How the porn industry has influenced technological change
Pornography is an intimate enough subject not to talk about it in public. But I want to tell about porn as about one of the most powerful engines of technological progress. Many technologies that have become commonplace for us have come from the entertainment industry for adults. Strange as it may sound, but this is not surprising. Porn is a market of tens of billions of dollars, and traffic to the largest adult sites is measured in hundreds of millions of users.
Even for such a fast Internet, which we have today, we should be grateful to porn sites. Since the advent of the Web, consumers of adult content have felt the need for a fast Internet connection. These needs have led to the development of ADSL technology. An interesting fact is that Penthouse at one time developed the infrastructure and offered fast modems to all its readers.
A porn on mobile devices in turn increased the demand for high-speed 3g Internet connection, because according to statistics, about 20% of search queries are related to content for adults. Under the cut you will find even more interesting facts about the impact of porn on technological progress.
Online payments
The New York Times magazine conducted an investigation in which it found that the first active users of bank cards on the Internet were porn sites customers. These sites became the pioneers of e-commerce and payment security systems (the first was Electronic Systems Card), thus paving the way for PayPal, eBay and Amazon. In 1999, users spent about $ 1.3 billion on online porn. This accounted for about 8% of total online commerce for the year. This is more than people spent on books and flights online. At that time, porn was the leading Internet industry.
Cable TV
Pornography has helped cable TV to establish itself as a consumer standard. In 1976, Manhattan Public Access Cable had 80,000 subscribers, until George Urban launched The Ugly George Hour Of Truth And Violence (a show in which George walked the streets, caught the girls and persuaded them to strip in the air - ed.). After 13 episodes, the number of subscribers exceeded 100,000, and by the end of the second season, 300,000.
Video Cases
In the 1980s, VCRs became popular. And then two formats fought a war - Betamax and VHS. The first was more perfect, but refused to support porn. At that time, 50% of the videotapes sold in the United States were porn. Guess who won? And the last format war was between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Blu-ray was coined by Sony and later supported by Hitachi, LG, Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung and Philips. Toshiba came up with HD DVDs and were supported by NEC, Sanyo and Microsoft. Formats fought for a long time, until the porn industry said it would only support Blu-ray. That was it.
Private chat rooms, file sharing and more
All YouTube streamers, twitch and other sites are also obliged to the porn industry. Moreover, private chat rooms, direct file sharing services, video chats with webcams and various social online sites were born in the midst of lust and debauchery. In the early 1990s, the only place where you could chat with a person in real time were adult sites. Below is an entertaining video infographics (without vulgarity).
No less significant innovations of the porn producers have brought to the Internet advertising and a variety of ways to monetize content: affiliate marketing, click clicks, paid subscriptions, disabling advertising for money and much more. Speaking of content, porn companies have always waged a fierce battle with pirates at any level - from torrents to disk sharing. And this in turn influenced the development of laws in the field of intellectual property and copyright.
“It” developed not only information technologies. The same filmography changed due to porn. In 1896, the first longest film of the corresponding genre was filmed, which went on for 7 minutes. It was called “Coucher de la mariee”. Before him, all other films were a maximum of 2 minutes. In general, such interrelationships throughout history are vast. More interesting is the impact that the porn industry will have on robotics and virtual reality technology in the near future.
All Articles