When the internet first entered public consciousness in the early 1990s, a prominent media entrepreneur described it as a “sit up” rather than a “lean back” medium. What she meant was that it was quite different from TV, which encouraged passive consumption by a species of human known universally as the couch potato. The internet, some of us fondly imagined, would be different; it would encourage/enable people to become creative generators of their own content.
Spool forward a couple of decades and we are sadder and wiser. On any given weekday evening in many parts of the world, more than half of the data traffic on the internet is accounted for by video streaming to couch potatoes worldwide. (Except that many of them may not be sitting on couches, but watching on their smartphones in a variety of locations and postures.) The internet has turned into billion-channel TV.
That explains, for example, why Netflix came from nowhere to be such a dominant company. But although it’s a huge player in the video world, Netflix may not be the biggest. That role falls to something that is rarely mentioned in polite company, namely pornography.
Estimating how much money the online porn industry makes is difficult, not least because of definitional problems. What counts as “adult content”, for example? And most of the dominant companies are privately held. Current revenue estimates for the US range from $9bn to $97bn a year. The latter figure looks excessive, but a conservative estimate is $15bn. That makes it bigger than not only Netflix ($11.7bn) but also Hollywood as a whole ($11.1bn) and Viacom ($13.3bn). In other words, online porn is huge.
This has been an open secret in the technology industry for aeons. Many years ago, I was asked by a film producer to provide an outline for a television series that would explain the internet to the average viewer. I suggested that the first episode should be filmed in the server farm of a major online porn provider, to make the point that smut entrepreneurs have always been early adopters of the latest communications technology. When I said this to the producer and his colleagues, ice formed on their upper slopes and I never heard from them again. But the point still stands: the porn industry remains a masterful exploiter of digital technology.
The biggest sites have names such as YouPorn or Pornhub and are unabashed about what they provide. But in fact most of them seem to be owned by a holding company called MindGeek, whose website is a masterpiece of assured blandness. It tells us that it has more than 1,000 employees and six offices worldwide, providing services that include search-engine marketing, web hosting, advertising and “media content delivery”. All of which is doubtless true, but nowhere on the site is there any reference to what “content” is “delivered” or hosted on any of its properties.
In reality, MindGeek companies are brilliant exponents of the user-surveillance technology invented by Google and now also practised by Facebook – but with a critical difference. Google and Facebook employ the technology to build user profiles that their real customers – advertisers – pay for. In contrast, the porn companies see their viewers as potential customers: they closely monitor their consumption of “free” porn to infer what kinds of content they will be prepared to pay for. And then they specify and commission “premium” videos based on what they have learned from this surveillance.
So, in a way, the porn industry has transformed itself into a centre of excellence in data analytics. In that sense, it’s a less dishonest industry – or at any rate one that is much more transparent than Google or Facebook in terms of revealing what kinds of data it collects. Pornhub’s “review of the year”, for example, makes riveting reading. It tells you more than you ever need to know about the infinite variety of human interests. The site had 33.5bn visits in 2018. Stormy Daniels was the most searched-for performer – so Donald Trump has been good for her business.
The US continues to be the country with the highest daily traffic, followed by the UK, India, Japan, Canada, France and Germany. The average visit duration was 10 minutes and 13 seconds. The most popular day for watching porn is Sunday; the least popular is Friday. And “lesbian” is still the most searched-for category (especially with female visitors), but “Japanese” is now second (possibly because of growth in Asian countries?) Many of the other searched-for categories and genres were unknown to this columnist, who clearly has lived a sheltered life. And so on.
What does it all mean? It’s difficult to say, but for me the main takeaway is a simple question: if the porn industry is as huge as it is, doesn’t that tell us something about human nature? In the end, this is not about technology but about us. Now there’s an uncomfortable thought for 2019. Happy New Year.
What I’m reading
Comedy by numbers
In his blogpost Tom Lehrer at 90, mathematician Ken Regan celebrates, arguably the funniest mathematician ever.
Tales from Silicon Valley
Frank reflections on the Marginal Revolution blog about what it’s like to work at the major US tech companies, by an engineer who has been around that particular circuit.
Facebook’s true value
In a study published in the journal Plos One, a team of economists have tried to estimate the value of Facebook by paying people not to use it. They found that it’s worth about $1,000 a year. Aspiring regulators, please take note.
