CES 2010: Web porn companies urged to consider Google's phone OS for future growth.
Between the global financial crisis, rampant piracy and a growing community of amateurs willing to share their most intimate moments for free, trying to turn a dollar putting adult content online is tougher than ever.
While retailers of sex toys say that 2009 was a good year for tech-driven devices, the consensus at a seminar on online marketing for adult businesses at the Adult Entertainment Expo was that making money from content is more and more difficult.
"2009 was a pretty horrendous year for most of us," said Jay Kopita from adult webmaster resource YNOT. "A lot of us thought the adult industry was bulletproof, and we found out that it's not so much."
Selling content onto mobile phones offers one of the few potential bright spots."Mobile is an emerging market, it's growing substantially," said Quentin Boyer from adult fim producer Pink Visual. "Within that, niche markets are good."
Boyer singled out Android because of the relatively straightforward way of selling applications on the platform, the large pool of potential developers and the surge in interest following the release of the Nexus One. "The Google phone is going to go great. That would be tempting for me, to look at ways to move into the Android app market,"
Pink Visual has already taken a leap into the fray. "We started work on Droid-related products when Droid was basically a rumour," Boyer said. "You have to get out ahead of that curve."
A raft of software development kits to enable easy building of phone-friendly pay sites are also likely to appear in the near future. "The fastest way into the mobile market is through a white label framework someone else has built," said consultant Kevin Godbee of 3.0 Consulting.
Not everyone in the industry is convinced that mobile offers major benefits, however. LoveHoney, a UK online retailer of adult products, launched a mobile version of its site last year, but hasn't yet seen much benefit.
"It has not yet been a significant source of sales for us," said cofounder Richard Longhurst. "People do different things on their phone. Really we're not seeing a major increase in sales through mobile yet."