Tech Brew Ride Home - (IHP) The History Of Internet Porn

Episode Date: May 27, 2023

(Originally published 01/04/2015) So, I ran across this quote from Star Trek television producer Rick Berman. He said, “Without porn and Star Trek, there would be no Internet.” That’s a notion that I have to say really kind of rang true to me, in a tonge and cheek sort of way. I mean, it’s something you hear all the time. The idea that pornography leads the way with any new technological innovation. That Porn is some x-large percentage of the overall internet Do you ever wonder how much of the internet is actually porn? If it’s such a large amount then wouldn’t it be worth investigating how porn has shaped the web and the internet generally? That’s sort of the thinking that led me to begin thinking about this episode. Bibliography:  The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google  Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age  EroticaBiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet  The Unsexpected Story  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat  https://tidbits.com/article/5833  http://internetlaw.uslegal.com/pornography/  http://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm  http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm  http://www.itworld.com/article/2729780/enterprise-software/10-fascinating-facts-about-internet-porn.html  http://blog.cytalk.com/2010/01/web-porn-revenue/  http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/21/david-cameron-online-porn-will-be-blocked-by-default-3891620/  http://nymag.com/news/features/70985/  http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/10471/siri-piracy-pay-for-your-porn/  http://www.thewrap.com/media/article/internet-piracy-killing-porns-profits-1394/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Internet History Podcast. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Happy 2015, everybody.

Finally, after many months, a proper chapter episode is in store for today. This is Chapter 6 entitled A History of Internet Porn. So, the idea for this chapter began when I ran across this quote from Star Trek television producer Rick Berman. He said, quote, without porn and Star Trek, there would be no internet, end quote. Honestly, as a child of the late 80s and early 90s, that's a notion that I have to say really kind of rang true to me, in a tongue and cheek sort of way, I guess. I mean, it's something you hear all the time. The idea that pornography often leads the way with any new technological innovation, that porn is some, X large percentage of the overall internet.

Do you ever wonder how much of the internet actually is porn? How much of this idea we have that porn is sort of in the background of everything we do on the internet, how much of that is true? If it's such a large amount, then wouldn't it be worth investigating how exactly porn has shaped the web and the internet generally? That's sort of the thinking that led me to begin thinking. about this chapter. To be honest with you, when I began researching this topic, I was not entirely sure that there would be enough there to write a whole chapter on. I was also surprised,

although I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be surprised, to find that no one else had really ever done a comprehensive history of internet pornography as an industry. I guess maybe I'm not surprised, but I don't know. Anyway, this is taken a bit long. than I thought because it does turn out that the data and other materials were sort of hard to come by. It seems like this is not something that people consider a legitimate topic for business or industry history. And then, of course, the pornography industry itself is more than a little shy when it comes to publicity concerning their business practices. But I did find the overall details I uncovered to be fascinating as a sort of alternative lens. with which to study the overall development of the internet and the web.

So a bit of a disclaimer here, of course. In this episode, I tried very hard not to be salacious or vulgar, but, well, we're talking about pornography and the business of sex. So the very topic itself might be an SFW, and it's probably definitely not safe for younger ears. So this is your fair warning. Anywho, it's commonly accepted that with any new medium or technological advance, sex and pornographic materials can often be the catalyst that drives early adoption of these technologies.

Among the first things produced after the invention of the printing press were, of course, Bibles, but alongside the Bibles were ribald and bawdy poetry and short stories. When photography was developed in the 18th century, photographic commerce was mostly about selling people portraits of themselves or their loved ones, at least initially. But what really kicked off an industry for photographs or a market for photographs was the marketing of pictures of other people in the nude. These pictures were largely marketed as artistic model studies for aspiring artists, but that does little to explain why they sold in the tens of millions. The Crimean War in the 1850s and the American Civil War in the 1860s really lit a fuse under this industry.

Soldiers on the front lines of these wars carried pictures of their sweethearts in their pockets, of course, but also carried pictures of these, quote, model studies. Pornography was absolutely a part of the birth of cinema. Remember, early cinema was displayed and exhibited as a sort of carnival side show attraction. People were wowed by little more than images of trains coming towards them. So, naturally, films of a more risque variety tended to sell more tickets. The first adult film was probably the seven-minute Le Coucher de la Marie in 1896, featuring a bathroom strip tease.

But even the great George Melier's was not above producing a film of his wife, undressing and bathing in the 1897 film, Apere Le Ball. The development of radio and television, conversely, were largely immune to pornography due to their being, broadcast over public airwaves and thus subject to government censorship. But the widespread practice of staging private stag film parties, utilizing 8-millimeter projectors and the like, went a long way toward developing the fraternity culture on American colleges, as well as the fraternal order culture, those male-centric groups like the Elks

and the Rotary Club. The great explosion of porno theaters in the late 1960s and early 1970s was partially in response to the dissolution of the classic Hollywood studio model, as well as the divestment by those major Hollywood studios of their theater chain divisions, as well as increased competition from television. Quite simply, showing pornoes in the late 60s and 70s allowed struggling theaters to, to stay in business. The simultaneous rise of the peep show booths in the 1970s would greatly influence a completely separate new medium, though. When the video game industry was birthed by Pong and Atari in the 1970s, the video arcade was developed as well and was clearly modeled on the old penny arcades that went back

to the 19th century and earlier. But the technology developed by the peep booths was largely co-opted by the video arcades to create the video game terminals that did so much to part teenagers from their quarters in the 1980s. The most famous example of porn leading the way for technological adoption came in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the advent of the VCR. Home video allowed people to consume pornography in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, almost for the first time. It's a well-known urban legend that the reason the inferior VHS technology won out in the marketplace over the supposedly superior Betamax standard was because VHS allowed more storage space on a single cassette. legend holds that pornography producers could fit more video on VHS and thus VHS won out in the market.

But several accounts I read when researching this piece are emphatic that this whole legend is actually false and that, in fact, there was just as much porn produced for Betamax as there was for VHS. VHS simply had a better marketing campaign. Of course, that doesn't stop the urban legend from persistent. developers of new technologies are always caution not to ignore the porn audience, lest they suffer the same fate as Betamax. Given the importance and impact on our society that computing has had, it's surprising then to realize that pornography was basically non-existent on computers until relatively recently.

Porn basically played no role in the development of computing. There are very simple reasons for this. For one thing, for a long, long time, computers were just text. They couldn't handle pictures at all. And while I'm sure if you dug around, some risque things were certainly sent between early researchers and scientists on the ARPANET, on the early internet, there simply wasn't a way to distribute or consume pornography until almost the birth of the World Wide Web.

And yet we know that from the very beginning of the internet era, the early 1990s certainly, pornography was synonymous with the internet, at least in the public's imagination. The net and the web have been infamously infested with porn for as long as we can remember. To what extent this has been true we'll soon see, but there is no denying that porn played a major role in the popularization of the web. Several concurrent technological developments in the late 1980s made this possible. First, VGA graphics made it possible for images, and specifically digital photographic images, to be rendered on the average personal computer screen for the first time. Second, hard drives made possible the storage of personal files and programs on a user's personal computer. Up until that time, it wasn't like the average computer user could go to Radio Shack and buy a couple of discs of adult content.

The notable case of the video game Leisure Suit Larry accepted, of course. Third, and finally, once computers were networked together in a meaningful way, it was then possible to distribute or trade pornographic materials, either as commerce or peer-to-peer. So, with the arrival of the web, for the first time, pornography could disseminate outside the retail or public realm. For our purposes, the thing that makes pornography interesting as we enter the internet era is that it became easily digitizable content. In the days of 300 or even 1,200 bod modems, you couldn't distribute music or video. The files were simply too big, but you could distribute music. pictures, assuming you were patient, of course. But also, porn was digitizable content people were very interested in pursuing. And the interest in porn was so enthusiastic, in fact, that

many were willing to pay for it. And so even before the birth of the web, digital pornography was beginning to make its way onto people's computers. The Usenet News Group protocol was initially set up in the early 1980s as a text-only bulletin board system. But after the introduction of 8-bit values in the ASCII text, Usenet could suddenly be used to upload and distribute binary files. The intention was to distribute software, of course, but pornographic images soon followed. Whereas today, whisper it quietly, Usenet is still a major forum for pirating digital movies and the like. In the era of 1,200 bod-modemes, image files were the most popular materials people had the paper, to upload or download. By August 1996, by one measure, five of the ten most popular news groups

on Usenet were adult-oriented, and one, alt.sex, reportedly served half a million users every day. In a Time magazine cover story on cyber porn in 1995, the writer Philip Elmer DeWitt reported that 83.5% of the images on Usenet were pornographic in nature. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the bulletin board systems, or BBSs, took off as well. The vast majority of BBSs were small, local, private affairs. You dialed into one guy's computer and browsed around to see what games, files, and programs he had to share with you. But SISOPS soon found the most popular sorts of files people were looking for were porn files. Serendipitously, this happened to coincide with the appearance of the first digital scanners.

Sysops quickly put two and two together and realized that if they simply scanned old collections of, say, Playboy or Penthouse, they could quite quickly build up a library of images that people would clamor for. More to the point, as the 80s turned into the 90s, enterprising SISOps started to charge for access to their systems. Entire software packages were developed that created nationwide networks of BBSs, sort of an ad hoc parallel internet. And the best way these professional BBS systems knew to encourage people to pay for a subscription was corn. For example, a BBS called Event Horizons was grossing more than $3.2 million a year by 1993.

Jim Maxi, who ran Event Horizons, employed 10 people simply to scan photographs, format them, and put them online for download. A sysop named Bob Mahoney built his exec PC BBS into a $2 million a year business by 1993, with more than 30,000 subscribers worldwide, said the Exec PC CEO, quote, we really didn't advertise the adult materials. The word just got around pretty quickly. One of our main claims to fame was that we had, to my knowledge, the largest collection of adult materials anywhere, end quote.

The bulletin boards didn't have to do all the work themselves, however, in an effort to build their libraries, BBS's set up compensation schemes. So, for example, you would be granted permission to download, say, four bytes for every one byte you uploaded. And thus, in echoes of what we'll later talk about with Napster and the Tube sites, BBS users in the early 90s were more than happy to upload their own collections to share and share alike. suddenly a user could dial into a BBS and have access to more porn than had ever been available in any one place before. It was a cornucopia of pornography, the likes of which the world had never seen, because it was essentially curating all the available porn in existence and putting it online.

Spananza couldn't help but draw the attention of entities like Playboy, who in 1993, sent reverberations around the entire BBS industry by winning a $500,000 copyright infringement suit against Event Horizons. The BBS agreed to self-police its files and take down any infringing content. As one of the Event Horizon owners described it, quote, essentially what it boiled down to was if the photos showed women that were absolutely so gorgeous and that the photographer was so beautiful, we just took it off." End quote. Sound familiar? Not to hammer you over the head with it, but this was likely the first case, or at least one of the first cases,

of a major media corporation going after digital proprietors and their digital users for violating digital copyright, and then forcing the digital proprietors to attempt to police their own members, all in the name of protecting copyrighted content. And this is long before Napster, long before YouTube even, and even before the web could display images, in fact. So it was porn, not top 40 music tracks, that got there first and first riled the cages of the copyright monopoly. And consider this, by the late 1980s, BBS operators had figured out how to make money selling content digitally. To this day, certain content industries continue to struggle to make content pay on the internet. But here we can see that from

the very birth of the online era, porn was a form of digital content people were perfectly willing to fork over their credit card numbers for. Porn has always been a special sort of premium content. If you're old enough to remember video stores and their adult rooms in the back, behind the curtain, then you'll remember that while mainstream videos only went for a couple of bucks to rent and maybe 20 or 30 bucks to purchase, adult videos could rent for $10 and retail for hundreds of dollars in this era. Porn, again, is content people will knock down your door to pay for. And so at the height of the BBS industry,

there were 45,000 BBSs in the United States, and though most were free hobbyist concerns, those that charged subscriptions were generating about $100 million a year in revenue in an era when almost nobody was online. And they were able to do this thanks to porn. So this would be examples one and two of porn leading the way towards the Internet.

But of course, it wasn't just about users trading dirty pictures. It was also about users trading dirty talk with one another. Throughout the 1980s, the actual message boards on the BBS systems were filled with adult-oriented forums, where users could have phone sex with one another without the phone. Internet relay chat, IRC, was actually developed on a Finnish BBS in 1998 to replace earlier real-time BBS chat clients. IRC was credited with, among other things, helping defeat the Soviet coup attempt

against Yelsohn in 1991, but it was also, and almost immediately, used by people around the world to type dirty to one another. And of course, as we discussed at length in the episode concerning the birth of AOL, in its early days, millions of AOL users paid hourly fees

just for the privilege of logging on to AOL's infamous chat rooms to chat dirty. AOL consciously patterned its chat systems on BBS examples. And so innovations like anonymous handles and the ability to trade pictures or files between users were included in the AOL system. This allowed the habits of Dirty Chat to flower even on the otherwise conservative AOL network. So here we have the table perfectly set for the emergence of the World Wide Web. The anonymous BBS users have digitized basically the entire world's library of photographed pornography.

The BBSs and the AOL and CompuServe chat rooms have trained users how to seek each other out and chat away. And so when Mark Andreessen had his big idea that the web should have pictures, as well as a user-friendly web browser to view them in, it was perhaps inevitable that the web would be the first computing technology to gain mainstream adoption with pornography as a major component of its value proposition. Perhaps the web took off in ways that earlier internet technologies didn't, in part because it was the perfect platform for porn. Many of the first porn websites were simply BBS operators that moved their collections of pictures online. On the early web, people were generally wary of sites that asked you to register or log in, like the early web. porn sites did. So we can give credit to porn sites for being some of the first websites to get people comfortable with the idea of having a membership with a login and password on an online

website. But the early web pornographers knew that they couldn't continue simply selling scanned photographs from offline porn magazines, especially now that the photos themselves were in the open and not archived it behind a zip file. So the first online porn entrepreneurs began producing their own content, encouraged by the low costs of production, and the economies of scale that web distribution afforded them. All you really needed to do was get some pictures of naked people, throw up some rudimentary HTML, and bingo, you had something to sell.

They were aided, of course, as the entire porn industry was in the 1990s by the fall of the Berlin Wall. Suddenly, a flood of new porn content was very cheaply available and in large quantities from producers in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Entire picture libraries of young Czech and Hungarian models could be purchased on CD-ROMs for a few hundred dollars a pop, and could then be uploaded for consumption by the newly digital Americans who were suddenly willing to pay $20 to $30 or even more per month for access. Enticing people to pay for this porn was not a problem, as we've seen, but enabling them to pay was the real issue. As we'll see in coming chapters,

people simply did not trust their credit card numbers to the web for a very long time. It was really not until as late as 1998, maybe even 1999, if we're being realistic, that online e-commerce became mainstream. Thus, early porn entrepreneurs had to call on previous experience from completely different industries in order to part people from their money. BBSs had relied on paper checks or simply taking credit card numbers by phone in order to charge their subscribers. And so many early porn sites replicated these methods.

But other early porn sites went in another direction. They chose to modify the 1-900 phone sex systems already in heavy use in this period to provide users with temporary access for a fixed fee. For example, the Red Light District, Fund.NL, was a Dutch porn site founded in 1994 by David Vandeport, Vanderpul's system required customers to fill out an online form with everything but the credit card number and expiration date. The customer would then call an interactive voice response phone number, provide the credit card details, and then receive a token that was accepted for admission to the website. One of the first.com startups was actually a company called Cybercash,

which produced a browser plugin that allowed for, secure commerce connections. It was an early attempt at facilitating e-commerce. Cybercash was co-founded by Dan Lynch, one of the developers of the TCPIP protocol itself, which of course the internet is based on. Before e-commerce entered the mainstream in earnest, a large portion of Cybercash's earliest clientele operated porn sites. It was the only way that these porn sites could take payment by credit card. But that didn't last forever because the porn purveyors knew that porn is, I'm going to use the first of many euphemisms here, shall we say often an impulse purchase. So the porn sites were eager to take the friction out of these cumbersome payment arrangements. Cybercash's method of

requiring users to download a plug-in before payment was probably no less honorous than calling a 1-900 number. Thus, when the SSL standard came out for Netscape, the porn sites were among the first to eagerly use it for credit card transactions. At the time, there simply weren't many other sites doing commerce on the web at this point. But even SSL would not be a panacea for the porn sites, because porn has a larger problem that is sort of unique to its industry. This problem would force porn sites to innovate even further, and in doing so, they would usher in the modern e-commerce technologies that we know today. Porn sites have an unusually large number of fraud and chargeback transactions.

