3G: naughty or nice? PhoneErotica.com generates over 300 million hits per month, and rings up more minutes of use per month than MSN

Telecom Asia, Jan, 2005 by John C. Tanner

There is an axiom in technology circles that porn drives technology usage. Pick a category--VHS, video rentals, premium cable, pay-per-view, CD-ROMs, PC games, the Web, chat rooms, broadband, online shopping, etc. Porn has been given credit for the rapid growth of just about all of them. Even VOD owes what little success it's had to naughty content.

Porn's track record as a tech driver has come up again as more new technologies start cropping up. HDTV is one example, although as Wired columnist Brendan I. Koerner once pointed out, porn is a genre where high-def may work against it.

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The other big example is next-gen cellular, now that color-screen handsets are mainstream and 3G services are popping up around the world. Many 2.5G operators already offer adult comtent in some form or another, and 3G operators are following suit. Hutchison, for example, has an arrangement with Playboy, which now licenses content to cellcos in well over a dozen countries.

For all the buzz over wireless porn, however, skepticism abounds, and with good reason. Several of them, actually.

The first, of course, is the morality issue. Even in markets where porn is more socially acceptable, like the US, it's still a bugaboo for many cellcos that don't want the bad publicity that anti-porn groups will give them for carrying it. In Australia, Optus is currently in hot water over the revelation of its involvement in a deal several years ago to host porn content and generate international porn traffic for porn company Gilman via Vanuatu--not exactly the publicity it was hoping for with plans to launch mobile adult content services this year.

There's also the device itself. Proponents claim the handset or PDA is a good medium because it's more personal than a desktop--you can view it anywhere, and more discreetly. Critics of mobile porn point to the small screen and say, "No way." Storage demands can also be a problem, though devices like the new photocapable iPod could up the ante considerably--or create expectations 3G can't deliver.

Interestingly, the introduction of handsets with cameras and camcorder features creates some DIY porn opportunities, from sending naughty MMS postcards of yourself to your spouse/lover to sending them to strangers for money. And imagine what you could do with 3G video calls.

The upside is more traffic for the cellco. The downside includes potential illegal activity (like taking pictures in gymnasium locker rooms) or highly unethical incidents like the one reported in India last November, in which a Delhi Public School student took cam-phone video footage of himself and his girlfriend having sex and then, after they broke up, sold MMS clips to his friends for too rupees a clip.

From driver to niche

As for the business case, Yankee Group research analyst Adam Zawel noted in an October report that PhoneErotica.com, a UK-based Web site for mobile users that provides adult pics, video clips and text, generates over 300 million hits per month, and rings up more minutes of use per month than MSN. Zawel also estimates the annual market for wireless adult content could reach $1 billion globally by 2008.

While $1 billion is a nice number, it's a drop in the bucket compared to what mobile operators earn from non-voice services today--and non-voice revenue is still well under a third of their ARPU.

Even so, there is a sort of inevitability to 3G porn, regulatory environments permitting. For one thing, the novelty factor alone will result in some downloads initially. Also, bear in mind that "adult content" is a broad category. It's not all XXX hardcore or even Playboy-level softcore--Page 3-style pics from such magazines as FHM and Maxim also count as "adult content". So do Java game downloads (i.e. strip poker on your PDA) and directory services (i.e. where the good gentlemen's clubs are in town).

The other key thing to remember about mobile porn-apart from the critical importance of access control--is that while porn may be a driver of tech adoption, technology has never become dependent on it. Of all the technologies that owe their start to porn, none of them rely on porn to stay in business today. Case in point: porn titles today account for a fraction of the total home video market. The same goes for CD-ROMs, games, pay-per-view, and whatever VOD services are still out there. Porn may be at the vanguard of new technology, but it's almost always relegated to niche status once the technology in question goes mainstream. 3G will be no different.