CYBERSPACE—As if there isn’t already a global glut of real porn, now there is the incredible phenomenon of fake YouTube porn and the hundreds of million of views that it attracts … per video!
Frankly, we were unaware until today that this was happening, but a Gizmodo post has opened our eyes to it, and now we may never be able to sleep again. These are videos whose only apparent purpose is to get people to click on them—and click they are.
“Just scroll through YouTube's most viewed ever chart, and you'll see the growing list of masturbatory deception. From the thumbnail, it looks like porn. Click it, and you get anti-porn,” wrote Sam Biddle for Gizmodo.
The only downside of course is that the video isn’t really porn. “It explains the tens of thousands of dislikes from confused, disgruntled porn-seekers around the world, who for whatever reason think YouTube is the best place to catch a glimpse of coitus and/or a breast,” added Biddle, who includes a half dozen or so examples plucked from YouTube.
Here’s one that garnered 174,000,000+ views:
“What it looks like: A doctor who is probably soon going to lose his medical license sticking some sort of instrument into a vagina.
“What it is: A long, boring informercial for fertility medicine.
“Sample disappointed comment: ‘pause at 0:54 and you can still beat off’”
Despite the negative reactions, anything that garners that many views is a marketing success on a scale unknown before the internet came along. That they are riding on the popularity of porn to grab those eyeballs is something that no one in this industry can complain about, as it underscores the fact that sex is simply irresistible.
But the massive numbers of clicks make us wonder whether there might not be some additional revenue that could be derived from this shameful deception. It’s not nice to tease people in this way and then leave them high and dry; why not siphon some of that traffic off to a place where it can be fulfilled, so to speak? That way, everyone wins.
Just a thought.
Photo: A sample fake porn video, courtesy of Gizmodo.
