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.
Great topic Anne, I remember Network Cultures and their conference on ‘The Art and Politics of Netporn’ back in 2005 (the poster on the wall at Media Studies) and two years later the followup: ‘C’Lick Me’, the 2nd International Netporn Festival at the Paradiso. I didn’t watch the stream, but did Verbeken mentioned them in a way?
It’s a mistake to state that sites like Youporn or Xvideo are user generated. Only a very small portion of the video’s shown are made by actual amateurs. Most of the material is made by traditional producers as advertisement for their sites or DVD’s.
I’m not convinced that the porn (or any other) industry is driving such a lot of innovation. There are other important industries driving IT innovation. Gaming for example. And probably the porn industry has also been following (and adopting) the new technologies. I think that with many industries and IT, there’s a balance between pull (when what the business wants gets developed) and push (when new IT innovation is available and gets adopted).
@cdn
Good story but I believe it is the tip of the iceberg. Innovation follows the corner of any industry where the money is flowing to. Look at what Playboy did for periodicals and written media in the 50′s, from distribution to writing. The vcr didn’t explode into every home until long after porn became available on vhs tapes, not to mention the dirty secret that vhs overtook the better quality beta tapes due to porn being available mostly on vhs. Like it or not, people put money into sex, and it’s that money that helps drives new technologies. It may not be solely porn doing the ground work, but the capital generated certainly makes it more possible.