Ask YC: Would you fund an adult themed start up?
Three categories of adult themed I might be thinking of:
"Maxim" style, where it's targetted at males, but doesn't have nudity.
"Playboy" style, which is similar to "Maxim" style but does have nudity.
"Porntube" style which is full on pornography.
Personally I think there is big potential in the disjointed and mostly pirated adult themed sites of today. Three benefits I see of this business could be:
- easy(easier) to gain traction, several sites I know which launched in the 2008-2009 time frame have reached top 100 sites globally. - lack of innovation in this space, mostly pirated content and taking an existing paradigm and switching it to adult themed (playboy does an online version of their magazine, various you tube copy cats) - large profit potential, I know several low(er) traffic sites which are making plenty off ads, there is an IPO potential here I'm sure
Long story short, I have several ideas for adult themed "hacks" which could be big.
But the fact reminds I know of no YC funded adult themed web sites and am not sure the YC program would support such a thing.
I posted this to HN also to generate some hopefully insightful discussion.
74 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadp.s. "lack of innovation in this space"...I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. From what I understand porn has been driving innovation for a lot of things
Absolutely. First credit card payments, first (live) video delivery, first affiliate systems and so on.
And that includes gambling / gaming and so on.
Right now I think the major players in the market have all gone through several boom-bust cycles, and are concentrating on billing and other financials.
Some of the larger ones own their own IPSPs and are facilitating payments for third parties, ironically most of them non-adult. This is to manage the charge-back rates, because historically large adult companies have been literally blown up by taking their banks down.
I used to be fairly close to people working in the adult business, so my knowledge is at least a few years old, the innovation right now is centered more around business models, finance, diversification and other non-technical items.
I think that is in part because all the basic components to run an online business are now well understood and there are plenty of ways to deliver media.
edit: maybe mobile devices will really create a shift, but from what I've seen so far it will be an incremental thing rather than something that just hits one year and will leave the way we interact with online resources unrecognizable from the year before.
I doubt if there will be any major technological development, inside or outside porn until we hit something like 'the street' from Stephensons novels.
That makes complete sense - that competition would be driving innovation, and me not seeing it means that it's on the back-end. The process/model/non-tech stuff rather than the technology.
I'm not sure if that is the case. (link below is NSFW)
http://gizmodo.com/5129520/realtouch-teledildonics-as-design...
As we're seeing people embedding the web in many other devices, the same is happening in porn.
It's bizarre, but I don't think we've seen the zenith of porn tech yet
[note: I'm in the adult industry, as many of you found out tonight here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1193169 ]
I completely overlooked that :)
One of the porn company's tech guys claimed they were the first to pull of live HD streaming and they had a TV network calling for consultation.
We've had contact with VCs and some very large companies that we have partnered with, and invariably the one thing that floats to the top is brand damage.
This is the big fear of any large player, as soon as there is even the remotest risk of that you have a problem.
That pretty much rules out your second and third option, leaving the first.
And YC being a tech oriented investor rather than a media company I figure that that would not be their cup of tea either, but in the end the best way to find out is to ask Paul Graham directly or to simply apply.
My guess is you'll be turned down, but that's worth very little, it's just a guess. Based on the companies that they've invested in in the past and what I know about the people behind YC.
The first is something that you'd have to spend quite a bit of time and money on mocking up to the point where you can show a potential investor what you're planning to do.
The people you'd pitch to would probably be established players in the market that are looking at expanding their offering without taking on more employees.
Personally, I'd rather get out than in to such a line of business, the website that I run with the 'adult component' has been quietly on the market for years but so far no takers.
(A fund on lines of fbFund or iPhone apps fund.)
I don't think there is really room for such a fund, simply because the competition is so fierce that you would have to do 100's or more investments to get one that gives you a good ROI. The successful ones can bootstrap, the others die and try again.
One of the more interesting observations that I read on the adult market somewhere (I can't find where, sorry) is that the adult and the gaming industry are the only two 'mature' internet industries, in the sense that the cards have been dealt and new entrants have a very hard time getting traction.
That alone would be a reason to make an investor very skittish.
You do have a TONNE of 10-100K type of exits in adult--but that's hardly attractive even for angels. It's often great money for one-two person shop though.
Dang, this is starting to sound like a not bad idea.
(I'm with vaksel too: remember Betamax? I don't, but I've heard stories that porn didn't choose it, so it died.)
