Social Media #Pornocalypse Is Why We Can’t Have Nudes In Playboy
It’s no secret that since 2005 or so, I have attempted to make a living at sex blogging. What may be news (if hardly surprising) is that I am no longer succeeding. The single biggest reason (and what I currently perceive as my largest business challenge) is that in 2015 there is no hope of growth in web traffic without social media, and social media companies are (predominantly) hostile to adult content. Generalizing: you can’t put (or link to) smut on social media, you can’t grow or even maintain your web traffic without social media, and so it’s very hard to make money on the adult web. Traffic and revenue decline, and there’s no way to chase it where it is. Back in 2012 at ErosBlog’s 10 anniversary, I wrote:
But what about the future? Will ErosBlog still be here in 2017? I’m less confident than I was in 2007; I grow older and move more slowly, while the world speeds up and accelerates into the future. But I’m persistent, and I’m stubborn. Unless I stop being entertained by porn (which seems unlikely) I can’t imagine not having bits of it that need pointed at and talked about. So, just as I did in 2007, I’ll say “I truly do hope so!”
I still hope so, yes I do. But it’s no longer clear that ErosBlog can survive as a profit-making enterprise. One of these days it may become a hobby, and a hobby with a much cheaper and less reliable server at that. I sometimes flatter myself that crowdfunding might offer a way forward, but it’s not immune from #pornocalypse either.
Enough about ErosBlog. Icons of the adult industry much bigger than me are struggling with the same dynamic. When your problems are also Hugh Hefner’s problems, you’re at least in good company. When I drunkenly posted the other night about the then-breaking news that Playboy was going to be putting panties on all of its Playmates going forward, commenter André adroitly identified the story as a #pornocalypse situation:
Pornocalypse comes to Playboy. Of all places. It was a common sense business decision, apparently. Porn is everywhere, so Playboy had long lost their edge, and in an age of sanitized social media, their only way to make it into mainstream platforms (Facebook et at) to — in their mind — secure a viable future (doubtful!) was to clean their act up and hide the nudity that offends the terms of service of those platforms.
André should write for Wired magazine. Here’s Wired:
Times have changed. Nudity and pornography are ubiquitous on the Internet. And people are buying fewer magazines overall, choosing instead to read online. Meanwhile, those same readers increasingly come to stories through third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Those platforms have their own rules, and often prohibit or limit nudity. For Playboy to survive in a platform-driven world, the pressure to conform to those standards is immense–so much so that the publication is abandoning the core of its brand’s identity.
This isn’t really a new thing for Playboy. The company already transitioned its website away from full nudity, for the same reason:
Playboy’s shift isn’t completely new. The magazine re-launched Playboy.com last year “as a safe-for-work site,” and has seen significant success. “Tens of millions of readers come to our non-nude website and app every month for, yes, photos of beautiful women, but also for articles and videos from our humor, sex and culture, style, nightlife, entertainment and video game sections,” the magazine says.
The company’s chief executive, Scott Flanders [says] that some content was made SFW “in order to be allowed on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.” The Times also reports that following the website’s shift away from nudity traffic to the site increased “to about 16 million from about four million uniques users per month” as “the average age of its reader dropped from 47 to just over 30″–in other words, a demographic totally at home on social media.
Here’s the Wired summary of social media’s hostility to adult content:
On many social media platforms, the so-called community standards barring explicit content aren’t that different from what Hefner felt he was rebelling against when he famously published Marilyn Monroe’s nude centerfold back in 1953. Facebook, the company says, “restricts the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content.” Twitter requires that sensitive content like nudity be marked as such so it can be hidden behind a warning. Celebrities and activists have had little luck in their campaign to have Instagram “free the nipple.” Apple’s App Store guidelines, meanwhile, warn that “apps containing pornographic material… will be rejected.”
This, my friends, is why we can’t have nice adult things. Discovery is no longer via search. (Google killed search for adult sites several years back anyway.) Discovery is via social media. And social media is hostile to adult. It’s not just me. Maybe “Bacchus” at a dumb little 13-year-old sex blog just doesn’t “get” how to market on the modern platforms-and-silos internet. But when freakin’ Hugh Hefner himself abandons the core of his venerable brand, which is models wearing no panties, because the social media platforms are hostile to ladies without panties? It’s not just me. It’s a thing.
I think I shall call it #Pornocalypse.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=15073
Diversity is the answer…
and should be joining or building an old style “ring around”
A good example: Rule 5 link around, see blog link
For me, the solution is simply to publish tasteful (and often ridiculous) “erotic” header pictures instead of bad bad bad – dare I say it? – boobs or genitals. The main content remains exactly the same. But then again, I don’t really deal in porn but just in education about unusual sexualities so it’s not as hard (heh) for me.
How do we fight against it?
I don’t use facebook,twitter etc. but they still have massive influence over what I can see and read. Apart from not supporting them what can we do to stem the #pornocalypse? I find the control of access to information to be really scary. Where is the opposition to it? How can we overthrow our Orwellian overlords?
Lead us Bacchus, in revolution and we will tear down their walls and free our minds.
Or maybe I’ll just express my dissatifaction in a tweet.
Revolution is not really part of my skillset, JA. There’s been talk from time to time of decentralized serverless social networking software, and such things are possible; but how to get from “hey, I have a nifty idea for leveraging public key encryption, P2P, and the blockchain” to deployed code and then to broad deployment sufficient to enjoy network effects, that I do not know.
I always made a point of seeking out Playboy on every social media platform I joined. Didn’t know their site was now SFW. Still adult businesses that are not as well-known have their accounts suspended or terminated even though the account like Playboy does not show any nudity. The process is very frustrating.
On a separate note I believe mobile payments are the future. It’s kind of like a quasi dark web. I noticed how sex workers provide personal items (pics, vids, panties) via kik, snapchat, et al. and are paid via Snapcash etc. Granted (just saw a retweet from Violet Blue that) Square started terminating the accounts of women they *think* may be sex workers still it’s hard on their end to figure out what’s going on offsite i.e., behind closed doors.
Which is my point really. We don’t like the way these corporations abuse their power, but billions of people sign up to their services which then gives them the authority to tell us what we can view.
Any alternative we could come up with, (if we knew what blockchain deployed code meant), would only be a minority, and struggle to make a difference.
There are alternatives, but who doesn’t use Google/facebook/twitter/Amazon/etc
Cheryl, it’s been my impression that Playboy and some other major adult brands from the glossy paper days get rather a lot of special treatment from the social media companies. If they eschew nudity, they’re often allowed to post PG-13 sexy stuff and link directly to their sexy site, something that less-well-known pornographers can’t typically get away with.
JA, that’s exactly the problem with the big data silos. Once they hit a certain critical mass, the network effect is so strong that nobody can afford not to be on there. Which is fine unless you’re an entity that can’t pass a “real name” test, or that’s unwelcome on principle even if you comply with the rules.
There’s no obvious reason why “FreeFace” couldn’t achieve a critical mass on its own, given enough time; and indeed I think something like that will be a useful social network in the future. But achieving the scale of Facebook is something nobody but Facebook has ever managed. Competing with that is not going to be fast or easy.
Flattered, Bacchus… And worried!
What intrigues me is that Playboy claims it gets out of the nudity business because there’s now too much of it – for free – rather than acknowledge that it’s because of an opposite trend to “sanitize” the web. Both trends are real, but at odds with each other. Will one side eventually win?
Perhaps it’s time a campaign was mounted against pornophobia using the models set by those fighting the likes of xenophbia and homophobia…
Corporations will respond once they’re kicked squarely in their bag of silver dollars.
Don’t be distracted by the nude girls.
The real problem is the user that is “boxed” into a closed system. Facebook, Apple, Google try their best to keep the audience inside their closed world, a world where they control the ads.
In the early years of blogging you had been on your own, following links from blogrolls, like on this blog. Nowadays most people only search on Google, or hop around fbook, staying all time in controlled territory.
This will become evem more dominant with tools like “Now on tap” by Google.
The web is turning into a few global shopping malls, leaving the indepent ones outside as soon as they do not fit into their branding.
It’s only about control.
You’re not wrong, Maud. As I said in the post, this is my single biggest business problem as an independent website that caters to grownups.
[…] like remaking themselves as “lifestyle brands” — this was the brutal year when even Playboy briefly flirted with the notion of abandoning nudity because they were bleeding losses and couldn’t get any social media traction due to […]