If, like me, you’ve maintained (for a few years, or a dozen) an adult blog or adult site of any kind, you might have noticed that your number of readers has gone down (a little or a lot) in recent years. Did you wonder why? Did you wonder where those readers went? Did people get tired of looking at sex online?

No. Listen as Business Insider explains:

Mobile Apps Are Killing The Free Web, Handing A Censored Duopoly to Google And Apple

In a nutshell:

With just two simple charts, Chris Dixon has pointed out one of those things that is both totally obvious but – when expressed succinctly – slightly terrifying.

The Web as we know it is being replaced, slowly but surely, by mobile apps. And access to those apps is controlled by just two companies: Apple and Google.

…

Here is his first chart, showing the way mobile users are exceeding desktop users on the Web:

mobile web use blows past exceeds surpasses desktop web use in 2014

In theory, that shouldn’t matter to your adult site, people can just browse it on their smartphone instead of with their desktop. Why should you care?

You should care because people mostly don’t browse much of anything on their smartphones. As the article puts it:

People on mobile phones and tablets are using the Web less and less, proportionately:

web use on mobile devices is a tiny fraction of app use

So there are now more people using mobile devices than are using desktop browsers. And on their mobile devices, they tend not to browse. They use apps, overwhelmingly. Do you have an app for your adult site? Not for Apple/IOS devices, you don’t, because Steve Jobs hated porn so badly that Apple still bans anything vaguely sexy from its app store even though he’s long dead (ding dong) and decently buried.

You probably don’t have an Android app for your adult site, either; Google’s app store has always banned explicit content, and recently tightened the rules to exclude “erotic” content as well. It’s possible in theory to distribute Android apps outside of Google’s store, but from what I hear, it’s difficult in practice to get any kind of numerical traction for adult apps. (The best venue I know of is adult app store Mikandi.)

Does this story have a moral? I’d say it has two:

1) If you have an adult site, you want to get an app for that.
2) You might pray that Samsung keeps building Android devices that kick IOS ass.

Good luck, we’re all gonna need it.

Similar Sex Blogging: