The porn industry: *still* leading the web by its nose

Its a well-rehearsed trope that the internet is basically one colossal forum for sex starved Tennesseeans, but there is grain of truth in the observation. Sex, like, love and money, is one of the key drivers of human behaviour. The vast, sprawling anonymity of the net gives many people the chance to explore and express “things” in a way unimaginable 15 years ago and it is little wonder that the Interwebs is rife with nooky.

And therefore it is little surprise that the porn industry has long been ahead of the game in understanding and monetising the web. Online payments, effective personal security, streaming media and community building were commonplace in porn years before Facebook, YouTube or mainstream ecommerce.

If you consider that books, images, DVDs and magazines are effectively content platforms, then that puts content right at the heart of the porn industry. So how are they protecting these, the very building blocks of their industry? Are they suing copyright infringers? Nope. Sites such as redtube.com, tube8.com etc are seeing their properties distributed for free as users cut out their favourite snippets and scenes and upload them for the free use of all-comers.

Why aren’t the porn companies stamping down on this? They recognise that every time a video appears with one of their performers in it, it increases the market for that performer. You can see this unfolding in the comments below each video, where members of the forum ask insightful questions like “hell this girz hot who she be?” and so on. Helpful posters answer: “why, my good fellow, that’s Michelle Sinclair, better know as Belladonna.” Hey presto – the market for her particular brand of activity just increased by several thousand drooling men.

So, in the long run, the piracy of content is what creates the stars of the future in this market. A lesson that record companies and film executives should have nailed to their weiners to remind them of the fact every time they visit the toilet.

Don’t ask me what research I did for this article.