- MediaGuardian,
- Monday May 7 2001
It is not easy to make money from the internet. It's even more difficult for an internet business to make a profit - unless, that is, you are in the porn business. The news last week that unseated dot.com employees were falling over themselves to get jobs in the porn industry was more than just a sign of the times. Disillusioned dot.commers, hacked off with constantly being bounced around from one failed outfit to the next, reasoned that the only fail-safe solution was pornography.
It wasn't such a big surprise. Porn is one of the few profitable industries on the internet, and "sex" has long been the most popular online search term, closely followed by "porn", "nude", "XXX", "Playboy" and "erotic stories".
While the rest of the net is reeling from crumbling ad revenues, the sex industry has not even taken a hit because its main revenue stream is subscriptions, not advertising. It's that old adage again: Sex always sells. No amount of economic downturn will affect this phenomenally successful industry that is becoming increasingly acceptable, especially among young professionals.
Yet companies such as Yahoo! are opting out of the porn industry. Given the demand, the big business and the job security,this seems like a mad decision. Why?
It all boils down to a public outcry, and a feeling that one of the biggest and arguably one of the most influential internet companies in the world shouldn't be dealing in the business of porn. Despite the fact that Yahoo! has sold X-rated products for more than two years, when the Los Angeles Times ran a piece suggesting it was expanding its collection a month ago, a huge debate ensued. A few days later, Yahoo! backed down and said it would cease selling adult products, stop accepting banner ads from porn sites, cut out classifieds and auction adult-type items, and pledged it would clamp down on sex-related message boards and clubs. The misconception, however, is that it will outlaw porn on its site, which it insists is not the case. A search still throws up 671 sites for "porn" and if Yahoo! users want to buy porn videos, they are redirected to an external site.
To make the changes Yahoo! is currently introducing what has been described as "pretty extensive filtering software" but teething problems are expected. The reduction of porn on Yahoo.com won't spell the death of Yahoo!, but it could derail its profit projections. Despite the new porn exclusion software, though, the company is still making its mind up. Last week, faced with a barrage of criticism from web users, it came back and said no decisions had been taken on whether the changes to its adult porn section would be permanent. "It's the internet, so lots of things are possible," said Yahoo! spokesman Jackson Holtz, insisting it was just a re-evaluation of adult content across the network.
Clearly, Yahoo! is playing it by ear. It doesn't want to alienate users or conservative forces, nor does it want to rule out forever a guaranteed moneyspinner. Yahoo! has been put in a glaringly uncomfortable spotlight. It has now publicly back-peddled on a plan to expand its adult materials and caused a flap among other big internet portals, concerned about public approval. Terra Lycos, which operates a number of Lycos portals around the world, has now chipped in and announced it is re-evaluating its own porn policy, while MSN has reaffirmed that it has a strict policy on porn.
Of all the bigger players in the portal market, AltaVista is one of the few that seems to offer no-holds-barred access to pornographic material. A quick search using the term "porn" brings up an array of hardcore images, video clips and links to sites that are advertised using very explicit language.
MSN has already gone the whole hog and removed any evidence of adult-related merchandise. It moderates chatrooms and has a tough policy on links to porn. In fact, after entering the term "porn" in the search engine, the user is immediately warned: "You have entered a search term that is likely to return adult content." There are no adult videos to be found on the site, but if users want that kind of material, they are sent out of MSN confines into the unrestrained web where technically they are no longer the responsibility of MSN.
Therein lies the great irony. A significant proportion of web users want access to porn and to this end will locate porn and buy it, with or without the help of Yahoo!. Censorship of this kind doesn't work. If Yahoo!, the second biggest website in the world, doesn't take a piece of this action, it will lose out. Pundits and users alike believe Yahoo! has got itself into unnecessarily uncomfortable territory because of its willingness to purge itself of adult materials, instead of forcing families to install filter software on their computers.
Yahoo! members spoke out last week, saying they felt betrayed and were planning to petition the portal after it quietly reconfigured its adult-themed clubs, message boards and chatrooms. Yahoo! has now made these areas much more difficult to find and even disabled some search links so that in order to find a club, users have to know the correct internet address and type it in directly. List members argue angrily that this tactic will ultimately lead to them disappearing altogether.
Ken Bradman, a 23-year-old web developer in Phoenix, has spoken out on the issue and is organising a protest club. "If they completely eliminate adult material from the site, they're going to lose a lot of members who are interested in that. I can guarantee you it's going to be a huge chunk of Yahoo!'s user base," he proclaimed last week.
Already some club members have reposted links to their clubs in different sections of the site to show they won't be silenced.
Yahoo! refuses to comment further on the porn issue, but the UK office is happy to point out its tight policy. "We have a different position to the US. We've already taken steps to reduce adult content on the site [last year] and we've tightened up chatroom controls," says a spokesman.
The UK office of MSN says much the same: "MSN.co.uk has a zero tolerance policy toward retailers on the shopping channel distributing pornographic material from its site. Since 'top shelf pornography' is not illegal for consenting adults over the age of 18 material of this nature is categorised in communities as 'adult' on the MSN site. Users searching under adult terms on MSN Search will be asked to confirm that they are wanting to access adult material and if they answer positively will be diverted on to a separate site - Nightsurf."
The issue has become much more than the removal of pornographic videos, the blocking of under 18s, and links to child porn sites; it has opened up a whole can of worms about freedom of speech on the internet. For a harassed Yahoo! though, it is damned whatever it does. This one could run and run.
