A return to honesty: grappling with the future of online porn [SXSW]

Everyone on the internet looks at porn. You do, I do, but more worryingly, so do children of very young ages. Given the unchecked proliferation of extreme porn genres on the internet, this is not a particularly good thing. On the other hand, sex is an incredibly taboo subject in polite society (much like international cricketer AB De Villiers’ musical career). Cindy Gallop, CEO and founder of new porn startup Make Love Not Porn (NSFW), says this is a recipe for disaster.

Since there is a vacuum of honest discussion about sex in society, she told a packed auditorium at SxSW 2013, the majority of young people (especially men) now get their ideas about what constitutes “normal” sex from pornography. What society needs, says Gallop, is a place where people can remind themselves what real, honest copulation really looks like.

Gallop has invented, found funding for and launched such a service and called it Make Love Not Porn. At MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, people can submit videos of themselves having sex. These videos can then be rented by the site’s members for a period of three weeks, at US$5 a video, which is split evenly between the site and the uploader.

Revenue-sharing and digital content rental are not exactly new on the internet, and certainly not in the porn industry, but Gallop’s social mission is a lot more interesting. She asks her contributors to submit the kind of smut that reflects what real world sex is really like: often unglamorous, occasionally quite messy, sometimes even a little hilarious. “When people film themselves fucking, they don’t show the outtakes. But there’s a market for that,” says Gallop, and her new website aims to be that market.

Elsewhere at SxSW, the mainstream porn industry was also taking a long, hard look at itself. Porn has always been the one part of the internet that didn’t struggle to make money. But now, thanks to the incredible glut of free-to-watch porn sites like YouPorn, Redtube and others, it is becoming increasingly tricky to make money in the sector, despite virile demand.

The future of porn, said Alex Hemy and Stephen Yagielowicz of industry news site Xbiz, is in personalised, interactive experiences. Rather than erecting paywalls, up-and-coming pornographers are finding new, sellable ways to connect customers with their favuorite adult performers and their specific carnal interests. In other words: if you enjoy watching people tape lettuce to their forehead, it’s only a click away.