@ Contenido Movil: Adult Content Is Not A Niche

Adult mobile content is often considered the big sleeper of the mobile content market…well, it may be in bed but it’s not sleeping.
One of the big criticisms of adult content is that mobile phones are usually used away from home, almost by definition in public places which is not where people like to view the content. That being said, there is a certain level of “hey, look at this” when groups of people get together. The spokesperson for spanish content provider Mooovil who was on the panel of the topic at Contenido Movil, takes the view that mobile phones are “deeply personal”, and likes to refer to “personal portable pleasure”.
He rolled out some figures to support his contention that mobile content was not niche but a main part of the mobile content industry.
–US adult industry is worth $14b compared to $8bill for Hollywood (cited from Forrester)
–40% of all paid content on bango is adult content
–In terms of search, Google states that 68 million queries everyday include some variation of the word porn. Vodafone has indicated that 56% of all search terms input at SFR in France is for adult content, the figure for the UK is 37%. He spoke of people searching on his companies portals and reports that: About 35% is for billable mobile content, 40% is for adult content, 10% is for other search engines, 10% mobile information and 5% services.
He also showed a case study of the 1-to-1 3G video chat lines run on Mooovil…described as “bidirectional interactive video chat”. Customers spent an average of 5.37 minutes on the call and called the chat lines on average 2.3 times per month. Video calls haven’t really taken off anywhere yet, but…
Another thing that was talked about was user generated adult content. As the spokesperson said, “the phenomona of p2p content is a very interesting one and in any category will become popular”…and indeed user generated adult content is becoming popular but is not easy to commercialize. Mooovil has such a service, but there are a lot of hurdles, the least of which is contacting people who send in photos. “It’s very dangerous content if not handled right,” he said.
Earlier in the day I spoke with L.R. Clinton Flayling of Brickhouse Mobile about the same topic and he said that user-generated adult content was so dangerous Brickhouse would never consider running it. For starters, a lot of markets require that producers of adult content gain evidence and certify that the person being shown is 18 years old or more (and rightly so), but that’s a difficult thing to do with user-generated stuff. Then there’s issues of consent…the idea is possible but tricky and it’s not really social media — it has to be uploaded and go through a gatekeeper before it is released. Flayling did say that somebody would probably take the risk at some point, and might be successful…

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