The ancient joke was, of course, that no one needs more than three minutes of a porn movie. Porn has never been noted for narrative or characterization, and the full-length movie really is only a series of moist couplings, bondage configurations or whatever. On the consumer level, tube sites - offering free, 60- to 90-second erotic clips for every preference - seem like the ideal online delivery system. They are quick, and, if you have the right links, they are free.
At the word "free," the fertilizer hits the fan, so much so that the February 2008 issue of AVN Online was almost entirely devoted to the pros and cons of tube sites. Optimists see sites like XTube.com or PornoTube.com as nine-day wonders that will either lose their novelty and die or at least be seen as no more dangerous than teasers or trailers, increasing traffic to pay sites. The pessimists, on the other hand, view tube sites as a dire nemesis, a rapidly encroaching swamp of copyright theft, legal confusion, lost income and a challenge to the DMCA safe-harbor legal provisions that could bring the wrath of government down on the entire industry.
The balanced view from the center was voiced by Jack Avalanche, CEO of CherryPimps.com. He felt that, initially, tube delivery would be bad for business. But he said the challenge the tube sites pose and the increased traffic they generate would benefit suppliers and consumers in the long run by helping "increase the quality and quantity of new product." His middle-of-the-road view is that tube sites are nothing more than another techno-innovation to which the business will have to adapt, either by hastening the tubes' natural demise or finding ways to capitalize on the hits they generate.
On the Internet, however, it is unwise to ignore the possibility that a truly unexpected phenomenon might suddenly materialize and catch everyone with their pants down. A great example of this is Craig's List and how the newspaper industry never saw it coming and suffered accordingly. Founded in 1995 by Craig Newmark, Craig's List is an almost totally free classified advertising site where anyone can sell just about anything, from pets to apartments - or themselves, if they are so minded - simply by posting an ad. It operates with a staff of 24 people, and its only sources of revenue are charitable donations and charging for job ads in select major cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and broker apartment listings in New York City.
Yet this operation that initially made no business sense now averages more than 9 billion page views per month. It has made classified advertising sections in printed newspapers - once a prepaid cash cow - increasingly obsolete. In the process, it gutted alternative weeklies and many small-town newspapers and even hurt august publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post.
But how does this relate to the adult entertainment industry? Nothing so drastic is detectable on the porn world's horizon, but we do live in an anarchy-prone Internet world where groups or individuals quite possibly will do something because it's possible and work out the business model later. We have blogging sex workers gathering cult followings and book deals, and we have YouTube, Wikipedia and Google filling previously unimagined functions at no cost to the user or consumer. We have the growth of alt-porn with a whole new look and approach to time-honored raunch and a consumer whose only interest is to get off for the lowest possible outlay.
Who's to say that some new twist on existing or yet-to-be unveiled technology could not make possible a new generation of cyberpunk erotica or adapted delivery systems -especially in the gray area between art and commerce - that will catch the audience's imagination and make even more inroads into traditional online marketing? Maybe this fantsasy won't materialize, but I'm betting something will. It will take 360-degree vision to spot early warnings of the next radical trend or revolutionary system.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.Blogspot.com.
This article originally appeared in the April 2008 edition of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe to AVN Online, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscriptions/ .
