Frank Kenney

(cue that horrible whistling theme from that commercial)

So the other day I was surfing the web and a colleague who shall remain nameless sent me a link to a humorous video that had been making its way around the web. It seems that the content was quite adult and one of the two stars let a little gas slip. Oh how immature! But still funny in a MAD magazine sorta way. When I clicked through I found myself on a site that was much like You Tube but was 100% adult content. The advertisements were off to the sides, the content was free and the community was vibrant and very much participating. While I won’t share the name of the site (I don’t need the Google crawlers logging it) I will tell you a little research and the owners of the site was a company that started out distributing VHS tapes, then DVDs and now giving the content away.  After a few emails with the owner it became evident that it’s the same ole game plan that the adult industry has followed from day one.   

When the adult industry realized that less and less people were buying content (in any form), they gave it away for free and monetized the communities built around the content. Viewers that preferred a certain type of film clip were bought together in an effort to share their favorite clips. Specific advertisements and value added services were added to the community and bingo, revenue streams opened up again. Utilizing current technologies and deployment models for storing and playing media (cloud storage) and hosted search, provisioning and account management capabilities (many adult sites will leverage existing email accounts) have kept these firms lean and clean; without traditional IT departments and razor focus of their business models.

Taking cues from the adult industry isn’t something new; it’s just something we don’t want to admit. But lets face it, the tipping point in the VHS vs. Beta discussions came down to the adult industry (it was cheaper). The tipping point for Blue Ray vs. HD DVD came down to a decision from the manufacturer to not grant a license to adult companies. Some of the trends are large like the above; some are small… think DIVX, downloadable flash and avatars. While we saw some adult content come into virtual worlds like Second Life, most of that was via end users and NOT larger adult companies. (In fact many had already tried virtual worlds and passed on the idea for various reasons.)

Just something to think about and I volunteer to lead that research agenda and chair that conference. Any helpers out there?

-f