Even today, in 2019, pornography is often a delicate subject for public discussions while in many places on earth it’s downright taboo. Cultural perception aside, the truth is that porn is one of the major powerhouses of technological progress. Many technological features and innovations that have become commonplace were in fact brought to us by the adult entertainment industry, and there is nothing surprising about that. Pornography occupies a big share of online activity, with traffic to the largest adult websites amounting to hundreds of millions of visits.
Chart from Statista.com; see the full article here.
First of all, you should be grateful to adult websites for the fast and smooth internet connection we have today. Since the advent of the World Wide Web era, consumers of adult content have felt the need for a speedy internet connection. These needs led to the development of ADSL technology.
The adult industry didn’t “invent” this technology, but their user base can be easily seen as early adopters who to a certain degree are the reason we now have Amazon and YouTube (and Pornhub). For instance, back in the 1990s, Penthouse pushed things along online by offering fast (for the time) modems to all of its subscribers.
Online Payments
In October of 2000, The New York Times Magazine published a report stating that of all the internet users about 20 percent employed their connection to visit adult websites. On average, each user paid around $10 for adult content and online sexual entertainment (per movie or paid chat).
These websites became the pioneers of e-commerce and payment security systems (the first was Electronic Systems Card), thereby paving the way for PayPal, eBay and Amazon. According to Forrester Research in 1999, users spent about $1.3 billion on online porn. This accounted for about 8 percent of the total online commerce that year. It looks like not that much, but it was more than people spent on books and flights. At that time, porn was the leading online industry.
Cable TV
Pornography has helped establish cable television as a consumer standard. Manhattan Public Access Cable had only 80,000 subscribers in 1976. That’s until George Urban launched The Ugly George Hour of Truth, Sex and Violence—a show in which Urban walked city streets, stopped random girls and persuaded them to strip on air. After 13 episodes, the number of subscribers on the channel exceeded 100K, and by the end of the second season went over 300,000. (For more, check out “New York Post Revisits Golden Age of Public Access Porn TV.”)
Home Video
In the 1980s, video recorders were gaining popularity. Eventually, two formats went to war over a consumer market: Betamax and VHS. Betamax was superior to VHS in terms of image and sound quality. On top of that, Betamax recorders also had a superior built quality. At that time, 50 percent of the videotapes sold in the United States were porn. Betamax refused to support such content. Guess who won?
The recent format war was between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Blu-ray was coined by Sony and later supported by Hitachi, LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung and Philips. Toshiba came up with HD DVDs, which were supported by NEC, Sanyo and Microsoft. It went for a long time until the porn industry decided it would only support Blu-ray—and that was it.
Private Chat Rooms, File Sharing, Etc.
All streamers on YouTube, Twitch and other websites also owe some gratitude to the adult industry. Private chat rooms, direct file sharing services, webcam chats and various social online platforms were born out of lust for sexual entertainment. In the early 1990s, adult websites were the only place where one could chat with a person in real time.
Among other online innovations, porn producers have brought advertising to the internet along with a variety of ways to monetize content: affiliate marketing, popunders, paid subscriptions, paywalls to disable ads on the website, and much more. Speaking of content, porn companies have always waged a fierce battle with pirates at any level—from torrents to disk sharing. And this, in turn, influenced the development of laws in the field of intellectual property and copyright.
Even cinematography, in general, was partly influenced by porn. In 1896, the longest movie ran for seven minutes. It was a pornographic short film called “Le Coucher de la Mariée.” Before that, all the films were only two minutes long at most. Such interrelationships throughout history are vast.
What’s more interesting is the impact that the porn industry will have on robotics and virtual reality technology in the near future. Robo tech is already starting to develop at a stunning pace—all thanks to the demand for sex robots.
What’s the Status?
Being on the crest of progress in the 1990s, porn sites might seem to lose their positions today. PornHub 2018 numbers are very impressive, though.
However, there are reasons for the porn industry to stay optimistic. Many have high hopes that virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) will give impetus to the development of the industry. Also, who knows, maybe we will soon see a “Pornflix” subscription service with Bandersnatch-like content. As for now, the issues still remain piracy, society’s negative attitude about porn—ridiculous for the 21st century—and access to CDN infrastructure.
Dmitrii Borodin is the chief executive officer and founder of GRIN tech. GRIN tech is a full-cycle digital agency delivering design, development (mobile and web) and marketing services along with fully managed business and media outreach solutions for businesses, startups and creators.
