The Future of Porn Online

This weeks blog is focused on the future of adult on the Internet and looking at the porn landscape on the web of today. I'll take a look at the Industry voice and also the consumer and highlight trends emerging for the next few years.

The Porn Industry

Like it or loathe it, porn is the 'art' of sex entertainment. Why is sex entertaining? Don't really need to answer that one, mix in a little animal instinct, emotion and curiosity and you have a recipe for a hugely creative subject.

Although porn is synonymous with a lot of bad practises, it's important not to isolate itself as the perpetrator and anyone who deals with it as the enemy. Yes, it has a bad reputation online, something I'm keen to deconstruct and to see how and why this happened but also take the time to look at what's good about the Industry.

So why did porn get itself into such a poor state? Why are there non-targeted ads everywhere, popups not seen since web circa 1998 and sites setup just to link you to places you didn't know you were going? It screams greed, scammers and webmasters only out for themselves - they don't care about their users. This is not true of everyone but looking back at how it's progressed online, it's easy to see why this happened.

Traffic

It's no secret that porn keywords make up a large proportion of Internet searches and traffic seeking porn everyday is in the 100's of millions across the web. It is massively popular. This in itself attracts a lot of webmasters seeking a self-sustained lifestyle by running their own porn site.

Get Rich Quick

We spend most our lives working for money so to get rich quick is hugely enticing.

Prior to the tube revolution in around 2005, Internet pornography was mostly available behind paid subscriptions which brought in steady income for many webmasters. These webmasters could easily setup affiliate systems and make the promise to others about 'getting rich quick' and offer attractive bonuses and commissions to those who drove traffic and converted. Many of these schemes had very limited terms and conditions, in other words it was a message of 'Drive us traffic, no questions asked and we'll pay you'.

A typical point of sale for an affiliate scheme. Big bundles of cash. Some even have private jets and nice cars! Selling the dream.

The sheer volume of niche porn created and the volume of affiliate networks created a fuel for those who just wanted to work on traffic and get money. Many of these people sought mailout promotions in the form of SPAM, others opted to created 100's of keyword domains to direct traffic with many template sites setup for search engine rankings. Others just went out to blindly deceive people using techniques such as 'e-whoring' and classifieds spam. 'E-whorers' would lurk in sex chats and forums, first getting their target onto a chat such as MSN before trying to sell them the service (such as live webcam chat) all the while sounding genuine and posing as someone they're not.  An age old tactic of marketers is to sell on insecurities. Make this insecurity as big as you can in the consumer's mind and then offer them the solution. Viagra, penis pills, weight loss, dating and insurance to name a few!

Search engines have been flooded with replica blogs, comment spam, forum spam and link farms over the years with almost a 'traffic is king' mantra driven by affiliate systems. However, content is the king and search engines have adapted rapidly to draw the distinction between what is trying to communicate with users and what is trying to shepherd them onto something else.

On a positive, the industry has responded and tightened it's terms of use for their affiliate schemes. Many of the bigger brands such as BangBros will simply not allow any email marketing and will work hard to provide you with the tools to help sell their product in a non-invasive and respectful way.

Many companies have been caught up in the greed rush and that feeling of lagging behind as many others use these practises causes a 'well everybody else does it' mentality.

The Tube Revolution

In around 2005, tube sites such as youporn sprung up to provide a youtube of porn. This caused an outcry from content producers and a lust from consumers. It was truly a revolution in online pornography and destined to be successful online following the huge success of streaming content demonstrated by youtube.

What did this now mean for content niche sites and paid subscriptions? Simply put, it meant people had a means of satisfaction they did not need their credit cards for, so profits in many cases dropped significantly.

Tubes allowed people to upload their own videos. Such is the nature of people, they would also upload stolen content from many sites thus negating the need for those sites. This is a strong argument from the content corner who strongly protest their livelihood is affected by the ease of piracy distribution the tubes provide.

However, there is one important trend that has emerged. The word 'amatuer' and the fact that now people in their own homes can produce porn for the viewing masses. This is new, this is something the tubes do that the pay sites don't and can't be denied. Whilst the wheels are in motion to protect content producers and for tubes to adopt more rigorous copy protection processes, it is clear that a hybrid of pay sites advertising their content in short clips and the budding amateur making a name for themselves will be the place for tube sites in the coming years. A churn will take place to help find a compromise between both content producer and media aggregators.

.XXX domain names

The .xxx domain extension (released this month, Dec 2011) has also created a lot of concern within the industry. It is very opportunistic to see the porn-web-world in this state and then heavily promote a solution in the form of .xxx. Very mixed reaction to the subject and some strong reaction from the Industry. Many companies opted to never support it or work with affiliates that support it. .xxx argues that it provides a place to act responsibly and the relatively high cost of the domains goes towards supporting a cleaner and more responsible adult web with virus checking and a human board of control. Others would say this is typical greed taking control of something they have no right to and the beginnings of ring-fencing the industry so governments and ISPs can form greater control. This would mean the consumer may have content heavily restricted and also a means for ISPs to sell packages which allow .xxx access at a greater price.

RampantSpider.com

RampantSpider was created to search porn across multiple tubes and to introduce some mainstream techniques. We have challenged ourselves to look at some inherently complex subjects all in the aid of user centricity, a term mainstream know moreso than adult. The argument about the content on the tube sites will rumble for sometime and we will update ourselves in accordance with their data. However, despite who owns what, there's still a user out there who's looking for their interests and facing difficulty with search filtering.

A large bulk of development and planning went into RampantSpider's filter system. This contains over 600 options which all have a thesaurus to help group multiple slang terms that mean the same thing. The beta phase will asses how this pans out.

So far, we are happy to report the filter is used almost as much as the search bar itself.

We also made a decision to abolish popup ads and flash banners to use as much space for the user experience as possible. We needed a useful tool, the more something is usable, the more it is used - seems simple right!?

Another challenge is tagging and organising content in ways only humans can. So much information in the video is only obtainable when you watch the video which is a very slow search technique so over the coming months we'll be looking at ways to help alleviate this issue. There will be a separate blog about this.

So, I'll finish with the summing up of the future of porn online. Whilst tube sites churn content and become more in-line with stringent copy theft laws, pay sites will continue to take new shapes to differentiate from tubes in the form of reality porn, 3D, interactive and live sex cams. They will also look at new business models and integrations with the tubes to facilitate the user. The amateur porn user base will grow and the biggest content producers will likely become the people in their own home. The impact of .xxx and 'ringfencing' is still yet to be determined but something many will be watching closely. As for the millions of adult blogs, link farms and 'circle jerk' sites, these will stick around but will die out of prominence as the search engines become wiser with social engagement and continue their evolution towards an ecosystem that truly rewards engagement.