It's just a cost of doing business for them. To boil it down, basically, it's incredibly common for a purchaser of porn to say, upon discovery by their spouse, I suppose, I don't have any idea where that charge came from, and then dispute the charge with the credit card company. In some cases, porn sites can see as many as 10 to 20% of their charges reversed at any given time. And credit card companies are thus wary of doing business with sites that have such a large percentage of reverse charges. American Express stopped doing business with porn sites entirely in the late.

late 1990s for this very reason. Thus, an entire industry of third-party merchant services rose up to allow porn sites to piggyback on their merchant accounts in an attempt to pull the chargeback risk. Sites like I-Bill, C-C-Bill, and others became the billing middlemen, actually stepping in and handling the charges for porn sites before distributing the proceeds, less a considerable 12 to 20% fee, of course. So this practice of third-party financial intermediaries stepping in to facilitate transactions

and get around the Byzantine credit card merchant account system did not directly lead to the modern payment systems like PayPal or Stripe that we now know, but I would suggest that they provided the earliest model for doing so. And again, they did so in the early to me. mid-1990s. Additionally, the early porn sites, by necessity, had to develop a lot of the modern fraud-scrubbing techniques that almost all e-commerce systems now use. Practices such as flagging charges that come from free email accounts like Yahoo or Hotmail,

or matching the location of the credit card's address to the user's IP address to avoid charges from stolen credit card numbers overseas. The pornographers had to make these large innovations largely on their own because mainstream companies like those in the credit card industry tended to keep the porn sites at arm's length. This stigma that surrounds the pornography business was the impetus for most of the innovations that the pornographers produced in the areas of e-commerce and security.

For example, it's now a common practice for any website or app to register a new, user by making that new user go through a double opt-in process. You know what I'm talking about, probably you sign up to an app or a new website. You give them your email address and pick a password. But then the site or the app sends you an email with a link that you have to click on before you have full privileges on the site or the app. This practice ensures that you're a real person and not a bot. It cuts down on spam and it ensures accurate account creation. This practice, though, was pioneered by an early

porn megacite called Cybererotica. Porn sites were early and eager adopters of email as a marketing practice, of course. Sending people free porn over email was a cost-efficient and generally very effective way to entice people to a given porn site. But as we all know, So, pornographers were not exactly restrained in their enthusiastic embrace of spam email. So as early as the mid-90s, many ISPs were banning email from domains that sent too much spam. Cybererotica knew that for all the millions of people that hadn't asked for the porn spam that they were getting in their inbox, there were millions of others who actually had. and so in an effort to protect these valid email lists,

Cybererotica began the practice of double opt-in sign-up. Now, when an ISP like AOL threatened to block their emails, Cybererotica could prove that their emails were not unsolicited. Cybererotica's founder Ron Levy said, Before I invented this system, people could pull pranks and sign other people up, end quote. Thus, it's funny to think, about, but that opt-in email link you get today, which ostensibly proves you're a real person, came about largely because early pornographers wanted to avoid being blackballed by ISP spam lists.

Ron Levy is actually an interesting character, because he gets credit within the porn industry for a lot of internet innovations. For example, according to many, the inventor of the modern affiliate program model of web marketing was levy and not amazon dot com even if amazon holds the patent on affiliate markets the first affiliate network was probably started by a ski and sports e-commerce site called sports source s2.com in 1994 affiliate networks were later adopted by early e-commerce sites like amazon and 's early competitor CD now. But Levy's version of affiliate marketing, fast cash, allowed webmasters of all size and levels of experience to create many porn sites that would feature samples of pornography

for free, all the while pointing to larger pay sites. The larger sites would pay for traffic from the smaller sites. And this form of networked marketing was born out of Neseltz. of course. As we've seen, advertising on the web did not get started until late 1994, and even when banner ads got going in earnest, mainstream sites were not about to plaster porn ads all over their pages. Of course, naked pictures attract eyeballs pretty reliably, so Levy knew that the best way to get the word out about his websites was to let a thousand flowers bloom and hope some of the pollinating winds would blow visitors back to his properties. So it is due to the

puritanical instincts of the mainstream web, that porn was largely locked out of traditional marketing platforms, and thus simply developed its own. It's doubtful that Amazon would ever admit this, but the affiliate model of signing up webmasters to produce many stores, pointing back to a larger mother store, was merely an imitation of Levy's network of tens of thousands of mini porn sites, pointing back to his porn empire. Levy was also years ahead of mainstream commerce players in another way. Early on, he could plainly see that simple banner ads did not convert very well on a straight per-click basis. Thus, he refined his methods early on, on his own.

