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SPEAKER_04: And now, over to you, Kate Monster.
SPEAKER_04: The Internet is for Porn, a song from the Broadway musical Avenue Q. Innocent kindergarten teacher Kate Monster is trying to celebrate the usefulness of the Internet for shopping and sending birthday greetings, while her surly neighbour, Trekkie Monster, insists that people really value it for more intimate activities.
SPEAKER_01: Is Trekkie Monster right? Well, sort of, but no, not really. Credible seeming statistics
SPEAKER_04: suggest that about one in seven web searches is for porn, which isn't trivial, but of course it means that six in seven web searches are not for porn. The most visited porn website, Pornhub, is roughly as popular as the likes of Netflix and LinkedIn. That's pretty popular, but still only enough to rank 28th in the world. But Avenue Q was first performed in 2003, an age ago in Internet terms, and Trekkie Monster might have been more correct back then. When they're new, technologies often tend to be expensive and unreliable. They need to find a niche market of early adopters, whose custom helps the technology to develop. Once it's cheaper and more reliable, it finds a bigger market and a much broader range of uses. There is a theory that pornography played this role in the development of the Internet and a whole range of other technologies. So does the theory stack up? Since the very dawn of art, sex has been a subject. Prehistoric cave-dawbers shared a muse with schoolboy doodlers, judging by their fondness for buttocks, breasts, vulvas, and comically large penises. Carvings of copulating couples date back at least 11,000 years to goat herders in Judea. But just because people used the arts and crafts to depict erotica doesn't mean that erotica was the driving force behind these techniques. There's no reason to think it was. Perhaps the first communications technology we know enough about to test the theory against is Gutenberg's printing press. The theory doesn't hold water. Titillating books were certainly printed, but the main market for reading material was religious. A more plausible candidate, leaping ahead to the 19th century, is photography. Pioneering studios in Paris did a roaring trade in art studies, a euphemism the authorities didn't always accept. Customers were willing to pay enough to fund the technology. For a time, it cost more to buy an erotic photograph than to hire a prostitute. By the time of the next big technological breakthrough in artistic expression, the moving picture, the word pornography had taken on its modern meaning. It's derived from the Greek for writing and prostitutes and it now means, well, I know it when I see it, as the American judge, Potter Stewart, famously said. But porn didn't really drive the movie industry, for obvious reasons. Movies were expensive. You needed a big audience to recoup your costs. That meant public viewings. And while many people paid to look at dirty pictures in the privacy of their home, far fewer people were comfortable watching a dirty movie in a public theatre. One solution came in the 1960s with the Peep Show booth, an enclosed space where you'd put coins in a slot to keep a movie playing. One booth could bring in several thousand dollars a week. But the real privacy breakthrough came thanks to the video cassette recorder, or VCR. At first, VCRs were a hard sell. They were pricey and they came in two incompatible formats, VHS and Betamax. Who would risk plunging a significant chunk of cash into a device that might soon be obsolete? People who really wanted to watch adult movies at home, that's who. In the late 1970s, more than half of videotape sales were pornographic. Within a few years, the technology was more affordable for people who wanted to watch family movies. The market expanded and porn's share of it shrank. A similar story can be told about cable television, and yes, the internet. Older listeners might remember when getting online meant coaxing a dial-up modem into establishing a connection, then fretting about long-distance phone charges as it slowly chugged through a file that would nowadays download in the snap of a finger. What would motivate an ordinary person to persevere? You've guessed it. One 1990s study of Usenet discussion groups claimed that five in six images shared were pornographic. So in those days, Trekkie Monster wasn't far wrong. And as he suggests to Kate, appetite for porn helped to drive the world to a higher level of demand for faster connections, better modems and higher bandwidth. It spurred innovation in other areas too. Online porn providers were pioneers in web technologies such as video file compression and user-friendly payment systems, and also in business models such as affiliate marketing programs. All these ideas went on to find much wider uses, and as the internet expanded, it gradually became less for porn and more for all that other stuff. Nowadays, the internet is making life hard for professional pornographers, just as it's hard to sell a newspaper subscription or a music video when so much is freely available online, it's hard to sell porn when sites like Pornhub are giving it away. Much of this free porn is pirated, and it's an uphill struggle to get the illegally uploaded content removed. But of course, what's bad for the content creators is good for the aggregator platforms, which make their money through advertising and premium subscriptions. The big player in porn at the moment is a company called MindGeek. It owns not only Pornhub, but several other top porn websites. In Avenue Q, TrekkieMonster appears to do nothing all day but surf for porn. So the other characters are surprised when he reveals he's a multi-millionaire. Trekkie, where'd you get all that money? In volatile market, only stable investment
SPEAKER_00: is porn! And once again, TrekkieMonster is nearly right,
SPEAKER_04: but not quite. For sure, there's money in porn, but the best way to make it may be to invest in the technologies that enable it and that it enables. In the past, in Parisian photo studios, or companies making VCRs or high-speed modems. Today, in MindGeek's algorithms that suggest content and keep eyeballs on screens. And what will TrekkieMonster be singing in the future? Robots are for porn, perhaps. The role of sex in accelerating technology is unlikely to be finished yet.
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