Tynan Writes

The sex industry is behind many innovations that today’s Netizens cannot live without, as well as some nasty bits we wish never existed.

For an industry that many won’t admit they’ve ever patronized, pornography has had an amazing impact on virtually every new medium, from cave painting to photography. Dirty pictures have been credited with ensuring the future of the VCR, boosting cable TV subscriptions, helping to kill off the Betamax and HD-DVD formats, and perhaps most importantly, driving the growth of the Internet.

In fact, the adult entertainment industry has been on top of many of the Net’s most crucial tech innovations, but not because it invented any of them.

According to Lewis Perdue, author of Eroticabiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet, “without business and technical pioneers in the online sex business, the World Wide Web would never have grown so big so quickly.” (Not that we think size matters.)

The innovations happen because porn is “an ecosystem in which participants are willing–indeed forced–to experiment, and where experimentation isn’t hobbled by common sense, good taste or bureaucracy,” says Bruce Arnold, principal of Caslon Analytics, a research and analysis firm from Braddon, Australia that specializes in regulatory issues, demographics, social trends and technologies.

In an industry notorious for erecting walls of secrecy, hard numbers are difficult to come by, and most evidence is anecdotal. Still, it’s clear that the adult industry has helped shape the Internet as we know it today, even if it has also been at the forefront of several less savory innovations. Let’s take a look.

Nice: Online payment systems
Naughty: Spam
Nice: Streaming Content
Naughty: Malware
Nice: Live Chat
Naughty: Pop ups, pop unders, mousetrapping
Nice: Broadband
Naughty: Browser hijacking
Nice: Traffic optimization
Naughty: Domain name hijacking
Nice: 3G mobile services
Naughty: Paris Hilton

[Much more on all of these after the jump]

A slightly different version of this story originally appeared on PCworld.com

1. Nice: Online payment systems

The next time you buy something at Amazon or another online retailer, marveling at the ease and security of e-commerce, don’t just thank Jeff Bezos, thank Richard Gordon. In the mid-1990s Gordon founded Electronic Card Systems, which pioneered credit card transactions for a wide range of illicit sites, according to the New York Times.

“While riches were being minted and squandered in the dot-com ’90s, Gordon made a fortune by taking a commission for processing sales on a range of sites … like ClubLove, which published the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape,” wrote the Times‘ Brad Stone. (Gordon’s attorney denied that he was involved with pornography; Stone found a dozen former partners or employees who begged to differ.)

According to Forrester Research, Web users spent about $1.3 billion on online porn in 1999. That represented about 8 percent of all Net commerce that year, and more money than people spent on books or plane tickets. Back then, it was the Internet’s leading industry. By 2006, Net porn produced $2.8 billion in revenues, a much smaller piece of the $150 to $200 billion online economy.

Richard Gordon also owns a Web design firm that created sites for the American Bible Society–or at least it did until contacted by Stone last May — proving he was somebody who could swing both ways.

2. Naughty: Spam

The sex industry didn’t invent spam, but it proved just how profitable a business spam could be. In the late 1990s it was hard to find an inbox that wasn’t engorged with come-ons for porn sites. From 2001 to 2002 adult-oriented spam rose 450 percent, according to Cyber Atlas. By April 2003, one out of five spams were for adult sites. But by October 2008, that was down to a flaccid 2 percent, according to Symantec’s State of Spam report, eclipsed by solicitations for loans, pills, and other spam scams.

3. Nice: Streaming Content

Before CNN.com or YouTube started filling the Internet with streaming video, adult sites were pumping out videos of adult stars doing what comes naturally, over and over and over.

In a May 2001 interview with NPR, Danni Ashe, founder of seminal softcore site Danni’s Hard Drive, noted that “the adult entertainment industry was the first to use streaming JPEG push video, which was video that worked…in the browser and didn’t require a plug-in. I think as an industry we tend to jump in a little bit faster and tweak the technology and try to get it to work faster.” 

In 2003, Acacia Research sued dozens of porn sites for allegedly violating its patents on streaming video. The patent portfolio company sued the porn sites in part because they were easy targets, but also because that’s where most of the video action was. Later on Acacia got around to securing licenses from Disney, the New York Times, and other less exciting video streamers.

“Without programming pioneers trying to perfect video streaming software that would deliver images of copulation and procreation to paying customers hooked up with a 28.8kbps dial-up modem, it is unlikely that CNN would be effectively delivering news clips of global breaking news,” wrote Lewis Perdue in Eroticabiz.

4. Naughty: Malware

Porn sites were notorious for drive-by malware infections. You’d get the malicious software either by clicking thumbnail galleries or downloading new “video codecs” that actually contained Trojans (and no, not that kind of Trojan). These days, drive-by infections are still raging – but they can be found on legitimate sites trying to exploit security flaws in Internet Explorer.

The results can potentially be devastating. Just ask Julie Amero, a Connecticut substitute teacher who was facing up to 40 years in prison after a computer loaded with spyware displayed pornography to her students. Fortunately for Amero, computer security professionals convinced the judge she was merely an innocent victim of spyware programs that took control of the school’s computer and launched a blizzard of pop up porn windows.

5. Nice: Live Chat

Why just watch videos of naked people when you could chat with them, tell them what to do, or even do it to them using the finest in modern electronics? Porn plowed the path for video chat and its boring cousin, Web-based video conferencing.