Wait, what? For one, I hardly think that porn the primary cause of any damage to a family; I would think that any family damage blamed on it probably has some deeper seated problems than porn. I further think that you would be hard pressed to prove that it is dangerous, especially when people are seeing actual naked people all the time without any damage. Addictive is arguable until the cows come home, mainly because addictive is a very subjective word.
And in every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.
And:
Now let’s look at attitudes towards women. Studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men who didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators—female as well as male—essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship between the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography—by any definition—has had a cause-and-effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.
Read more: Porn: Good for us? - The Scientist - http://www.the-scientist.com/2010/3/1/29/1/
The anti-porn brigade is just as bigoted as the anti video game brigade.
Porn and video games are enjoyable. Enjoying your life is a sin! Don't you get it?
Now get back down into that salt mine!
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184510 for discussion about your link and its dubious methods.
Also, what if I don't have a family? Does that mean I can use porn and drugs with impunity, since there is no family to harm? Or does it magically harm other families, perhaps via some obscure quantum effect that the Large Hadron Collider is studying?
I would keep my name and any money I had as far away from it as possible.
So far away that you read articles about it and post your "opinion"?
Anyway, this comment was amusing to read. Now to see if you are actually serious, which would, admittedly, make it a lot less funny.
It damages families in a lot of ways. Porn users are almost universally addicts; you might say you're not, but if you're a regular consumer, try to go without it and see how long you last. I challenge all naysayers to do that. A few can do so without much effort, but the vast majority can't. This reality is opposite of the lie that most will claim.
There are accounts all over of addiction to porn and the feelings that it causes. Companions feel inadequate compared to the airbrushed, artificial bodies their companions lust after. Porn users perceive the subjects of their pornography in an abnormally sexualized light and it diminishes their emotional and intellectual sensitivity.
Pornography steals time, productivity, and money from its users; it is not a wholesome, upbuilding recreational activity as some here say, it is not comparable to video games. It is degrading to its subjects and its users.
Pornography, like drugs, is a mechanism to enrich a few for the moral entrapment of its many users. Porn users become addicted and can't stop using it. They go back for more and more. They desire harder and harder material. They seek to mimic what they see in their preferred pornographic material. How is any of this desirable?
Pornography has a large negative effect on its users. That's absolutely true and no amount of studies, hopes, oblations, snarky comments, or any other thing can change that.
Regarding addiction, I'll answer with a quote, replace X with the vice of your choice:
"Is X addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating."
Harder and harder material? Please no more "gateway" theories. As for acting out what we see on the screen, what's wrong with getting a little inspiration, I am not going to suddenly start hitting my partner just because I saw a pornstar do it.
Think of all the other things people are "addicted to" by your definition. Going to work every day. Eating. Brushing your teeth. Bathing. If you don't do those things, you will feel weird right? By your standards, routine == addiction, which makes your use of that word meaningless. Nice try though.
Pornography steals time, productivity, and money from its users; it is not a wholesome, upbuilding recreational activity as some here say, it is not comparable to video games. It is degrading to its subjects and its users.
Reading the newspaper steals time, productivity, and money. So does seeing a movie, or reading a book, or watching TV, or replying to trolls on HN. People do it anyway because the day is long and there is plenty of flexibility in most people's leisure schedules. An hour spent doing something enjoyable every few days is well worth the time cost for many people. For some people, that's porn. So what? Honestly, "getting it over with" probably increases people's ability to concentrate on something more interesting, since that part of their biology that needs to have sex is satisfied. So porn is probably good for productivity.
Companions feel inadequate compared to the airbrushed, artificial bodies their companions lust after.
I disagree. I have found everyone I've dated to be more attractive than anyone I've seen in porn. Outside of porn, though, I've definitely seen some girls that I would like to have but never will, perhaps unrealistically setting my standards. The reality it that any media or exposure to real life changes standards; porn affects those standards no more or no less than anything else.
They desire harder and harder material.
So what? Perhaps they wanted it before, but didn't know it existed? I have come up with a lot more interesting fantasies in my mind than I have seen acted out in porn. Does this mean I'm addicted to thinking?
Pornography has a large negative effect on its users. That's absolutely true and no amount of studies, hopes, oblations, snarky comments, or any other thing can change that.
You certainly haven't proven this in any of your posts. If anything, you are just projecting your fantasies onto others, just like you claim users of porn do.
But anyway, the good news is that your opinions on this don't matter. The rest of us will continue to enjoy porn. Sorry you won't join us.
This is true, I know only too well. I started my pornography career as a young boy, and my tastes have got more and more depraved over the years.
