If necessity is the mother of invention, then pornography must be its father. In fact, the entire family's been spending a lot of time online recently. To see what's hot in Internet technology today, just click over to your nearest porn site for some illuminating lessons in how to get eyeballs, track visitors, and create sites so sticky users actually can't get out.
The Internet seems tailored to adult entertainment; like porn, it's a visual medium. And it's private. "You don't have to hide your car behind a sleazy building in a shady part of town anymore," says George Hunt, who owns the $300,000-a-year online adult-film distributor Thursday Night Video Communications.
It shouldn't surprise us that adult-entertainment retailers flocked to the Internet years before the stock market boom and the birth of Amazon.com. "As far as I can tell, as soon as humans discover something cool, they start putting it to use for the things they know they like," says Content Love Knowles, operator of Bondagemistress .com, an adult- entertainment reseller. "And humans like sex."
At the turn of the 20th century, the popularity of pornographic photography helped drive the camera's evolution. More recently, Sony made the now-legendary blunder of refusing to license its Betamax technology to adult-entertainment providers, a decision that allowed VHS to edge Betamax out of the market in the early '80s. "Technology is driven by adult entertainment . . . because sex then sells the technology," says Knowles.
