The Web is changing the landscape of the pornography industry -- transforming what
once was perceived as a pit of sleaze into something almost respectable and even cool. No
longer is the porn world limited to back-room studios in the San Fernando Valley and the
red-light districts of metropolitan areas; it's become a do-it-yourself industry that
turns up all over the map.
Of course, the adult Web offers sleaze aplenty but it's also increasingly a place where
college-educated Web professionals are turning their entrepreneurial talents to "Hot
Horny Pix."
These new purveyors of porn are entering the field not out of passion for their
"content" but because they dream of making Web-sized fortunes. But the market
they're entering is already wildly overcrowded. And it turns out that the people who are
best positioned to make big profits from those "hot pix" online are the same
ones who have been profiting from them for ages offline.
It's hard to gauge exactly how many nice-boy-next-door newcomers have taken up porn
since the advent of the Web, but there are hints that the numbers are growing. A builder
of adult Web sites, estimates that at least 70 percent of all Web porn sites are being
produced by people who have no experience in the porn industry -- many are one-person
operations, he says, run by broke housewives who think they might make some cash by taking
their clothes off virtually, but plenty of others are being done by young,
college-educated entrepreneurs. A recent survey on a San Francisco developer mailing list
with about 400 subscribers turned up 10 Web professionals who are working on adult sites.
The lure, unanimously, is money. Forrester analyst reports have pegged the profits for
the online adult industry at $185 million for 1998; other observers put the numbers even
higher. Many Web entrepreneurs claim to be pulling in millions a year (although many also
inflate their numbers). The Wunderkind of Web porn, 24 year-old CEO Seth Warshavsky
of the adult network IEG, projects revenues of $50 million this year. Beth Mansfield, the
legendary housewife/accountant behind the adult link emporium Persian Kitty, plans to reel in
$800,000 in advertising revenues alone this year.
Porn is almost hip in the Web world: The Net's "dirty little secret" has been
the subject of glowing tributes in trade magazines and business magazines alike. Few other
industries are making money online, which could explain why Upside and Wired and
the Wall Street Journal are devoting so many pages to the wonders of Web porn profits. So
it's not surprising that Web professionals who read those awe-struck reports in business
journals might want to tap into the heralded riches.
Everybody knows that the largest
profit center on the Web is porn. There was an article about a year ago in Wired, I think,
about a German company that claimed that it was making tons and tons of money making porn
on the Web. The story glorified them -- they were proud of it, and kind of dared you to
come after them. But I think that was an early sign that it was going to be cool among
some crowds to be involved in porn on the Net.
There has, of course, always been money to be had in the porn industry -- by most
reports, porn is an $8 billion industry in America alone -- but the Internet has put that
money into a medium that Web workers are comfortable with. You don't have to have
connections in the porn industry to get started; all you need is some pictures. You don't
have to deal with bodily excretions and shady customers; instead, you deal with sterile
pixels and HTML. Web porn entrepreneurialism offers all the revenue of the porn world
without having to deal with the physical reality of sex and the human body.
It's cleaner. You don't have sleazy stores on the street and riffraff hanging out.
You don't have to deal with the Mafia or Asian gangs -- they can't control the Net when
anyone can do it from their bedroom.
