Ever dream of building a porn website? Then you should have become an academic. Maybe you would have been one of the five “security researchers” from the Technical University of Vienna, Sophia Antipolis and University of California- Santa Barbara who set out to answer one of the most pressing questions of our time: How do adult websites make money?
To get us an answer, they built their own smutty destination, which yielded plenty of insight into an oft-ignored and steamy little corner of the content business. Their findings were reported on MIT’s Technology Review today. Although it disappointed by not linking to the site, the post is otherwise chock full of factoids. Here are five you need to know:
1. Turns out being a successful porn mogul isn’t as simple as aggregating a bunch of bukkake videos. Once you’ve got the content, then you need the eyeballs and that means anteing up in a surprisingly complicated game of web traffic arbitrage. Or as the article rather kinkily describes it: “a seething ecosystem of traffic affiliates constantly skimming clicks and pennies off of one another.” If you’re interesting in getting into the porn-traffic brokering racket, know that $160 will fetch 47,000 sticky little clicks in the rather robust-sounding market.
2. Security is a major issue. Adobe Flash and Microsoft Office provide backdoors through which malware can penetrate your browser. 43% of the clicks in the study came from browsers that were open to this kind of action. And it turns out the researchers’ investment could have yielded a healthy profit had it been made with a company that drops malware or adware onto unsuspecting machines.
3. 42.7 percent of Internet users look at porn. (This seems low.)
4. 20% of men look at porn at work. (This seems high.)
5. 90% of porn sites are video or image sites that are free of charge to users, monetized only by directing traffic to premium sites or even other free ones. But lest our online content moguls get too excited, it’s worth noting that the post throws some cold water on anyone with the notion that mainstream media might learn from its smut-peddling cousins:
[I]t’s just as likely that these techniques wouldn’t work for traditional media, because users don’t appear to be as motivated to read news as to find porn. How else can we explain the fact that in the course of the experiment, users clicked many times on single links that were randomly directing them to anything but the media they were apparently after – a practice widespread among free porn sites?
