Klaas Verbeken starts his Pecha Kucha presentation titled “Porn & the future of the web” with the obvious question: Who has downloaded pr0n? The greatest common nominator in mankind is sex, however sex doesn’t sell. 40% of all downloads are porn related. We currently have sharp high-quality HD Video but we want DVD because people don’t want to see all the actual details.
Porn is the drive behind a lot of innovation online such as video conferencing with naked ladies and live chat. However, sometimes technology doesn’t get adapted such as the multi-angle cameras that were only used by the porn industry. There are billions of dollars flowing in and out of the porn industry which led to the development of SSL techology.
The big question is: to pay or not to pay. We are currently not paying and preferring user-generated porn such as YouPorn. We choose for free content. It’s hard to get a monitizing model right.
Consumers of porn are becoming both producers and competitors in the case of Sellsumers where you can sell your sextape. A final example of a technology “invented” by the porn industry (AdultFriendfinder) is IP-to-geo translation. This currently drives the web with Google redirecting all our services to our local domain again.
Long live innovation, long live porn.
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