sponsored by

Hosted by
eROI

PornTech
Lending A Hand
by Chris Olsen

Porn. Widely available to anyone on the web. Responsible for a generation of one-handed typists. An innovator and early adopter of Web technology and trends? Case in point: Yahoo! has a category for Interactive Sex, which alone includes 175 broadcast sites like "Nymphomaniacs - super-fast video conferencing technology will let you see these girls live and in real time, up-close and personal." Web porn is technologically advanced, as well as innovative. Additionally, porn consumes a considerable amount of Internet resources, services, and products.

Since the early to mid 90’s when the Internet began to become widely available to mainstream society, demand for Web porn has grown at an incredible rate. The bandwidth used by porn sites pumping (no pun intended) all of these still images, movie clips, and live video feeds around the world, is enormous. All this demand has contributed a great deal to the need for increased Internet capacity. Aside from the obvious contributions to overall Web traffic and subsequent need for increased infrastructure capacity, porn has "spawned" demand for increased bandwidth capacity to the edge of the Internet. T-1 and T-3 internet connections, once common only to ISP’s and large corporations, are now needed by porn servers that host tens of thousands of hits and hundreds of thousands of images per day. Not only does this increase demand for ISP’s bandwidth services, but keep in mind that each end of a T-1 and T-3 connection requires thousands of dollars worth of equipment from the likes of Cisco, Nortel, or Lucent to name a few.

Broadband access to the home is rapidly becoming available. Now I won’t claim that desire for porn at home is the main reason for people’s demand for broadband Web access. But hey, knowing that that jpeg will download in 1 second instead of 10, or that streaming video will actually stream, is probably enough to get a lot of people (and you know who you are, and no, I still have a 56k analog connection) to draw their shades and pony up the $39.99/month for ATT@Home.

Not only are porn sites early adopters of technology. Adult sites were among the first businesses to employ e-commerce and now common Web marketing/networking techniques. Long before Jeff Bezos began pushing paperbacks over the Web, pornmongers were selling access to their wares online, accepting transactions via common credit cards, as well as more innovative approaches to funds transfer and electronic payments like CyberCash and other Internet payment services.

The widely encountered and monumentally annoying pop-up window, an early favorite of porn sites, now shows up on the complete spectrum of Web pages. Sites like ESPN and MSNBC now use pop-ups to take polls, advertise new services, and draw your attention to new areas of their sites. Porn sites also were among the earliest to adopt the free service business model. They realized that the true profits were in eyeballs, and that by providing a free uhhh… service, they could attract a great deal of traffic, which is of great value to advertisers. Of course the majority of the advertisers are other porn sites offering "premium" products like the aforementioned super-fast video conferencing - but the free sites give the pay sites a forum with the best odds of reaching their target customers.

The existence and accessibility of web porn is also a major force in the creation of a separate, growing industry: Employee Internet Management software. Porn surfing doesn’t just occur late at night. On the contrary, Websense notes that 70 percent of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the nine-to-five workday. Businesses are now forced to protect the productivity gains they have made through investments in Internet technology, as well as protect themselves from potential lawsuits brought on by pornography in the workplace. Companies like Websense develop software to allow employers to manage, monitor, and report on employee use of the Internet. Much of the demand for this software is directly from companies desire and need to filter and block employee access to porn.

Clearly porn does not merely utilize the web as a business medium. Porn, as much as any other industry, contributes to the Internet’s growth and progression. The porn industry is a large consumer of Internet capacity and has frequently pioneered the implementation of new Web technologies. Not only does porn impact Web technology trends, but also develops many of the techniques and methods used by all industries as they attempt to leverage the Internet for business.