media sites with options to ‘like’, ‘follow’ and ‘share’ explicit content from ‘friends’.
Pornography has gone social. Sexually-oriented content is now being presented in the same format as mainstream social media websites. And here, porn is not just about watching.
One can “like”, share and comment on nude photographs of “friends” that one has added or people one “follows”. One website, for example, hosts a weekly “challenge” where participants are invited to send images of them performing sexual acts and a winner is picked.
It is not just YouTube anymore. Some have based their design, user-interface and even names on popular social networks. A Pinterest-inspired pornographic website has been named Pinsex. Like Pinterest, it allows users to “pin” or bookmark X-rated images, gifs and videos.
Another one inspired from Instagram, called Pornostagram and now known as Uplust, features pornographic images that have been uploaded by users after adding Instagram-like filters. And there are no prizes for guessing what F***book is modelled on. Launched in 2014, it has positioned itself as an adult dating and social networking hybrid site.
Christian Thorn, CEO of Pinsex, says that the social space had been left unexplored by online pornography. “Content consumption and engagement has dramatically changed with the onset of social media. The primary goals for our platforms have always been making sex and porn social and breaking taboos,” says Thorn, who also runs another website called Pingay.
The pin format, he says, works for pornographic content as it is “extremely visual”.
Thorn says his enterprise saw the maximum growth in the Indian market in May this year. “We had around 1,00,000 visits from India alone then, around 90% of them coming from mobile phones.” he says. Six million users visited the website in March-April and of them, 60,000 are registered.
Authoritative figures on the worth of the online porn industry are notoriously hard to come by.
In 2012, Fabian Thylmann, owner of the world’s largest online pornography empire Manwin, was arrested for evading tax on a reported annual income of $100 million. A 2011 book by neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, studied 400 million internet searches between July 2009 and July 2010. Of these, 13% was for erotic content.
Meanwhile, mainstream pornographic websites have been battling against pornographic content on their platforms. In March, Vine, the six-second video sharing network, updated its terms of service prohibiting pornographic content. “For more than 99% of our users, this doesn’t really change anything.
For the rest: we don’t have a problem with explicit sexual content on the Internet — we just prefer not to be the source of it,” they announced on their blogpost.
When Yahoo acquired Tumblr in 2013, CEO Marissa Mayer said that while the parent company wouldn’t crack down on pornographic blogs, it would keep advertising away from it.
Under the Indian law, watching pornography is not illegal. However, sharing or disseminating it is — with a penalty of imprisonment of up to three years for publishing and transmitting “obscene” content under section 67 of the IT Act. There are stricter rules against child pornography.
For social porn websites, legal concerns include “abusive” content and copyright issues.
“We have a reporting system where users can flag/report content and we then take action. We have had a few takedown requests regarding copyright issues (less than 10 in over a year),” says Thorn. Uplust comes with a feature where one can report “obscene, harassing, abusive content”.
Next stop: mobile phones. But there is a catch. Android and iOS app stores have strict policies against explicit content.
“Though the policies limit our reach there are other ways to reach app-users so we will focus on this as well,” says Thorn.