“Video chat is a huge area of interaction and profitability in the digital adult business,” says Mark Frieser, co-founder of MyVIProom.com, an adult content and dating destination scheduled to debut early next year. “Tons of women are selling one-on-one chat at really exorbitant rates. That sort of video technology has definitely been pioneered by the adult industry.”

Meanwhile, “teledildonics” combined with chat, gives new meaning to the term remote control, notes author and sex educator Violet Blue, proprietress of the Tiny Nibbles web site [NSFW].

“Live camgirls created the peer-to-peer direct sex work arena, heralded the death of the pimp, and forged new tech paths (such as teledildonic interaction with camgirls where the customer pays for the connection and operates her sex toy live),” she wrote in an email. “It remains in lucrative commercial use today.”

6. Naughty: Pop ups, Pop Unders, Mousetrapping

Once you visited a porn site (accidentally, we assume) you often couldn’t leave, thanks to sites that took control of your browser to deliver ads or launch new windows the moment you closed one down. That’s what got schoolteacher Julie Amero in so much hot water.

7. Nice: Broadband

In the 1990’s Penthouse Magazine gave away 2400-baud modems with the magazine’s logo on them, according to Gerard Van Der Leun, former director of Penthouse.com and currently a contributor to American Digest. At the time it was the fastest way to access the magazine’s popular XXX bulletin boards. In the early years of the Net, nobody needed a bigger, fatter pipe more than the adult industry and its customers.

Though the evidence is largely anecdotal, “acquiring higher resolution pornographic images faster promoted broadband connections,” wrote Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M, in a 2006 paper on the nature of computer-based porn [PDF].

According to an October 2000 report in the New York Times, nearly one out of five AT&T broadband customers paid an average of $10 a film to watch “real, live all-American sex” online. A 2003 study by Nielsen/NetRatings found that online music sharing and porn were the biggest factors behind broadband penetration in Europe.

Of course, nobody from Time Warner Roadrunner or AT&T Broadband ever showed up at the door saying “We’re here to install your porn connection, Mr. Clinton.” But when broadband did make it to your neighborhood, you can thank the adult industry for getting it there just a wee bit faster.

8. Naughty: Browser Hijacking

Spyware and adware would hijack the browser’s home page or change users’ default search engines, redirecting them to bogus “search engines” loaded with pay-per-click ads for adult sites. The owners of these pages would receive a few pennies every time some unsuspecting Web surfer clicked on the links, which could translate into tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each month.

9. Nice: Traffic optimization

Long before blogs, aggregation sites like Digg or Reddit, affiliate ad networks like Link Exchange, or even Google Adsense, adult sites were building massive traffic by sharing links, customers, and revenues amongst themselves.

“The porn folks have led the industry in traffic development and monetization,” says Ariel Ozick, chief of operations for Wired Rhino, a search marketing optimization company. “They developed the concept of top sites linking to generate traffic and were among the first to develop an affiliate revenue sharing model.”

Since the dawn of the Net, adult sites have been sharing customers, says Frieser. “Back in the ’90s, if you subscribed to an adult site and left after three months, you’d get an email offering not only access to that site but three other networks for the same price. There was a lot of that going on.”

Now Frieser says it’s starting to happen again, in part because adult sites are losing their audience due to the plethora of freely available smut on the Net.

10. Naughty: Domain Name Hijacking

There’s no more egregious example of filching someone else’s domain than the legal battle over sex.com. In 1996, Stephen M. Cohen used a faked document to convince Network Solutions that legal ownership of Sex.com had been transferred to his name. He then proceeded to operate a wildly profitable porn operation on that site. In 2001 the domain was returned to its original owner, Gary Kremen, and Cohen was ordered to pay him $65 million. Cohen refused and is still at trial for contempt after going on the lam for five years; Kremen sold the domain in 2006 for an estimated $14 million.

11. Nice: 3G mobile services

Pocket porn is the new frontier. Just as adult content helped push cable and DSL connections, mobile porn will arouse demand for high-speed 3G data services.

Last June, iRoticNet launched a service that lets iPhone 3G users choose from over 1,000 adult entertainment clips for $10 a month. There are already “a few hundred” iPhone porn sites available, according to Farley Cahen, a VP for adult industry trade group AVN Media Network. Juniper Research predicts the worldwide market for mobile porn will swell from $1.7 billion to $4.6 billion by 2012.

Frieser, who helped launch a relatively tame mobile service built around adult star Jenna Jameson in 2005, anticipates a sharp rise in wireless porn, especially as smart phones surge in popularity.

“I think we’ll see a big spike in interactive services,” says Frieser. “Look at the European market, where you can do one-on-one cam chats using your mobile. To say that’s the not the future for the US market would be foolish.”

Is that your cellphone vibrating or are you just happy to see me?

12. Naughty: Paris Hilton

Be honest. Where would her career be without “1 Night in Paris”? This lurid sex video from 2004 still contains some of her finest work (or so I’ve been told).

When not researching porn (just for the articles, honest), contributing editor Dan Tynan tends his blogs, Culture Crash and Tynan on Tech

Tags: 3G, adult, broadband, live chat, malware, porn, spam, streaming, Video, XXX

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