In 1996, he developed one of the first web analytics tools, triple-X counter, to help webmasters better count unique visitors versus merely raw clicks. The insights this gave him encouraged Levy to stop paying on a cost per impression or CPM basis. The numbers simply didn't add up. It might be fine for a brand advertiser like Procter & Gamble to pay for every eyeball it got, but to a porn entrepreneur like Levy, it only made sense to pay for results. Thus, by 1997, Levy had moved first to pay-per-click and eventually to pay-per-action, thus only paying an affiliate a bounty if a user actually signed up for a site membership.

Paper-click, PPC, and paper-acquisition, PPA, would not be adopted by the mainstream advertising industry until the early 2000s, after the dot-com bust had proven banner ads didn't work, and only after Google's AdWords and AdSense program proved that this sort of advertising could be more profitable for both advertisers and publishers, if done correctly, but it's basically the standard model of advertising on the web today. Levy is also credited by the porn industry for developing modern live video feeds, as early as May of 1997. And this points to another way that porn-powered

technological advancements on the web. Obviously, video was sort of a holy grail for pornographers on the internet. But as we've seen with our discussion with Rob Glazer and our examination of real networks, providing even minimal quality streaming video was a difficult technical proposition in the age of dial-up.

Corn sites were, were eager adopters of video codecs and plugins from the likes of real networks and Microsoft's Windows media player. But again, the porn sites wanted to eliminate friction for users, and of course downloading and using plugins was not ideal. An early pioneer of video streaming was actually the Dutch porn company Red Light District again, mentioned previously, which developed a simple compressed video streaming system of its own as early as 1994. Around that same time, porn entrepreneur Danny Ash, of Danny's hard drive fame, developed her own video product called Danny Vision.

Other industry homegrown solutions eventually allowed heavily compressed but easily downloadable porn videos to play directly on web pages, no plugins required. Even on 28K modems, these videos allowed users to start and stop at their convenience, with the ability to skip back and forth in the playable timeline. And the porn industry produced this technology in the mid-90s again. It wouldn't be until the year 2000 or so that Hollywood even began its own attempts to market videos via web delivery. By that time, tens of thousands of full-length adult titles were already, available on the web.

Another area where porn sites were emphatically ahead of the technology curve was in the realm of video conferencing. As mentioned previously, a lot of the early web pornographers came from the phone sex industry, where the business model entailed connecting a user to a performer who would talk dirty by the minute. Clearly, this same business model could translate quite easily to the web if you could use live performers in front of webcams. And so, once the first consumer-grade webcams became available, individual sex workers

began experimenting with personal performance videos, eventually creating a subscription or pay-by-minute model that mimicked the phone sex model. Another early innovator in this space was not exactly a pornographer, but a individual named Jennifer Ringley of the famous Jenny Cam, who eventually charged people to watch her live her life online. The pornographers took what Ringley did a step further, thus leading to the proliferation of camsites, where cam girls and boys, by the thousands,

would perform live at all hours of the day for paying viewers. Again, the porn industry tended to write its own software and tweak its own technology to make this possible. For a time in the late 90s, the CAM sites were by far the most popular niche of the online porn market, because it allowed a sort of AOL chat room on steroids. Users could talk dirty and directly interact with someone, with the added benefit of actually seeing the results of their interaction right before their own eyes. In an era where hardware companies struggled to get mainstream corporations to adopt video conferencing,

the adult industry was operating large-scale conferencing and networking operations around the world. But just looking at the companies that developed in online porn in the 90s would be taking too narrow a focus, I think. As a publishing medium, time and time again, the web has lowered the barrier to entry, lowered the costs of production, made worldwide distribution easy and instantaneous, and thus empowered individuals on an unprecedented scale to express themselves. Just as blogs and social media allow anyone to have a voice,

the web has allowed anyone to become a porn star if they want. The porn market online is just a small. much about individual performers and mom and pop websites as it is about traditional porn studios like Playboy or Vivid. Homemade pornography has been made possible by technological advances in digital video and such, but the web has allowed the distribution of homemade pornography in a way that wouldn't have been possible previously. Again, take for example Danny Ash of Danny's hard drive. She created a member's only section of her website in 1994. and within two years went from grossing 600,000 to 2.5 million a year by 1997.

And she was not alone. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of new porn producers, got their start in the industry entirely thanks to the web. Another example would be Greg Dumas, the former vice president for marketing at Hustler in the mid-1990s. when Dumas could not get Hustler the company to embrace the web, he decided to strike off on his own and founded sites like Club Love and Eye Gallery.

When Dumas sold these sites in 1999, they were generating in excess of $21 million annually. Another example of an upstart porn company that stepped into the void to satisfy the Internet's insatiable desire for porn is Pink Visual, whose president, Alison Vivas, says, quote, Our success comes from 50% of the traditional adult companies not capitalizing on what the Internet could do, and the other 50% comes from the fact that online porn startups

didn't have anything to compare their revenue to. If a startup made $100,000 a month off the bat, that was great. but to a big company like Hustler or Vivid, that doesn't seem like much. They delayed entering the internet space because it didn't seem significant. So more than almost any other part of the web, internet pornography is the story of thousands of small players, some of them eventually becoming larger players, but all of them existing in a fractured market,

rising up in creating an entirely new industry within that market. Given this explosion in pornography, we tend to go back to our original question, I guess. How big did porn really become on the net? Well, the numbers I was able to find are all over the place, frankly. So it depends on who you want to believe and, frankly, what their agenda might be. The one piece of data that I've chosen to highlight comes from the Internet Filter Review, an industry trade group that advocates pornography filtering technology in order to protect children from technology. So I don't think that they have any vested interest in inflating or deflating numbers.

