Next big thing? iPhone porn.

Poor old Apple. Just when Steve Jobs wants everyone to be talking about the 3G iPhone’s potential for awesome games and innovative GPS applications, instead the web is buzzing about the handset’s potential for adult content. According to one adult company, it’s “by far the porn-friendliest phone”. I can understand why the adult industry is scrambling to make its content available for the iPhone - millions have been sold, it’s got a great web browser, and iPhone users are demonstrably using it to look at websites and stream videos. According to one industry spokesperson, there are now a few hundred iPhone porn sites, all hoping to make their fortune from Apple’s touchscreen handsets. But is iPhone porn really going to be the next big thing? I doubt it. Will people pay to subscribe to iPhone adult websites, as they would for traditional websites? Surely not - the only money to be made here is adding a quid or two to those existing website subscriptions for access on the go. Advertising, then? Mobile advertising is such an early market, it’s hard to see anyone building a business around this. Pure promotion - people making adult DVDs setting up an iPhone site with free samples? Maybe, but again, this sounds like a good idea in theory, but whether it would actually make them more money is a big doubt. Back in the days when 3G was commonly predicted to result in huge profits for ‘girls, games and gambling’, many companies thought they’d get rich from mobile porn. And while some are making decent money, it’s certainly not the big driver of content usage it was expected to be. iPhone is unlikely to change that. I’m not saying there won’t be a market for adult content on iPhone - there clearly will - but the fact that it’ll seemingly be entirely based on accessing said porn through the Safari browser will limit it. Of course, if porn companies were allowed to sell their dedicated applications through Apple’s iPhone App Store, that’d be a different question, but current indications are they won’t be. Apple has been somewhat stony-faced in its rare proclamations on adult content in recent months.
Published by Stuart Dredgen June 24, 2008