Heavy competition.
One hardly has to know how to conduct an internet search in order to find porn. Yes, stories exist about people who have misspelled "sex" when entering the term into a search engine, but it's my guess that even in cases such as that, the desired results were quite easily reached.
Most porn sites, of course, are in it for the money, and after giving you a taste of what's available (and after having you tell the truth about being over 18) require you take out your credit card before offering you more. Would a network of freely accessible porn attract users? Would it offer competition to the professional sites that almost unquestionably are also exploitative of their often underage models? Free do it yourself video sites, based on the YouTube model, exist, and they seem to be doing well. The Wikipedia entry on YouPorn, perhaps the most popular of these (numerous) sites, tells us that
PornoTube and YouPorn are seen as posing notable competition for paid pornographic websites and traditional magazine and DVD-based pornography.
In that same Wikipedia entry we learn that that:
YouPorn also operates a chatroom, an online dating service and cam chat shows.
and we also get what seems to be the mind-boggling statistic:
YouPorn consumes more than two terabytes of bandwidth each day, which has caused the site to go down at times due to the sheer volume of users and the large file size of the videos.
I'm primarily interested, however, in the question of whether sites such as this constitute online communities. The existence of chatrooms suggests that perhaps they do (but I haven't checked what goes on there). Similarly to YouTube, YouPorn videos give statistics on viewing, post user ratings, and allow comments. (Yes, I learned all this from entering the site.) There are videos there with tens of thousands of views. Some even get into the low hundreds of thousands. Although the videos get rated, I didn't notice that many viewers were actually also adding their rating (on a scale of 1 to 5), and I didn't
find any videos at which viewers had left comments. The infrastructure for community might be in place, but I didn't get the impression that it was actually being used, as though people were simply saying "thanks for the free porn, but don't expect me to interact with you".
Go to: In the eyes of the beholder?, or
Go to: The plain brown paper envelope column.