"For an adult movie producer, for example, the Internet opened up markets to a global audience rather than limiting sales to, say, sex-shops in the US. They could spend £200,000 on server farms to provide streaming video and chat and probably pay it off in a couple of months," says Forrester's Jackson.
Another related driver, however, was the need to find "better ways
of satisfying demand ahead of legislation". "Cultural and legislative
barriers have always driven innovation because people spend time
working out what's illegal and what's not and invent a technology
solution to get round the problem. Videos resulted from that impetus
because they were originally unclassified and the age rating didn't
apply to them — only to films played in cinemas," Jackson explains
Ratings don't apply
Recently, another factor that has influenced the market is simply
the plethora of adult Web sites now available. "The industry reaped the
benefits of a low cost-of-entry in 2000, but it's so low that anyone
can set up a server with videos and pictures and start charging. This
has led the industry to commoditise to a degree," says Jackson.
Pace agrees, but believes that this, in turn, has spawned more
innovative approaches to presentation. "Finding a way to differentiate
your site from others is the key. For the most part, the content you
have on one site can be found on another, so the only way to keep your
customers is to find a way to present that content to them in a format
that is somehow better than your competitors," he says.
This has led to the adoption of technologies such as searchable
databases and instant access, which "came straight out of the desire to
get adult content as fast as possible". Other techniques include
services such as geolocation. This enables web sites to determine
users' geographic latitude and longitude and work out in which city or
region users are located by comparing their IP address with the known
locations of local servers and routers. "By using geolocation, sites
can figure out who to pair their users with, what they may be
interested in because of their area and so on" says Pace.
Porn in your pocket
But the fact that "content delivery is what the adult industry is
all about" has also led to the exploration of new channels to market.
Porn in your pocket in the shape of devices such as mobile phones and
PDAs is an attractive proposition to the adult industry.
Although revenue predictions for adult content on mobile devices
vary from analyst to analyst, the consensus is that it it's going to be
lucrative. Juniper Research, for example, estimates...
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