I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted

by Nick Bilton

  As these numbers illustrate, not only are people willing to pay for digital content, they also will fork over money for special formats. The owner of one video website explained that in the past, he really had only two options for showing an adult video: VHS and DVD. Now he’s willing to do it in a variety of formats—in bytes, snacks, and meals—and users “have a choice with how they want to view it.” So if someone wants to watch a thirty-second clip on a mobile phone, he’ll sell it to that person—just as arcade owners sold short bits decades ago. Does the customer want a feature-length high-definition DVD? Step right up; he’ll be glad to provide whatever people are willing to pay for.

  These pornography sites charge any number of different prices for their content. But these companies realized that they have to make the content that consumers want, and they have to make it available anywhere, at reasonable prices, any time the consumer wants it. Most important, since production costs and distribution channels no longer create a barrier to entry, if these companies don’t do that, someone else can and will.

  To bring in revenue, the smaller sites have recognized that advertising can be enough to pay the bills and keep the lights on. But the ads must be relevant to their audience. So if viewers see an advertisement similar and relevant to a clip they are about to watch, there’s a good chance they’ll click through to the ad’s link. But if the consumer is watching porn and the advertisement is for a car, the ad probably won’t generate many clicks.

  Catering to consumers’ specific preferences also helps fight the wave of free or stolen material online, the plague that is causing so much angst and frustration in the news and mainstream entertainment businesses. This digital shoplifting dates back to the dawn of adult content on the Web but has expanded over the last few years. For instance, a bevy of websites called tube sites—the porn versions of YouTube where anyone can upload and download content—have sprung up to post ripped-off or user-submitted content under names like You-porn, Red Tube, and Xtube. Just as ABC, CBS, and Viacom must confront having their content posted by viewers on YouTube and other online video outlets, the pornography industry has been forced to deal with this illegal content sharing too.

  Although some video sites have tried to shut the tube sites down, other porn purveyors have taken a different approach, says Alptraum, the editor of Fleshbot. Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees trying to shut down tube sites—money that many smaller sites don’t have—the content makers decided to adopt the old mantra “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

  Producers started uploading teaser versions of their own content on the free video sites. They wanted to create experiences that would lure a user from a tube site to their own sites, where more content—and related advertising or sales offers—awaited. To do this they took two approaches: The first was sharing new, original content that didn’t already exist on a DVD—content that couldn’t have been illegally copied and posted yet. It was sort of like offering a free toy with a Happy Meal at McDonald’s: When all is said and done, the consumer isn’t sure if the toy or the food is free—but it doesn’t really matter as long as McDonald’s made a sale.

  The second approach involved upping the stakes. If someone uploaded an illegal version of a video to a tube site, some content owners would upload their own version in the form of a higher-quality clip, only slightly longer, with links and ads embedded to help bring the viewers back to their home pages. In many instances this has worked. Go to a tube site today and you’ll see high-quality video uploaded by porn creators sitting next to stolen content that’s a little old and grainy. Which one are you going to click on?

  After my California trip, I went back to Alptraum to share my findings. She invited me to her office so that she could show me the results of a survey she had recently given to her readers.

  Fleshbot, where Alptraum is the editor, is a part of a much larger company called Gawker Media, which is the parent company to several well-known blogs.5 Gawker was started by Nick Denton, a journalist turned entrepreneur who began the company in 2002 with a technology blog called Gizmodo. At that time, “blog” was still a very insider-technology term. It’s true today that almost everyone has a blog, even the White House. The New York Times has several—and I work for one of them! But in 2002, blogs were sparse and were considered more of an online diary than a viable business. When I asked Denton his reasoning in starting the website, he answered with a very logical response.

  “One day I was reading Wired magazine,” he explained, “and I thought to myself, Why does this publication only come out once a month? Why can’t it happen all the time—maybe even every hour or every few minutes?” Gizmodo is now one of the biggest technology gadget blogs on the Internet and draws in more than 150 million page views a month. After the success of Gizmodo, Denton decided to expand. More blogs were launched off the Gizmodo concept, including the well-known gossip blog Gawker and a variety of other sites. In a similar fashion to the porn industry, Denton realized that customers want niche products. Collectively, the Gawker Media sites generate nearly 400 million page views a month, and all of them are free, able to deliver niche advertising to a niche audience. Denton was able to grow the sites so quickly and become almost instantly profitable partly because he didn’t have to battle the forces of a bricks-and-mortar business. There are no printing presses or distribution problems to deal with. Instead, the blogs’ writers are paid by the clicks on their stories and can work from anywhere. (Most work from home.) A handful of editors, including Alptraum, work in an office in New York City.

  The Gawker Media offices are housed in an old garment building in an area of the city called NoHo, occupying a floor with deep-red brick walls and rickety wooden floors. The offices are set up in a way that reminds me of a supermarket with long aisles. But instead of dairy products and cereal lining the shelves, prolific young bloggers sit at rows of desks in front of computer screens, typing away and serving up content by the pound.