In 2003, this group claimed that one-fourth of the search engine requests every day were for pornographic material. The report further claimed that in that year, 4.2 million pornography websites served access to 72 million visitors worldwide. In 2003, there were only about 700 million internet users in the world. And today, of course, there are approximately 3 billion internet users. So, if we were to extrapolate the numbers, that would mean that today there are approximately 308 million people who every day surf the web for porn online. By 2012, a different report stated that there were between 5 and 6 million porn-related websites in existence to serve these people. This represents approximately 12% of all websites, and approximately 2.5 billion of the emails sent

every day, or about 8% of the total emails sent, are supposed to be porn spam or porn-related emails. To me, given the supposed ubiquity of pornographic material, the interesting thing about the pornographic industry, as it evolved on the web, is that there really hasn't been an Amazon or a Google of porn. Not that there aren't online porn retailers or online porn search tools, But what I'm saying is that no major player has really emerged to dominate porn in the online era. It really has been a market of thousands of different players, some of them big, but most of them small. It's also notable that the traditional players from the world of offline porn, again, the Playboys or Vivid Videos, for example, are not exactly dominant online either. Online porn remains a very fragmented and segmented industry,

sort of all-long-tail, to use the Chris Anderson framing. And I think the reasons why traditional porn companies have not made the transition to the web very effectively is seemingly due to a bit of a generational divide, as well as a bit of the old innovator's dilemma, perhaps. Older pornographers of the Hefner-Flynn era were always and often publicly. dismissive of internet pornography as lower quality and lower grade than what they themselves could produce. According to Greg Dumas, during his time at Hustler, for example, quote, management thought the internet was a fad and initially were against making any investment in it.

Hustler was a publishing company, an old school publishing company, not a tech company. They were still doing paper memos. There was no email. It was a different time, end quote. It was this sort of institutional mindset that seemed to be common throughout the industry. The thinking seems to have been that home video offered by far a better experience than jittery postage stamp size webpages that you had to wait for to buffer. John Stagliano, founder of the porn studio Evil Angel, admitted that traditional porn companies did not jump on the internet bandwagon as early as they should have.

Quote, if we did, we would have made more money. But I didn't understand the technology. The internet was not a significant force for me. As a consumer of porn, until about 2003, the delivery system online was very inferior to VHS tape or a DVD. That was why I didn't think of the Internet as competition, end quote. But of course, in the classic Clay Christensen disruption model, what was clearly an inferior product got better. And when any and all the porn imaginable was available online on demand,

what did quality really matter? I would theorize that another major factor was that much as the record companies in the CD era, the DVD era of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a sort of second golden age of porn. According to adult video news, Avien, in 1997 home video generated approximately 16 billion in revenue, with porn accounting for approximately $4.2 billion of that 16 billion. When DVDs replaced VHS, of course, those numbers probably grew even larger, so I would posit that porn was making so much money around the turn of the century, the late 90s, that the industry didn't see any reason to believe that the party would or even could ever end. After all, hasn't porn always adapted with and profited from every technological innovation that's come around?

So how was the internet supposed to be any different? Well, of course, we all remember what happened to the music industry with Napster and what is now happening with the movie industry and television industry with the likes of BitTorn and Netflix. The hard lesson for all content providers seems to be that the internet might not disrupt you right away, but you can be sure it will disrupt you someday. And this has certainly proven to be the internet.

the case with pornography as we move into the 2000s. As with digital music, the key change in the beginning of this millennium was the proliferation of broadband, as well as larger computer hard drives and better screen and visual technology. Also, I think that the rise of the camsites and the flood of do-it-yourself homemade pornography trained consumers of porn to accept content produced by and for the crowd. In fact, it could be argued that before Web 2.0 and social media, before YouTube stars and Facebook accounts, it was really porn that first hooked net users on the concept of user-created content.

So it's ironic that it was a technological innovation from Silicon Valley that ultimately sideswiped Silicon Valley. The emergence of YouTube in 2005 brought this experience of freely uploading and downloading video content sharing and consuming digital video into the mainstream. Porn copycats, what are now known as tube sites like U-porn, Reb Tube, Tube, Tube Galore, and the like, quickly proliferated.

Just as YouTube build itself as a place for people to share, their personal videos online, the tube sites ostensibly were for users to upload their homemade porn. But YouTube, of course, is infamously full of professional videos, of copyrighted properties and pirated titles. And this is how it is with the tube sites as well. They are filled not only with users' homemade uploaded videos, but with every porn DVD in existence, with material freed from the password and protected firewalls of the pay porn sites. This isn't entirely a recent phenomenon, because as with the record companies, post-Napster, the porn industry had some degree of trouble with the rise of bit-torrent technology.

And as a side note, by the way, Napster was actually purchased by the European porn company private media group in 2002 for $2.43 million, before later Baxter. being sold to an MP3 company, Roxyo. But downloading a pirated porn title is one thing. The tube sites are an entirely different proposition, allowing, as they do, and this is another euphemism, instantaneous gratification, targeting an audience for whom only three or four minutes of content is even necessary to achieve, shall we say, consumer satisfaction. So it's more than a little ironic that in the last several years, the porn industry has struggled so mightily with the problem of piracy.

