AGAIN, we are at the cutting edge of the zeitgeist - USA Today notes that the "adult" entertainment industry often leads the way in technology:
- Online pornographers have been among the first to exploit new technology for more than a decade - from video-streaming and fee-based subscriptions to pop-up ads and electronic billing. Their bold experimentation has helped make porn one of the most profitable online industries, and their ideas are staples at Fortune 500 companies.
As cyberporn pioneers venture into new fields, such as wireless services, digital-rights management and geo-location software, their peers in other businesses are taking notes again.
Porn's recent tech tinkering could have sweeping implications for the music and movie industries, which are trying to protect digital content from being stolen and traded. Each day, millions of video clips and photos are filched from for-pay porn sites and traded, forcing the red-light districts of cyberspace to find novel ways to protect digital content.
The adult industry's use of technology already reshaped how Internet behemoths Yahoo and Microsoft MSN do business. Both rely heavily on fee-based subscriptions and prominently feature video-streaming technology.Amazon.com has effectively used affiliate-marketing campaigns - posting free content on 900,000 smaller sites - to attract millions of consumers to its site. Pop-up ads are seemingly everywhere on the Net.
Technology has paid off handsomely for porn sites in the USA. Led by sites like Danni's Hard Drive and Cybererotica, they generated $2 billion in revenue last year, up 10% to 15% from 2002, says Adult Video News, a trade magazine. That's about 10% of the overall domestic porn market. The number of porn sites has vaulted eighteenfold, to 1.3 million, since 1998, says the National Research Council.
It will likely grow as more Americans get high-speed Internet connections. About 35 million people visited porn sites in December - or one in four Internet users in the USA, says Nielsen/NetRatings.
...."Where there's sex and tech, there are sales," says Eric White, CEO of Virtual Reality Innovations, a profitable maker of cybersex toys.
Some established companies have quietly dabbled in porn for years. Comcast, the nation's largest cable company and Disney suitor, is one of the most far-reaching distributors of porn. Like other cable and satellite companies, it pipes adult films into pay-per-view TV services. But, like others, it doesn't break out revenue from adult programming in its financial reports.
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Article comments
1 - Teejay
I wanted to be Porn actor. I am 26 years old boy from Africa. I wanted to know if an african guy like me who have interest in having sex a lot can join your acting crew.