Dirty video on demand
Not to be overlooked either is the response to the new wave of
computer pornography from the established publishers of the glossy
paper variety. Seeing as a large amount of online porn actually
consists of pictures scanned straight from these publications,
and much of the rest from videos, surely there would be an interest
in some form of restrictive legislation from these concerns? After
all, the drop in circulation rates of many of the adult magazines
since the Internet has arrived on the scene cannot just be a coincidence.
These magazines are distributed mainly by subscription, simply
because readers are embarrassed about buying them over the counter
in the high street. The Internet provides almost total perceived
anonymity and very cheap thrills. The would-be patron of the pornographics arts needs to shell out only ten quid for a month's Internet sub, and with telephone charges at 1p per
minute at off-peak local call rates there is low-cost access
to an almost limitless choice of perversion - no coughing up £3
per copy for a small selection of soft porn pictures in a mag.
Of course, the clever players are moving their magazines onto
the Web themselves and publishing them alongside the traditional
paper versions. They charge a small subscription fee to view,
don't incur much in the way of extra production costs (the magazine
is already produced on computer anyway), and can rake in a small
fortune from willing advertisers drawn by the huge readership
potential such ventures can attract.
When Playboy launched online it broke all Internet records with
an estimated 880,000 visitors in the first day! Penthouse got
in on the act and some observers reckon that the online version
could be the saviour of the paper version in a time of declining
fortunes for the Guccione empire. Making pornography available
to the computer owning public is nothing new to the porn publishers: CD-ROMs are a booming industry in the US and account
for a huge volume of adult material sales. What is new is the
notion of giving a product away, or at least not charging a fortune
for it.
Adult magazines have never been cheap. Publishers don't want to see their content given away free online, but if it is, they will have to find new ways to make money either by milking advertisers or by finding new and more imaginative ways to entertain the reader.