The irony, of course, is that online porn was born of this sort of copyright piracy, of BBS systems scanning Playboy pictures online. But the technology is now such that even more so than the Hollywood studios, the porn industry feels powerless to feel, fight back against online piracy. As Pink Visuals Vivas remembers, quote, Napster happened in 2001. There was piracy happening in 2001 as well, but people didn't do anything about it for numerous reasons. For one, the money was still flowing.

It wasn't until the money began slowing down that people started to get frustrated. And two, the adult industry is somewhat afraid of the law. They think it is somehow going to backfighting. on them." End quote. So it turns out that porn actually has in the recent years suffered from many of the same ills that have plagued their mainstream media brethren. People simply don't buy DVDs or any physical media much anymore. So that cash cow has dried up.

Video rental stores no longer even exist. Even pay-per-view TV porn is crashing, largely because the internet makes it all instantaneously available for free on the tube sites. In a way, porn is more like the record industry than one might have thought. Just as music consumers no longer want full-length albums, preferring to access just the individual songs that they want, a la carte, the idea of purchasing a full porn DVD can now be thought of as almost a historical aberration. Individual scenes are all a porn consumer is really interested in these days.

The big change to the porn market came in 2006, when the adult DVD market itself fell for the first time in history, dropping 15% on an annual basis. Evil Angels Stagliano said, quote, We didn't feel the change until the middle part of the first decade of the new millennium. So instead of making 90% of my revenue from DVD sales, Evil Angel makes 40% from that avenue, end quote. And it wasn't just DVD sales that were affected. According to the Wall Street Journal, between 2008 and 2010, revenue from Adult TV Pay-Per-View fell from $1 billion to $89 million annually. DVD sales and rentals of DVDs

dropped 22% in 2008 alone, which for that year was twice the decline that Hollywood at large saw. Vivid Video Studiohead Stephen Hirsch estimated that overall DVD sales fell 80% in the five years leading up to 2014. And it's not just the studios that are seeing the money dry up in porn. according to adult industry performers themselves, a decade ago, female actresses in porn could make about $100,000 a year on average. Now they are lucky to make half that amount. Back in the era of the bank bailouts during the financial crisis,

Penthouse founder Larry Flint and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis even went so far as to ask for a $5 billion bailout of the porn industry. That might have been a joke, but porn producer Kevin Beecham said in 2012 that, quote, when the internet started, there were maybe five guys, five major players in the adult movie space, and those guys were spending a million a week to make five million a week. Now, I hear those same guys are spending a million just to make a million. end quote. Paul Fishbein agrees that it's no joke. The founder of the industry trade magazine adult video news said, quote,

the very technology that helped bring the adult industry into the 21st century is also killing it. It's hard to sell what consumers can get for free, end quote. If 2006 represented the high watermark of the porn industry, that would be ironic for me, because the most detailed data that I was able to find about the economics of porn comes from a report released in that very year. In 2006, the report said, porn was an approximately $97 billion industry worldwide. That represented more revenue than the top technology companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, Netflix,

Earthlink, everybody, combined, were able to do. generate at that time. According to that same report, every second of every day, $3,75.64. was being spent on pornography. Every second of every day, 28,258 internet users were viewing pornography. And every second of every day, 372 internet users were typing adult search terms into search engines. One wonders how those numbers might have changed, almost a decade on now.

Ironically, the tube sites that have done so much to hobble the porn industry can hide behind a clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It's that clause that says that site owners are not responsible for everything that their users do on their services. The porn industry The porn industry charges is that the tube sites are probably the ones uploading the copyrighted content But the tube sites claim it's their members doing it And that they themselves are not liable

For this copyright infringement under the terms of the DMCA One interesting wrinkle about the whole tube site story Is that it seems likely though that some player Or group of players from within the porn industry itself might be behind the entire tube site phenomenon. According to a 2011 article by New York Magazine, a porn producing company called Brazzers actually started some of the largest tube sites. They use those early tube sites to promote their own browsers content, which of course

coexisted alongside content from other producers, uploaded by users or not. Brazzers, buoyed by the success of these tube sites, eventually sold to a German programming wizard named Fabian Tileman, who changed the name of the overall holding company to Manwen. Based out of Canada and Luxembourg, Manwin has been so successful with these tube sites and the like that it now has more than 500 employees and claims 42 million daily uniques across its network of sites, including, of course, many of the largest tube sites. And in 2011, Manwin purchased the online operations of Playboy itself. Based on what I was able to discern from the message boards of the porn industry,

manwin now basically is the colossus of the online porn industry. And the other porn players have seemed to have reached some sort of a detente with the tube sites in recent years. Whether that is because the tube sites themselves have actually succeeded in taking control of the porn industry in a sort of palace coup or because some sort of cybererotica style affiliate arrangement has been set up is unclear to me. But one thing is undeniable. Corn has gone from being a can't miss proposition, the one type of content you could guarantee

people would pay for online, to becoming the same sort of zero marginal cost proposition as every other digital good. The frustrations of the pornographers oddly echoes the complaints of their big Hollywood brethren. Listen to porn producer Scott Kaufman, quote, I can contact a tube site and tell them to take my content down, and it's their responsibility to do so. But if someone in the next hour uploads the same material to the site, then I have to call again and have the same conversation. The pirates can have one person sitting there all day, continually uploading content, and the studios are expected to police this activity. It would be more effective if the owner of the tube site was responsible for policing it. In pawn stores, for example, there is a responsibility

