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tubes
This
page considers questions about amateur and professional
adult content in venues such as Xtube, Metacafe and DailyMotion.
It covers -
introduction
2005 saw uptake by the general community - initially by
20 somethings at work or on campus and by teens at school
- of video services such as YouTube and Metacafe. That
uptake built on acceptance of photo services such as Flickr.
As discussed elsewhere
on this site, the new services allow people to upload
short videos (typically of up to 1:10 minutes duration
and with a 10:00 minute maximum) for access through a
shared location. That aggregation means that the most
popular sites garners enormous numbers of unique visitors
and repeat traffic. It also means that visitors are likely
to arrive in search of a particular video and then browse
other content.
Access may be to any visitor or to specified individuals
or a class of viewers, eg those who are a 'member' or
prememium member of the service or those with a working
credit card.
Given contemporary culture (featuring exhibitionism, teenage
'dares', gawking and commercialisation) it was inevitable
that such services would be quickly colonised for the
display of adult content. Colonisation also reflects consumer
access to low-cost high-quality and idiot-friendly video
cameras.
A consequence is that much of the online adult video,
in particular that for which payment is not required,
is 'home grown'. The production values of user-generated
content vary considerably. Some video is so blurred and
badly-lit as to be incomprehensible; other video demonstrates
that having a camera and no clothes does not turn you
into Fellini, Polanski or Mapplethorpe. Some is flash
video (ie recorded); other content appears on streaming
sites such as Stickam.
Commercial adult content producers have colonised general
video services such as DailyMotion and LiveLeak and specialists
such as Xtube, PornoTube, Megarotic and YouPorn. (YouTube
has a formal ban on nudity.) Some of their content is
teasers. Some producers have used specialist services
as gateways to their own sites or as agents for their
commercial content, eg with the specialist site featuring
both free and pay-per-view/download content (with revenue
being shared by the specialist and the producer).
Commercial producers have also experienced (and on occasion
presumably condoned) piracy of their work, with enthusiasts
posting clips from DVDs and media. Some producers appear
to have posted offcuts from studio sessions.
issues
Video is identified by 'keyword' tags,
applied by the person posting the item or (more rarely)
by the service operator. Most services allow sorting of
content in a number of ways, usually by tag, by date ('most
recent' and in ascending/descending chronological order),
by poster, by 'most viewed', and by 'most discussed' or
'most popular' (on sites where viewers are able to comment
on items and/or assign a value - typically a number of
stars - to the item).
That identification and posting means that it can be difficult
to readily identify particular content and that there
is substantial duplication (a rough search of one specialist
site in December 2006 suggested that 12% of clips were
duplicates) because enthusiasts post items from other
sites, from a DVD or from the same site. Quality is often
unknown: viewers cannot be sure what they are getting
until the video plays and on occasion will find that a
third or more of a clip consists of a frozen image or
a pointer to an adult site/service.
As with blogs we
wonder whether some self-exposure by naive teens emulating
their wilder peers (and by adults who should know better)
will come back to haunt
them. Posters with regrets, or merely belated advice from
family and friends, can approach sites for deletion of
content. However, as with print it is difficult to stop
people copying what has been published and to identify
then retrieve every copy.
A perspective is provided in Net.SeXXX: Readings On
Sex, Pornography, And The Internet (New York: Peter
Lang 2004) edited by Dennis Waskul.
the new tube
Nielsen//NetRatings claimed in 2006 that weekly US web
traffic to YouTube grew 75% during the first half of 2006,
to 2.8 million unique visitors. The estimated number of
pages viewed during June 2006 was 724.0 million (up from
117.6 million in January 2006) and the average time spent
at the site increased 64% from around the 17 minutes at
the beginning of the year to 28 minutes in June.
Nielsen claimed that US men were 20% more likely to visit
YouTube than women; people in the 12 to 17 year cohort
were nearly 1.5 times more likely than the average web
user to visit YouTube. The 35 to 64 cohort comprised 54%
of visitors to the site. comScore claimed that the same
cohort comprised 47%. QuantCast claimed the cohort comprised
65%, an illustration of the significant variation in estimates
of user demographics discussed elsewhere
on this site. YouTube more modestly proclaimed that "Our
user base is 18-49, spanning all geographies". Demographics
for services that have overtly emphasised adult content
or are perceived to be permissive to posting of such content
are uncertain.
Detailed independent breakdowns of what is being is being
published and watched (and by whom) is not available.
It is clear that much visitation was not concerned with
adult content and instead related to video that encompassed
humour, family messages, clips of family pets and even
sermons about the wickedness of the internet.
YouPorn.com was reported as claiming 15 million unique
visitors in May 2007, with an audience growing at around
37.5% per month, resulting in a global Alexa ranking of
51 - ahead of CNN.com (84), About.com (114) and Weather.com
(195).
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