Originally Posted by jayeff

Someone posted these stats here from another site (XBiz if I recall) a couple of weeks ago and I noted at the time that according to them, online porn has captured only 5% of the total porn market. Taken at face value, I thought that was a very low figure given that it is almost 10 years since online porn moved off BBS etc onto the "mainstream" Internet.

Online porn suffers several practical limitations. Although the 'Net itself has a global reach, payment processors have closed off a lot of the potential markets to "normal" business. Even for surfers with broadband access (which less than 50% have), the 'Net has a long way to go before it is an ideal medium for viewing anything but static content.

Then there is the relationship between online porn and its potential customers. We ourselves talk as if porn is viewed mainly so that the surfer can "rub one out". If we have got it right, is it surprising that relatively few people are willing to pay $20, $40 or more every month for it to fill that very limited role. Only magazines are similarly limited in what they can do to sustain a sexual fantasy and each $5-$10 issue reaches on average 5+ readers. Clubs, cable, video, all offer social possibilities that online porn cannot. Clubs, escorts and (some) 'phone services offer interactivity which online porn cannot approach. Accessibility without embarassment is one of the few clear advantages we have to offer.

And inevitably you also have to look at our own practises. By 2000, supply and demand were closely enough balanced that if we had followed the pattern of other developing markets, we should have begun adopting a longer term view towards our customers. Instead, the vast majority of sites still promote an over-priced, under-specified product and use all kinds of "unfriendly" sales techniques to maximize their income.

Our problem is that a lot of Internet traffic is controlled by people who do nothing but control traffic. Whether we are talking about the relatively small number of people who control lots of traffic or the thousands who control small amounts but are significant in total, a site operator who wants a large customer base (quickly), has to compete directly for traffic by being willing to pay the market rate for it. It is irrelevant whether he pays a search engine, a traffic broker, affiliates, or some combination or even if he runs his own traffic gathering operation: that reality translates into costs which provide customers with nothing except high subscription rates and all the tricks that they hate.

A few dozen sites have proved that it is possible to be customer oriented yet still be successful on a large scale, but that approach needs patience which most don't have and except for sites which are already well-established, it is arguably irrelevant these days to all but one-man operations with modest ambitions or those who have low-cost offline channels for promoting their online product.

I'm doubtful how much free porn has to answer for. It's something which is easy to blame, but it is a very cheap and effective way to attract traffic and although I'm sure it does cost us some sales, I doubt it ultimately deters many who are interested enough in porn to pay for it month after month. I'm sure that the overall cost of less certain ways to generate traffic would be higher, not least because they would concentrate traffic into fewer hands.

I don't see the traffic-cost situation and the issues associated with it changing much, since they are consequences of the nature of the Internet. For online porn to really come into its own, we need technology that will allow us to deliver a product with broader entertainment appeal and that better justifies our prices: faster downloads of high quality movies and live (interactive) content. And ideally we need that content to be easily viewable on regular TVs rather than restricting most surfers to their PCs.