not to resell stolen products. If the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, worked in the same way, it would be a different story for the industry, end quote. What, if anything, the adult industry can teach the larger media content industry about selling content in a digital era is now unclear. But then the larger internet, as with the larger media industry in general, has always had a complicated relationship with porn. The widespread and untrammeled availability of porn on the internet has always been one of the internet's biggest selling points to some people. But porn has also been one of the internet's largest headaches in terms of public relations. We can't really talk about porn without briefly mentioning censorship and

government attempts to regulate porn content. In fact, many of the legislative attempts to regulate the generally free and open nature of the internet itself have come largely from efforts to stamp out online pornography. In this day and age, we're used to people trying to break the internet to placate the greed of the dumbpipe internet service providers or to protect the copyright oligarchy of Hollywood and the content producers. But historically speaking, the biggest threats to the internet have always come in the form of anti-porn crusades,

like the Communications Decency Act of 1996 in the United States or the recent porn blocking initiatives in the UK. Thus far, the larger Internet has been successful in fighting back against these efforts at censorship, but the industry at large is somewhat shy about admitting how much porn contributes to the bottom line of the Internet economy. I mean, certainly at the beginning of the way, you would have to say that companies like Cisco, Sun, and Oracle wouldn't have sold as much hardware and software as they did if it weren't for porn's role as an early leader in building out content.

And of course, we've discussed how AOL was a house built on corn and dirty chats. The push to broadband also wouldn't have been as urgent around the turn of the century had it not been for porn. People weren't exactly clamoring to download Hollywood movies, at least until iTunes and Netflix, but around the turn of the century they were certainly looking to download their porn faster. You always hear about how porn is X percentage of the web or internet traffic or the internet traffic or the that sex, the keyword sex, is the most popular search term. So to what extent do mainstream web players profit from online porn, even if tangentially? Well, they don't like to tell you.

Certainly, sites like Yahoo had adult sections of its directory very early on. And before it was pressured to take them down, the adult and escort sections of Craigslist certainly helped to build that site's popularity and also to kill the classified sections of Alt Weekly's where those ads traditionally found a home. And then, of course, during the dot-com bust, when money was drying up everywhere in the internet industry, several major web players turned directly

to the adult industry to try to keep the lights on. For example, in November of 2000, Alta Vista, the search engine, signed a deal with the private media group, the purchaser of Napster, for sponsorship of porn-related searches, which private CEO, Berth Milton, claimed, represented half of all Alta Vista's search terms. And if you'll remember from the previous episode, the one about Danny Lewin, Akamai Technologies was struggling around this period to find new, clients after the dot-com bubble burst. In fact, in March of 2001, in one of his many trips to California, Lewin himself met with 15 representatives from the adult porn industry, including

Playboy, Vivid, and others, telling them, quote, the adult industry is a significant market segment we can't afford to ignore, end quote. In the end, as much as the internet industry has a standoffish attitude towards porn, it's simply no secret that porn remains a major content player on the net. And it doesn't seem like that's going to be changing, even as we enter the modern era of mobile and social media. Despite the fact that Steve Jobs famously defended the proprietary nature of iOS, by declaring that Apple's closed ecosystem made things like the iPad, quote, porn-free, by the time the iPad's launch came about in 2010, that PornSite Pink Visual that we discussed earlier

had an iPad dedicated website ready to go three days before the first iPads were even delivered. And even if Apple continues to shun pornography on its devices, well, there's always Android. Go to the Google Play Store, and you'll find that adult apps are common, and quite popular. And that all makes me think about a point which several of the books that I read in researching this episode made on many occasions.

Their point was that when we look at porn and the Internet, the biggest story is maybe not how much porn has formed or transformed the Internet, but how and in what ways the Internet has transformed porn. If you'll allow me one last exercise in euphemism, porn is a medium that people would prefer to consume in private. And so the technology revolutions of the last hundred years have all been about, at least in the context of pornography, making that consumption a private act. Motion pictures when they came about could suddenly show you real-life people having sex right in front of you. But you had to go sit in a public movie theater with dozens of other people when you wanted to

consume that. Magazines like Playboy and especially the advent of home video allowed you to consume pornography in the privacy of your own home for the first time. But a television is not necessarily a personal private device inside a home. And you still had to go out into. public to purchase or rent the pornography. With the BBSs and the internet and the web, you no longer had to leave your house to purchase or obtain pornography, but again, the family computer is not exactly a private space inside the home. Now, however, with mobile, with smartphones and iPads and the like, porn can be obtained completely in private

and consumed completely in private. So maybe when we come right down to it, in spite of Steve Jobs' stated intentions and best intentions, maybe the real revolution is that the Internet represents perhaps the apex of all of pornographic technology. The apex for now, I suppose, at least until Oculus Rift or some similar technology comes along and gives us virtual porn. If this is the first time you're listening to this podcast, please subscribe to us on your podcast app of choice. There's plenty more great internet history where that came from.

And if you're a long-time listener, then you know what to do to help us out. Rate and review us on iTunes. Because iTunes gives credit to reviews and ratings, and the more great reviews we get, the more people will discover us. As always, there's more info on our website, www.com. The show's Twitter handle is at NetHistoryPod, and my personal Twitter is at Brian MCC. Thanks for listening.