I have worked in a lot of industries, but one in particular interested me from an IT perspective, curious if the mechanics are still the same – they must be, as their sites are usually very media heavy, full-on marketing sales directly in your face. Multiple pop-up windows, that would usually drive users away to another site. But guess what – they all work a bit the same. And if they all work a bit the same then I also wondered how many of these sites are simply templates using a grand design, with continual research going on furiously to ensure they kept up to date with the latest technologies, media advances, security, marketing opportunities. All delivered through a website, like a slap in the face. I am talking about (if you hadn’t guess) the pornography industry, or the more euphemistically, the “adult entertainment” industry.
It’s a phenomenal force – I was working at a mobile company during the launch of a mobile video, and the development company who built the transcoding system came over from their base in Israel to implement so we could test it in our network. The company had just come over from Italy, where the only mobile formatted videos they had available were soft porn. When the first phones appeared that could display grayscale images, soon pornography became available to buy through your phone. Yes, buy! Twitter is full of id’s that simply exist to follow you, and repeatedly send you links to video sites. They appear in your email, on your phone, on initially innocent looking websites, e.t.c.
There are around 266,848,493, of which an estimated 5% are pornography related. I cannot be bothered to enter a debate of what you count as “porn”, but even going by these (2010) estimates, that’s at least 13 million websites (some above-board commercial setups, but majority have suspect website practices (malware and adware commonplace). I have no moral problem with pornography, and the industry has been lambasted because of fears of child-access. That is ridiculous, as what is needed to parents to be better educated to set up a safe browsing environment – what exactly is a website supposed to do, beyond putting a disclaimer “I am over 18″ checkbox (yes, that will do the trick). And the upcoming xxx domain extension – only legitimate people are going to buy that (or more likely, buy that one to go with all the other domain extensions they also have). I don’t see how that will help. About as useful as offering flashers a sign saying “I am a flasher”, which they can wear voluntarily.
A few years ago, I did attempt to track down companies that create these sites (I wasn’t sure if it’s internal or external), but discovered that (unsurprisingly), it is a very closed world – not that I was expecting them to advertise on jobserve! It a;; fascinates me because the way a pornography site, operates is diametrically opposed to many usability and accessibility principles, to the point of being anti-user. But given the subject matter, users are more likely to be persistent in reaching their end “goal”, putting up with multiple popups, aggravating overlays, suspect messages, anti-virus/firewall having a panic attack.
I would be interested as part of research, to learn more about what it’s like to either develop or test on web projects in these industries.
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