  The receptionist pointed me to Alptraum’s desk at the far end of the room. As I wandered in that direction past each blogger’s desk, I glanced at computer screens displaying different niche topics. One person was looking at pictures of a souped-up truck for the car blog Jalopnik. Another played with some gadgets, probably for the tech blog Gizmodo. At the next desk, someone was editing images of a video game, maybe a writer for the gaming blog Kotaku. Finally, I got to Alptraum’s desk, where, as you might imagine, her screen was covered with pictures of naked people—specifically, a video of two people having sex.

  Alptraum looked up without making any attempt to hide the screen and said, “Hey, Nick! Great to see you! Just give me a second. We just got this new celebrity sex video, and I want to get it up on the site.” I watched as she bounced back and forth between her Web browser windows and quickly published the post.

  When she was done, I asked if she ever felt uncomfortable looking at porn all day at work. “No,” she replied. “It’s my job, and I don’t really even think about it as porn anymore. I think of it as providing content for an audience.

  “Sure, my screen is filled with penises and tits,” she continued, “but that doesn’t mean my job is any different than the guy over there writing about video games or gadgets. It’s just niche content that people are interested in.”

  She told me about a survey she had just asked her readers to fill out on the Fleshbot blog: “Porn Worth Paying For: What Makes You Open Your Wallet?” http://fleshbot.com/5318653/porn-worth-paying-for-what-makes-you-open-your-wallet. The readers’ responses were split into two camps. Some said they would love to pay for porn online but the prices were still too high. “I refuse to pay more than $15 for any porn DVD,” wrote one reader. Another said, “I was going to buy my first porn DVD just last week, looked at the prices and laughed and went to download instead.”

  But most of the readers said they would pay for quality or storytelling. “I tend to pay for decent ‘plot driven’ feature types more tha
n anything,” wrote one reader. “I’m all about the niche content. Those are the people I want to give my money to,” wrote another. “Well-crafted feature porn is far more enjoyable to me, and even worth paying for,” yet another said. “I’m happy to pay for a quality website that’s full of great content. I’m seriously considering getting with plumperpass.com,” another confident reader wrote.

  Even in the down and dirty world of smut, quality matters. “We can see people have been online for years paying for niche, quality content, and interaction. Those numbers exist,” Alptraum said. “As long as the price is right and the content is professionally shot and offered in any number of formats, people will pay.”

  In other words, people will pay for well-packaged offerings—even in the face of free alternatives.

  Still, Alptraum cautioned, this is not always the case. “There are some instances where people are happy just getting off to a really poorly shot free sex video—even sometimes shot from a shaking grainy cell-phone camera,” she said. “But for most people, even when it comes to porn, quality will always be worth paying for”—though she added sternly, “as long as the price is right.”

  But porn companies that have tried to charge too much have seen their content stolen and shared all over the Web. “The right price, quality, niche, and immediacy,” Alptraum reiterated; “that’s what people will pay for.”

  Experience Matters

  In my travels through the porn industry, it was evident that the smaller start-up companies are innovating and pushing the boundaries of the medium. They are listening to their customers and creating content that customers are willing to pay for and delivering it to the devices where they want to enjoy it.

  Some porn companies recognize that today’s customers are also consumnivores—in one form or another, we’re all consumnivores, especially the next generation. We’re constantly cutting up content, picking out the best pieces, and passing it along. In the past, my mother used to do something similar, but on a much smaller scale. She would grab a pair of scissors and snip interesting articles from the local newspaper or recipes she wanted to try from a magazine. Now a generation exists with the mentality that those scissors have been replaced with a mouse and an Internet connection. And whereas my mother used to cut out entire articles from the paper, the equivalent today is to slice and dice words, images, paragraphs, and video clips. The audience doesn’t necessarily need to pay for someone to do that for them.

  But there’s one other thing I discovered the next-generation consumer will pay for online: better experiences, which often grow out of better storytelling.

  Sometimes that takes the form of relationships—not in the sexual sense but in the way you connect with your consumers and create new communities.

  For more than a decade, well before sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendster existed, some players in the adult industry engaged in their own version of social media. They didn’t really know what they were doing, and no label was applied to their practice. They simply recognized the importance of developing a connection and community with their audiences.

  In the late 1990s, when niche pornography sites began popping up all over the Web, some adult actors and actresses began going on message boards on their websites and chitchatting online with the customers who paid for their content. Sometimes they would describe a scene they were going to shoot or even share their plans for that evening. They tried to engage in one-on-one discussions with the customers and in doing so created the bond many are trying to create today with social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. In those early days, they recognized the importance of conversation.

  That proved to be somewhat of a turning point. There are many reasons people steal content, as I’ll discuss later. But one of the major problems of the Web is the lack of humanization. People are oblivious to the fact that a human being is on the other side of the digital information they are consuming. The people who copy adult DVDs and upload them to tube sites don’t consider that a human being might be making a living from that content. But 99 percent of those uploading the footage would never walk into a XXX store and steal the actual DVD.

