Thank Sex For Making The Internet Hot
Breaking news: Sex is popular online.
"Sex had played a major role in driving many technologies," says Jonathan Coopersmith, a technology historian at Texas A&M.
The example most people are familiar with, he says, is the VCR. Many early video cassettes were pornographic, and consumers' desire to view the material in their own homes fueled the early dissemination of the technology.
Think back to the early days of the Internet, Coopersmith says. "You had to have the hookup, you had to have the computer, you had to have the willingness to experiment a fair amount. And the people who do this tend to be young men, especially in their 20s and 30s, and this also happens to be a prime audience for pornography."
According to Nielsen net ratings, more than a quarter of Internet users accessed an adult Web site in January 2010. The Web research company Hitwise says adult sites accounted for about 6 percent of all U.S. Internet hits that month — putting the adult category in eighth place, with social networking sites in first.
But Hitwise general manager Bill Tancer says that in the not-too-distant past, adult sites used to get the most hits of anything on the Internet. "If I go back to when I started tracking this data in 2004, that was the highest of any category," he says.
Chatting Up Sex
Of course, that's only taking into account pornographic Web sites — the Internet has also provided a private venue for sexual discussion and education. Violet Blue is a sex columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, writes for several online publications, and blogs and hosts a popular podcast called "Open Source Sex."
"The Internet has been sexualized even before it was the Internet," she says. Back in the days of bulletin board systems, some people would exchange what was known as "ASCII porn."
"This was essentially people using characters by hand on their keyboard to create what look like explicit images, and then send them to each other through bulletin board systems," she says.
Coopersmith says America Online's popularity was driven by its private chat features.
"One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was 'the house that sex chat built,' " he says.
And Violet Blue points out that before YouTube began better enforcing its community standards, "there was a lot of porn on there."
Porn Paved The Way
Adult sites also paved the way for the mainstream to adopt several technologies.
They were among the first to integrate e-commerce systems to process credit card transactions. "The first part of the Web to make money was pornography," Coopersmith says.
Right now, the adult industry is hurting — due to the same piracy other online content providers face — but in the early days, "you have a lot of some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world," Coopersmith says. "For instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee and you have different levels of membership."
More obnoxious practices were also readily embraced by some in the adult world, as many people's junk e-mail folders can easily demonstrate.
Video technology is a place where adult sites have been especially innovative, integrating live video streams into browser windows with early "jpeg push" video. They continue to be on the cutting edge; Peter Acworth, who founded the very NSFW site kink.com, remembers a few years ago when customers were demanding live HD streams, but he couldn't find an acceptable off-the-shelf solution.
"So we put together our own technology to be able to do so," Acworth says. "You know, you go to CNN or anywhere else on the Web, the video you see is going to be significantly lower bandwidth."
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GUY RAZ, host:
For the past few months, we featured a series here on the program called "The Net at 40." It's where we talk about the history and the culture of the Internet. Forty years since the first computer-to-computer communication.
And we've talked about domain names and bulletin board systems, the creation of email, everything except for
(Soundbite of elephant)
TRAVIS LARCHUK: The elephant in the room.
RAZ: Ladies and gentlemen, he's back in the studio with us, one of our producers, Travis Larchuk.
Travis, tell us what the elephant in the room is.
LARCHUK: Sex.
RAZ: I thought so. Is that my cue to make a parental warning?
LARCHUK: Yes, and if my parents are listening, Mom, now would be a great time to pull out that Three Tenors CD, pop it in, maybe kick back for the next few minutes and just go away.
RAZ: All right. Hopefully, she'll do that. All right, so sex on the Internet.
LARCHUK: Right, so to understand how we got to where we are today, I called up this guy named Peter Acworth. He founded this Web site kink.com.
RAZ: That sounds like it's going to be a not-safe-for-work moment.
LARCHUK: Well, it depends where you work, I guess. Anyway, it was back in the late 1990s, and Peter Acworth was working on a Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He was trying to figure out what to do with his life, and so he turned to the Internet.
Mr. PETER ACWORTH (Founder, Kink.com): All I could find that was of interest -to me, at any rate - was pornography. I remember Yahoo! which was the biggest search engine at the time by far, used to publish a page which listed the top user search terms. And I remember some large number of search terms were sexually related.
LARCHUK: And he had this eureka moment.
RAZ: Hang on, he got his Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University, and he became an Internet porn kingpin?
LARCHUK: Well, he actually dropped out of Columbia because he realized this is where the money is, and he founded this Web site, kink.com, and basically turned it into this cutting-edge porn empire. And he even ended up developing his own in-house engineering department because the pace that technology was developing at just wasn't fast enough for him.
RAZ: Well, what kind of technology?
LARCHUK: Well, we'll get to that in a few minutes but first, I know you buy a lot of stuff online.
RAZ: Almost everything.
LARCHUK: Well, the people who pioneered e-commerce were basically pornographers, and I called up this guy, Jonathan Coopersmith, who is not a pornographer. He is a technology historian and a professor at Texas A&M.
Dr. JONATHAN COOPERSMITH (Associate Professor, History; Technology Historian, Texas A&M): The first part of the Web to make money was pornography.
LARCHUK: And that's because back in the early days of the Internet, pornographers were first in line, adopting new technology to do things like encrypt credit card information, basically making it safe to buy stuff online.
Dr. COOPERSMITH: You have a lot of - some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world - you know, for instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee. Also, the cybersex industry has been very active in trying to reduce credit card fraud.
RAZ: Kind of a public service.
LARCHUK: And it's not just about commerce. They also played a big part in other innovations that we use every day. Just think back to the early days of the Internet.
Dr. COOPERSMITH: You had to have the hookup. You had to have the computer. You had to have the willingness to experiment a fair amount. And the people who do this tend to be young men, and this also happens to be a prime audience for pornography.
LARCHUK: So it's just like that song from that musical, "Avenue Q."
(Soundbite of song, "The Internet is for Porn")
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As Trekkie Monster) (Singing) The Internet is for porn. The Internet is for porn.
LARCHUK: And the thing about this song is, it's kind of true. Up until a few years ago, porn sites got the most hits of anything on the Internet. And today, the biggest sites online, social networking sites like Facebook, a lot of the stuff that you can do on those sites helped make America Online number one back in the '90s and specifically, I'm talking about private chat rooms.
Dr. COOPERSMITH: One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was the house that sex chat built.
LARCHUK: And a lot of the video technology that we use today that lets us watch clips or stream live video, a lot of that started out
RAZ: On porn sites.
LARCHUK: Exactly. You remember Peter Acworth, the kink.com guy?
RAZ: How could I forget?
LARCHUK: Well, a few years ago, his customers were saying they wanted to see live video in high-definition.
Mr. ACWORTH: So we put together our own technology essentially to be able to do so. You know, if you go to CNN or anywhere else on the Web, the video you're going to see there is at significantly lower bandwidth than that.
RAZ: So CNN is actually taking its cues from the adult entertainment industry?
LARCHUK: I don't know about that, but I was talking to Peter Acworth about where the adult industry is going next, and he was talking to me about, you know, "Avatar," it's the number one movie, and there's all this at-home 3-D technology coming out.
RAZ: I can see where this is going, Travis. I doubt James Cameron had that in mind.
LARCHUK: Well, maybe not, but it is possible, and we know who the early adopters will be.
RAZ: Indeed. That's one of our producers, Travis Larchuk.
Travis, thanks.
LARCHUK: No problem, Guy. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
