being "at the forefront in technological advances".
It is a theme that has been uncritically embraced by the
mass media, with USA Today for example claiming
in 2004 that adult webmasters are
among
the Web's most innovative and profitable entrepreneurs,
but pariahs among mainstream business people. Online
pornographers have been among the first to exploit new
technology for more than a decade — from video-streaming
and fee-based subscriptions to pop-up ads and electronic
billing. Their bold experimentation has helped make
porn one of the most profitable online industries, and
their ideas are staples at Fortune 500 companies. ...
The industry is peppered with female executives and
young male entrepreneurs who built businesses out of
homes and balked at the prospect of working at a corporation.
"Porn is more aggressive and less bureaucratic
than the mainstream," says Tucker. "Our time
to market is less than two weeks, vs. more than a year
in Hollywood."
Consequently, porn-site operators like Tucker are paid
consultants to mainstream businesses, and their sites
function as glorified test labs for emerging technology
Readers of the preceding pages of this profile might question
broader claims that the adult content industry (in contrast
to other industries?) -
has
invested a lot of money into the future of technology.
Porn sites have been dedicated to upgrading their servers
and developing broadband capabilities to make access
faster and easier for their users. In addition, virtual
reality mechanisms can help the porn profits rise even
more. The porn business is aimed at satisfying their
customers, and unlike mainstream companies, porn business
has more leeway to conduct technological experiments.
A
greater model for consistent delivery of product, innovation,
flexibility and attention to consumer concerns might—we
think—instead be Amazon.com.
Arguably the greatest use of the net for delivery of adult
video has been the online mailorder function: consumers
surfing sites to identify (and then pay online) for DVDs
and videotapes that are delivered through the postal
service or by courier rather than over the wires to their
personal computers.
Lane argues that adult sites
are
more adept than mainstream sites at getting and keeping
customers. A main reason is that porn customers are
more open to varied marketing techniques. Customers
of adult websites are more tolerant of "blind linking"
and an infinite number of pop-up windows. These marketing
techniques are not so appealing to the customers of
mainstream websites
More
problematical is the claim that adult content operators
succeed through "cooperation with the competition".
They supposedly remain
...
profitable by cooperating with rival sites. This is
very different than other businesses on the web which
fight to compete with their rivals. What pornography
sites do is "share traffic." If someone doesn't
find what they're looking for on the site, the site
will send that person to similar sites. Because an affiliate
network exists, the original site gets paid for sharing
traffic.
In
practice the online adult content industry appears to
feature the same characteristics of market dominance,
opportunism, marginal players and problematical ethics
as other businesses ... and is beset by the same (if not
greater) problems of consumer churn, denial of payment
and hacking.
A perspective on consumer adoption of 'new technologies'
for the creation/distribution of adult content is provided
by historical perspective is provided in 'Pornography,
Technology, and Progress' by Jonathan Coopersmith in 4
ICON (1998), 94-125.
sex, shopping and broadband
What of claims that adult content will drive consumer
uptake of the next generation internet and telecommunication
services?
It has been fashionable to predict that adult content
will galvanise indifferent demand for broadband
or 3G. One example is Interactive
Consumer Broadband: Sex, Sport & Shopping, a report
from UK group Analysys.
It argues that the residential market for broadband in
Britain will be driven by demand for adult content, with
Video on Demand (VOD) and games a long way behind. Scepticism
about VOD is unsurprising, given disappointing trials
in Europe, North America, Singapore and South Korea.
The report forecast that broadband erotica would be worth
US$3 billion by 2003 on a global basis. A June 2002 In-Stat
report
estimated that adult content accounted for an 98% of global
VOD revenue of US$460m. We note that little VOD is being
successfully provided over the net and that a 2002 Jupiter
MMXI survey claimed 47% of European users would "not
even consider" paying for content.
In January Charles Prast of UK operator Private Media
Group argued that adult content will be the "main
driver of third-generation (3G) mobile services demand",
according to Reuters.
In
new technologies, adult services usually account for
80 per cent of traffic. It has been so with video, the
internet and DVD. It is natural to assume it will be
the same with mobile internet
Prast
forecast that once 3G is established adult content will
drop to about 20% of overall traffic.
Analysts
estimate that the value of the pornography market will
be $70bn (£44bn) in 2006, and that $4bn (£2.4bn)
of that could come from mobile services.
It
is however unclear whether consumers are going to consistently
pay for blurry video
on their mobile phones or download large amounts of video
erotica via wireless to
their laptops. In late 2002 online adult audio content
provider Venetian Dreams launched "Screw Talk", a wireless
streaming adult content service ... presumably the mobile
version of traditional heavy breather services.
A 2003 report
from Strategy Analytics suggested that "mobile adult-oriented
services" might be worth up to US$1 billion by 2008.
That figure would, however, represent around 5% of mobile
entertainment service revenues and is less than half the
value of the ringtones
market in Western Europe in 2002. In 2005 it updated the
report, forecasting an increase from US$1 billion in 2008
to US$5 billion by 2010. A 2003 European Commission study
on Mobile Entertainment in Europe: Current State of
the Art (PDF)
reflected disagreement about demand, pricing, regulatory
frameworks and costs.
The Can Adult Entertainment Save 3G? report from
Ovum noted claims that global online adult content might
be worth US$1 billion pa and that wireless devices such
as PDAs rather than mobile phones allow discreet consumption.
That comment reflects suggestions that there is an untapped
market for female consumers of adult content, who supposedly
prefer to encounter erotica on their phone (while seated
in a living room, travelling on a bus etc) rather than
on a desktop.
In October 2004 analysts Yankee Group predicted that the
US market for adult content on "handsets" will
grow to around US$90m in the US and US$1bn globally by
2008. In 2007 the optimists at Juniper Research claimed
that global sales of "adult mobile content"
in 2006 were around US$1.4bn, with overall "mobile
entertainment" being worth US$17bn (of which mobile
music accounted for US$6.6bn). Juniper forecast that by
2011 adult content will account for US$3.3bn of mobile
content sales, out of US$77bn in mobile entertainment
revenue.
In practice most 'm-porn' has comprised phone 'screen
savers' or text rather than sustained video and has distinctly
retro production values. One critic griped
that
the
hazy pictures or text tales available for your porno-enhanced
hand-held devices are mind-bogglingly lame. One of the
truisms of the modern age is that pornography is often
first to exploit new advances in technology. But maybe
there should be an amendment: Bad pornography always
comes first, out on the cutting edge.
Bad
or otherwise, wireless delivery doesn't appear to have
been sufficiently compelling to secure sustained consumer
and investor interest and offset the concerns of mobile
service operators. The most innovative activity appears
to be wireless-based directory services such as the Erotiguide.
self-publishing and swapping
In discussing Censorship
we suggested that there is considerable uncertainty about
the dimensions of non-commercial adult content production,
dissemination and consumption on a national and global
basis. Comprehensive widely-accepted figures simply aren't
available.
A recurrent theme in writing about the net is that it
will revolutionise traditional publishing relationships,
shifting power away from major publishers to individual
authors and to consumers. It is unclear whether that shift
has occurred in relation to adult content and whether
it has had a tangible economic impact.
The emergence of 'self-pics' sites (which feature photographic
self-portraits of predominantly under-35 Westerners in
varying states of excitement and undress) is a new development
and can be considered as akin to blogs.
Such sites don't appear to have eroded traditional markets
for visual content and overall there appears to have been
a significant consolidation over the past five years,
with
- major
sites garnering most traffic (in the classical 'winner
takes all' mode seen elsewhere on the web, eg search
engines)
- site
operators realigning their business models towards 'premium'
- ie subscription rather than advertising based - revenue
models
- reliance
on facilities such as chat
(eg free access to a personal profile but payment required
for communication with the profile's owner).
Exchange of textual erotica through bulletin boards predates
the web. We speculate that the proliferation of non-commercial
'alt' story sites has severely undermined the viability
of traditional story collections (crudely printed on bad
paper, exorbitantly priced and available by subscription
or from adult shops). Figures aren't however available.
The impact of adult image newsgroups (over 2,000 on Yahoo
alone) also is not clear.
It has been claimed that searching for adult content accounts
for up to 30% of traffic on fileswapping services such
as Gnutella (discussed here).
Those figures are, however, uncertain and it is unclear
whether there will be sustained growth. Opening up your
computer to allow a stranger to search for music files
is one thing; inviting entry to trawl for porn is perhaps
another matter. The 2002 paper
by Michael Mehta, Don Best & Nancy Poon on Peer-to-peer
sharing on the Internet: An analysis of how Gnutella networks
are used to distribute pornographic material covers
a very small sample of video files but suggests that much
P2P swapping is innocuous.
The net has provided a medium for proliferation of the
'slash' genre, ie fan fiction about the private lives
of literary, film or television celebrities. If you are
interested in what Captain Kirk and Mr Spock do behind
the console when the crew has gone to be (or imagine a
luxuriant erotic life for Harry Potter or Gollum) you
will be able to find someone else's torrid prose - or
contribute your own.
The genre has been celebrated by Henry Jenkins - author
of Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory
Culture (London: Routledge 1992) but poses questions
about trademarks, the moral
rights of authors and of course restrictions on online
content.
FanFiction.net (sanitised in 2002 after complaints about
explicit content) supposedly features over 73,000 Potter
fanfics and has been identified by Nielsen as one of the
stickiest (perhaps an indication that authors and readers
should turn off the monitor, smell some fresh air and
- dare we say it - get a life). Competitor FictionAlley.org
features 16,000 fanfics with a 'community' of 24,500 registered
users who have posted 563,000 fanfic-related messages.
piracy
Given the fuzziness of industry statistics, the nature
of consumption and the shrillness of claims by some vested
interests it is impossible to provide a comprehensive
picture of
- how
much online adult content is being pirated
by businesses or appropriated by individuals
- who's
copying
- the
impact of that copying
- whether
piracy of online adult content is a 'model' for other
abuses on the net
Industry
responses vary. Some businesses have announced that they
are ready to combat online misappropriation. Consolidated
national/international figures aren't available and test
cases are difficult to identify (a 1998 example is here).
Others have claimed that unauthorised copying can be leveraged.
An executive of adult video maker Vivid was for example
quoted
as commenting about viral marketing -
if
surfers find a snippet from a movie, it might entice
them into buying the whole tape. We can actually turn
these shared files into mini-infomercials
A
back of the envelope count by Caslon in 2003 of images
on 100 newsgroups and personal sites suggested that around
2% were watermarked or otherwise identified. We are reluctant
to draw conclusions from an impressionistic and small-scale
survey, as use of some 'marked' images might have been
authorised by the rights owner and use of 'unmarked' images
might indeed unauthorised.
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