CALL PAT ROBERTSON PRONTO! WE GOTS A CRISIS!
http://www.hollywoodwiretap.com/?mod...=story&id=2015
The biggest porn stars in the world are using NewsCorp's MySpace.com to promote themseleves, often to kids.
Much like enterprising bands that used MySpace to market themselves, dozens of the biggest XXX starlets are now using the site for the same reason. These include Jenna Jameson, Tera Patrick and Nikki Benz. Even porn industry trade publication Adult Video News has a page. Many, like Patrick's, have links to the stars' official sites offering explicit imagery, videos and sex toys. All are wildly popular with the kids who are MySpace's mainstay.
For example, The average MySpace user has 68 friends. Jameson has 406,571. Patrick has 56,688.
One 18-year-old high school girl from Kentucky who calls herself "Pornstar" writes today on Jameson's page:
"...you have no fucking clue how much i want to be a pornstar when i graduate.. ive only got 4 more days!! then i begin trying to start my career as a pornstar."
All of this poses myriad problems for MySpace and corporate overlord NewsCorp, which paid $580 million for the site recently. One quarter of the site's 75 million users are ages 13-17. Obviously parents, already concerned about the site's alleged pedophiles, won't be happy with this newest twist.
Among the other questions is how advertisers will react. While it's pulling $156 million in ad revenue yearly, MySpace has struggled to attract name brand revenue. Its porn star problems are a case in point why. Weight Watchers was featured at the top of Patrick's page. T Mobile was prominent on Jameson's. Neither probably wants to be associated with XXX content.
And then there's the problem of sorting such content from among the millions of pages on MySpace. The Wall Street Journal reports today on Photobucket, one company actively developing new methods of filtering for MySpace. But that's only so effective.
Writes The Journal's Julia Angwin:
...even though the basic elements of these Web businesses are computerized, no one has worked out an effective technology fix for the porn problem. Some scanning software has a hard time distinguishing between pictures of nudes and apple pie, and certainly can't make the subtle judgment calls required of Photobucket's human censors. Naked breasts partly obscured with tape? OK! X-ray-like images of sexual acts? Delete!