Pornography has always led the pack when it comes to riding the wave of communication technology innovation. In fact it can be said that porn is responsible for creating the wave in the first place. This is particularly true when it comes to the internet. If need is the mother of invention, then internet porn has many children.
According to Jonathan Coopersmith, “Pornography has historically been closely connected with the rise of communication technologies…In recent decades, the digitalization of data, the Internet, and the World Wide Web have accelerated this trend. …As well as providing revenues, cybersex has also trailblazed new business and operational practices that later diffuse to other markets.”
Online Payment Systems
Whenever you make an online purchase, whether it’s shoes, clothes or even surprise tickets for one of those last minute vacations, you have porn to thank for the ease in doing so. In the mid 1990s, Richard Gordon founded Electronic Card Systems, an online credit card system which made money in exchange for sex videos an efficient transaction. Less than 10 years later, internet porn sites were generating close to $3 billion in sales. Thanks to porn leading the way, online purchasing represents a $150 to $200 billion industry.
Streaming
Before YouTube there was porn. According to nude model and former stripper Danni Ashe, an extremely successful porn-site entrepreneur and CEO of Danni’s Hard Drive, “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.”
Without programmers working their butts off trying to perfect the perfect system for delivering online sex videos to users with dial up modems, reputable news sites might never have been able to deliver up to date news clips of worldwide events.
Online Chat
In 2000 the president of the largest American producer of porn films Vivid Entertainment, Bill Asher described live one-on-one teleconferencing as the “holy grail of online porn.” Men could watch live sex shows from their computer, and via instant messagin they could ask the women to do whatever their horny little hearts desired. Meanwhile women using digital video cameras or webcams could broadcast their stuff online, charging whatever fees they wanted. This not only cut out pimping middle men for the ladies, but paved the way for web-based video conferencing.
Search Engine Optimization
Long before marketing companies started using sites like Digg or Reddit to generate website traffic and acquire those Google-friendly backlinks, online porn sites were already creating a huge community amongst themselves by sharing links, clients, as well as revenue. They all linked to each other which placed them at the top of the search engines for targeted keywords. The porn industry was at the forefront of generating profit from traffic, and were among the first to create a model for affiliate revenue-sharing.
Connection Speed
With millions upon millions of hungry users demanding the high quality sexual images and videos, broadband connections spread across the globe like wildfire, leaving slower modems and dial-up connections in the proverbial dust.
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