JANUARY 24TH, 2012
I know, you’re thinking that we’re trying to get some views from Google with the keyword “porn”. But I guarantee in this post we will talk about a lot of interesting stuff, including some cool case histories.
Let’s start from a couple of questions: how big porn and sex are on the Internet? And, most important, are they a social experience?
About the first question: in the beginning of the new millennium we’ve heard some big figures. When Internet began to reach the masses I remember people saying that 90% of the digital traffic was dominated by porn, but no one was really able to prove it. For sure, before social networks changed the rules, “surfing the Net” used to be a more private experience. Internet users were more likely describable as “non-social” than as “social addict”, as most of us are today. I hope you will agree with this.
An Optenet research, dated back to 2010, said that 37% of the websites in the WWW were porn-related; another research by Online MBA (still from 2010) can give us a more clear idea of the scenario: 12% of websites are porn websites; 8% of emails sent every day have porn content; 35% of downloads are related to X rated pictures or videos.
And, despite in the last 2 years the Web has changed a lot, we should definitely have a look at this infographic:
All right, so now we have some numbers. Let’s skip to the second question: does the consumption of porn material involve the socialsphere?
While a third of the UK based Badoo users admit they use the social network to find potential sexual partners, on Twitter there’s a hub called Pornstartweet (with 50 thousand followers), that puts together all the profiles of major porn stars. Maybe Twitter will become the network where people will be openly talking about sex and porn consumption – due to its more mature user base, compared to other platforms.
After all, do you think it’s shameful to follow a website like Youporn? Many twitters don’t think so, and Youporn is now followed by 20 thousand people – the same amount of followers Bank of America’s Twitter customer service has. A good amount of users that decided to see what’s up with the huge Californian platform, world leader in the free online porn market, that years ago entered the top 100 most visited websites in the world (83rd position, to be more precise).
Contents are…. well, we might define them as “curious”. Quite funny and quite interesting to be fair (like showing the last video updates, sometimes with detailed descriptions), but definitely cheeky and not appropriate for a high-society dinner:
I don’t know how many people use it, but under every video we can find the typical Addthis button, to share the fun with friends and family…
Ok, so even the pornography industry is making some big steps towards the Social World. A huge amount of Internet users watch porn on daily or weekly basis (we all know, c’mon), so why not making it become an experience worth to share/like/comment?
Let’s switch the subject for a second: how about the relationship between the Social Web and sexual acts?
Even this is something worth discussing. Last year College Humor came up with a brilliant video (down here) ironically describing a new invention: the “Foursquare of sex”; recently the market showed how this idea wasn’t that absurd.
The swedish government (and the Stockholm based creative agency Ester) created agenius online-to-offline application to promote the usage of condoms in the Scandinavian country. But I don’t want to spoil it, just take a look:
Yes, it’s a campaign that integrates (through QRcode) a mobile app, a website and the very action of having sex. Results seem pretty interesting, and definitely there’s a good idea behind it: creating some interactive statistics, involving younger audiences and generating awareness towards an important issue.
In the meanwhile, Durex South Africa was living a nightmare, when they decided to post on their Twitter account a very tasteless joke, generating a Social Media fail followed by official excuses and all (which is nowadays becoming a standard procedure). Here’s the tweet:
My 2 cents? Condomo8 was a great idea. And not just because the app was interesting, also because they put sex (and the importance of safe sex) in a different prospective, at least compared to what the industry got us used to (firstly the big fish like Trojan and Durex): the chauvinistic image of the man making women go crazy, or the sheer terror of contracting STDs or having unexpected kids.
The video down here refers to a Facebook campaign (targeting Brazil) to promote Olla condoms. Even though it’s quite interesting from the Social Media marketing standpoint, it just leverages on the psychological terrorism of having unwanted children:
On the other hand, Condomo8 is a smart app, funny and useful. And it goes towards a precise direction, which I think could be a path followed by others: genuinely – willingly and not forcedly – including the sexual activity among the hundreds of different private activities shared every second on social networks.
So, after all this, do you think we will get to the point when it will make sense to integrate our sexual life (and our consumption of pornographic entertainment) in our Social Media profiles? After all, they are two of the very few aspects of our private life we’re still not giving in sacrifice to the Facebook god.
I’m not going to say I would be absolutely cool with it, but I somehow think that – one day – this is what will happen.
Guido Ghedin