  By going into these forums and sharing their personal stories with people who had access to their content, the porn stars added a dose of humanity and community to their digital images—a very difficult task online but one that is being introduced slowly by mainstream publishers with the adoption of social networks. Once visitors engaged in conversations on the porn sites, many of them no longer felt comfortable stealing and sharing the work of people who were trying to make a living. They simply saw them in a different light.

  Personal stories add one dimension, but great storytelling on the screen or the page consistently stands out. Yes, it’s true that the adult industry will face competition from some people performing in front of a webcam in a bedroom or using a mobile phone connected to the Web. The mainstream media are going to suffer the same fate too. What’s to stop someone from writing a blog post about a breaking news event because she finds it interesting or reviewing a restaurant he enjoyed? Nothing. And as has happened with the porn industry, the next generation of content and media will exist in the same way: professional sitting alongside amateur. Although better content and better stories nearly always trump amateur hour, they clearly will coexist next to each other in the future—just as porn content does today on the Web.

  But the porn industry shows us that people will pay for good storytelling. Ollie Joone understands this better than most in the adult industry. Joone entered the porn world in 1993, well before the Internet was a household necessity, and began making adult CDs. The company he cofounded is called Digital Playground and claims to have 40 percent of the adult video market, providing skin flicks for hotels, cable, and pay-per-view TV. Joone says adult films aren’t just about selling sex; they’re also about storytelling and the overall experience. The company still uses big-name porn stars and has built part of its business with clever, sexy spoofs of popular films, such as Pirates, a play on Pirates of the Caribbean. The Pirates version, a multimillion-dollar production that was actually shot on a ship, won an R rating and made millions of dollars in video sales. Pirates II is now in the works.

  Digital Playground’s tagline is “porn worth paying for.” I asked Joone how he differentiates his work from a quick clip of someone naked. He explained it like this:

  Imagine you’re watching a movie with a dramatic car chase. If it was a really good chase, with police cars and sirens, the quality of the video almost wouldn’t matter. Just the content by itself would be dramatic. Now imagine that you know the backstory of this chase, that it’s a life-and-death matter, that someone’s been shot—maybe they just robbed a bank—or that one of the cop cars is stolen too. It would make the video experience much more compelling. Add a heightened level of quality and interaction to this and you’ve got an experience people will pay for. It’s the same exact mentality with pornography, he said.

  The day I interviewed Joone, he was off to shoot a scene for a fictitious sex party, using a new technology that would make the action look three-dimensional. Using equipment that allowed up to a dozen cameras to record the action at the same time from different angles, he could produce a picture that would allow movie watchers to look toward any direction in the room, see the scene from multiple angles, and feel almost a part of the action, much like the experience of a very good video game.

  As I wrapped it up, I asked Joone what was next for his industry. Technology isn’t available yet to do what he’d like to do, he said. But he believes the next generation of porn and storytelling will be hyperpersonalized, placing you almost directly in the scene. That will give you control over what you see—almost like you’re standing on a holodeck, a room that uses holographs to simulate reality.

  How long will the industry have to wait before the technology exists and he can start to create content like this?

  “Oh, we’re not going to wait,” he
quickly replied. “We’re going to build it.”

  Looks like the porn industry is leading the way after all.

  2

  scribbling monks and comic books

  it’s ok—you’ve survived this before

  Thus the telephone, by bringing music and ministers into every house, will empty the concert halls and the churches.…

  –“The Telephone,” New York Times, March 22, 1876

  The world has been going to hell for a long, long time. So if you’re feeling rattled by the stunning growth of today’s new social media and are afraid that the way humans communicate is going to change rapidly—and not in a good way—your fears are understandable. Time and again, new technologies have been seen as frightening, intimidating, and a sure road to ruin.

  We shudder at the unknown. We know deep in our hearts—sometimes quite correctly—that the world is about to be screwed up in the name of progress. New developments often seemed poised to ruin a perfectly good way of life. At various times, they have seemed dangerous (or even life-threatening), destined to destroy our personal relationships, or poisonous to our culture, our language, or our basic manners.

  Yet we’re still here. Despite the hand-wringing of the New York Times, we still go to concerts and lectures, even though the much less expensive option of enjoying music and speeches is readily available on our superthin iPods.

  That possibility seemed unimaginable to the newspaper in 1876, when it wrote about the potential impact of the research of a Professor Reuss. “A distinguished German performer on telegraphic instruments who has recently made an invention which cannot fail to prove of great interest to musicians and, indeed, to the general public,” the paper said. “The telephone—for that is the name of the new invention—is intended to convey sounds from one place to another over ordinary telegraph wires, and can be used to transmit the uproar of a Wagnerian orchestra or the gentle cooing of a female lecturer.”1 That seemed to be a good thing and certainly convenient. But there was a dark side: