Adult content drove the monetisation of many web-based ideas — and the development of modern fintech
Online porn has critically shaped the internet as we know it. Two recent public debates, one involving Apple’s decision to scan iOS devices for child porn, the other following OnlyFans’ decision to ban adult content, show that the sex industry still has a role to play in setting the direction of technological progress. Though its importance in commercialising the internet is diminished, it has perhaps the clearest use case for censorship-beating, privacy-protecting tech.
“Every step up in quality — higher-resolution photographs, better-quality movies — required increasing amounts of bandwidth,” Patchen Barss, an oft-quoted proponent of the theory that porn is the cradle of tech, wrote in his book “Pornography dominated the flow of images and video on the internet, and because there was a perpetual demand for more, different and better pornographic products, bandwidth needed to grow.
The internet has grown to encompass the world, and porn, of course, could not keep up. One of the rare studies to actually measure porn traffic, published earlier in 2021, put the share of adult website users among its sample of 15,000 Italian cable customers at 12%. Their average session lasts about 18 minutes; it is hard to imagine what could make it longer.
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