If We Made Porn...

Here at PornHelp, we spend a lot of time thinking about a seemingly simple question: what is porn?  As with any question of that ilk, its minimalist construction belies its deep complexity.  Answering it entails not just identifying porn’s characteristics, but also (among other things) its origin, its purpose, and its impact.  There are scholars who spend careers studying porn, and for good reason.  In thinking about what porn is, we can’t just begin and end with Potter Stewart’s famous observation that we know porn when we see it.  Recognizing and labeling porn as “porn” is just the tip of the iceberg.

Today, we thought we’d engage in a little thought experiment by putting ourselves in the shoes of a pornographer.  If we made porn, what kind of porn would we create?  What would we want it to do?  How would we define success?  By exploring these questions, we hope to gain insight about why some people develop porn use problems.   

Let’s get some basics out of the way.  We wouldn’t create porn for the fun of it.  Sure, everybody wants to do what they love and love what they do, but for most working stiffs, the job is about a paycheck.  If we were pornographers, we suspect it wouldn’t be any different.  We’d make porn to make money.  Simple as that.
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With profit as our basic motive, we’d approach porn as a product, no different from toasters or vacation deals or gym memberships.  Our goal would be for people to consume our product in a manner that turns us a profit.  And, we’d probably - at least at first - aim to develop a product that appeals to the largest market segment: young and middle-aged straight men.

We’d ask ourselves: how can we make money from porn?  As we’ve written here, we’d learn that we’re not going to turn a profit by getting our customers to pay for it.  That business model is dead.  Instead, our money would be made mostly in ad-clicks and user data.  Our revenue would depend on getting our customers to click links that result in payments to us from other sites, and on keeping them on our site long enough to reveal things about themselves that make it easier for us to predict what other links they’ll click in the future, so that we can show them ads they’ll click, or sell their data to others.  

Our business, in other words, would be intensely focused on understanding and influencing customer behavior.  Our success would depend on keeping customers on our site, clicking, for as long as possible now, and getting them to come back later.  How would our product play into that equation?  By responding to what brings customers to us in the first place: helping them masturbate.  Our porn would be designed to create and sustain our customers’ sexual arousal.  We’d pay close attention to variables such as the age, race and body type of performers, and the sex acts that are shown, in order to get the perfect, most reliable, mix to keep our target demographic aroused and on our site.  

But, here's a hitch.  Masturbation tends to culminate in orgasm, and also with our customer leaving our site.  But when a customer left the site, we would lose the chance to make money from that customer’s visit.  So, we’d need to strike a balance between making our porn respond to our customer’s desire for sexual arousal while also not, shall we say, pushing him over the edge too quickly.  It would be like a casino - the longer the customer stayed the more money we would make, so we wouldn’t want to make him blow his wad (sorry, had to) right out of the gate.  Instead, we would want our customer to have a good enough time with us to keep coming back, but not so good that we lose the opportunity to make money on this visit. 

To achieve that balance, we would invest heavily in real-time customer data mining technology to track every customer’s behavior on our site.  We’d measure how much time customers hovered over links, the sequence in which they viewed areas on the site, and the characteristics of the porn they seemed to prefer.  This information would, in turn, help us tailor each customer’s experience to keep him on our site now, and to get him to come back later.  

Ultimately, our goal for each customer would be to maximize the number and duration of that customer’s visits to our site, limited only by three variables: (1) that customer’s time constraints (which we would aim to innovate around by offering new and more convenient means of access to our product), (2) that customer’s ability to control his urge to become sexually aroused and masturbate (which we would aim to reduce by delivering satisfying - but not too satisfying - product, by tailoring ads to him, and by selling his data to others who would do the same); and (3) by that customer’s physical capacity to sustain and repeat sexual arousal (which we would aim to increase by delivering well designed porn to get and keep him aroused).  

So, let’s recap.  We’d be in porn to make money.  Our money would come from our customers' ad-clicks and site-use data.  Since our customer behavior would be our profit center, we’d invest heavily in understanding how to influence it.  Our principal means of influencing customer behavior would be by developing and delivering porn that kept customers clicking and visiting now, and inspired them to return later.  Our porn’s core attribute would be its ability to create and sustain sexual arousal reliably, but not so effectively as to short circuit the duration of a customer visit.  We would monitor our customers’ behavior to gather data that would allow us to refine our product offering to maximize the number and duration of visits for each customer.

Sound Machiavellian?  Maybe.  But it’s hardly uncommon.  There are plenty of comparisons.  Vacation resorts, online retailers, travel aggregators, digital media companies - all of them invest in analytics to help them influence customer behavior.  Why would porn be any different?  Answer: it wouldn’t.  Or more precisely, it isn’t.  People don’t produce porn for the fun of it.  They do it because there is money to be made influencing your behavior through the power of your sexual response.