One of the worst kept secrets of the internet age is that with all of the money flying around, plenty is being spent on online pornography. Time did a deconstruction of the notion that porn ‘has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined’, noting:
While $2.8 billion is nothing to sneeze at, porn is hardly the golden goose many assume it to be. CNBC suggested in a recent report that the porn industry “stands at a precipice as it heads into 2012,” with “revenue from films … shrinking, due to piracy and an abundance of free content on the Internet.”
So porn remains a big business, but it is harder and harder to maintain revenue generation. What are the options? Piracy is a huge factor that all digital media contend with and is hard to contend with; for years the industry has been pushing to be more inclusive of women (neither report discussed how that is impacting revenue); and finally you can broaden the accessibility of porn to those who cannot otherwise experience it. Here are two sites that look to do just that.
First we have PornSFW.com. According to IncredibleThings, the site is “a website that turn NSFW pornographic images and into innocent pics that are safe for work. The result is pretty hilarious” Taking a quick at some of the images, they definitely are more funny than sexual … but with the site name IT is also going to be blocked at pretty much every corporate site with a filter.
The other site is called ‘Porn for the Blind’. Really. I clicked on one of the links on the site … and it had someone reading the on-screen text of a video and then describing the scene in what I can only describe as a clinical and non-sexy way. ‘And then Sean inserted his finger into Adriana’s … ‘ you get the picture.
In tough economic times businesses everywhere need to adapt to survive. These are just two ways one industry is seeking new revenue streams … do you know of others? Let us know!