Now I can only get off with pictures of completely naked women.
"Going to work" is not an addiction for most people. Most would be fine to stop going to work; they may languish or feel unproductive now that there's a huge chunk of underutilized time in their day, but they don't have a constant compulsion to need to go to work. Pornography users are addicted in the way that there is a constant, very-difficult-to-resist compulsion to use it again and again. They literally cannot bring themselves to stop using it.
Reading the newspaper does not necessarily steal money, time, and productivity. As long as the practice of reading a newspaper is moderated, it enhances its user by teaching him new things about the world, about his contemporaries, and so on.
Pornography is not some innocent indulgence. It is dangerous and harmful. It cannot ever produce a net good upon its user. It's not like playing a sport or game where effects incidental of the enjoyment are beneficial to the participants. Pornography is always bad.
My opinions are just as good as anyone else's. You are free to do research and substantiate or dissubstantiate them. I'm not interested in finding and providing that research in this context as noted elsewhere in this thread.
And once again, we go from here to there with nothing in between. A good argument starts with a set of facts, and then gradually introduces more facts and commentary until the conclusion is the natural outcome. Your arguments start and end at the same place, assuming facts that you never introduced and that, arguably, aren't even facts.
My opinions are just as good as anyone else's. You are free to do research and substantiate or dissubstantiate them. I'm not interested in finding and providing that research in this context as noted elsewhere in this thread.
I don't need to "do research and substantiate or 'dissubstatiate' them". Your opinion does not matter to me. You said something, I think you're wrong. I am going to continue advocating the awesomeness of porn, and there's nothing you can do about it.
It seems like most of the educated world agrees with me, so right or wrong, I probably win.
And finally, I disagree that your opinions are any good. A good opinion is based on provable facts and personal experience. Your opinions are based on neither!
(My opinion is better, because I have personal experience with porn. You speak in absolutes, but are clearly wrong, because I look at porn and this action hasn't adversely affected my life in any way. If your argument was correct, my life would currently be ruined.)
> I challenge all naysayers to do that. A few can do so without much effort, but the vast majority can't. This reality is opposite of the lie that most will claim.
I have done this, and nowadays I don't even look at 1/100th of the porn I used to five years ago, e.g. all the porn I look at nowadays is a little of the person I might be sleeping with if I'm far away from him/her, and whatever random porn might be linked on random IRC channels I'm on (usually for amusement than arousal). Nothing really prompted me to change my porn viewing habits. But of course, then you will shove me into the "few" that can do this without effort. So what's the point of even answering that. :p
> Companions feel inadequate compared to the airbrushed, artificial bodies their companions lust after. Porn users perceive the subjects of their pornography in an abnormally sexualized light and it diminishes their emotional and intellectual sensitivity.
On one hand, I don't disagree that modern day mainstream non-amateur porn is ridiculous and artificial, it's almost become a total turn-off to me, minus a couple people like Sasha Grey, someone I never felt was really glamorized to that extent. But that does not mean that people are expecting airbrushed perfection, or that people feel inadequate compared to porn. I feel fat and full of stretch marks and a desperate need to exercise (stupid asthma issues right now) to get rid of all this flab on my body and I can never manage to get the perfect bikini shave down, but when I am sleeping with my current partner, and when I was with most of my former partners, I feel sexy, confident, attractive. Around him and what we do together, I get this amazing sense of sharing something so glorious, taking pleasure in pleasuring each other, happiness, stress relief...name anything good, and I've probably felt it. And I don't expect him to be perfect, I know he's got his own flab to lose, his own shortcomings, his own interests and fetishes that I might not be into and vice versa...and I know he's not 9" (or where the idea that "bigger is better" even came from). But I don't consider that to be a bad thing just because I saw (on some days) several hours of porn where there were perfect people doing everything I could possibly think of that I was into. Plus, half the stuff I've seen are so ridiculously unrealistic. In the heat of passion, are you REALLY going to be contorting bodies into that kinda position? Nope.
And I know every single person I have ever slept with has watched plenty of porn at some time or another and some still do. Yet none of them have gotten the idea that real sex is like the porn they watch. Because porn can only show so much, and if you don't realize it yet, you will once you actually sleep with someone.
(Oh oops, is this where the "you're promiscuous, clearly porn did that to you" part comes in?)
> Pornography has a large negative effect on its users. That's absolutely true and no amount of studies, hopes, oblations, snarky comments, or any other thing can change that.
"I'm right, you're wrong"...yes...how well that has solved arguments. Porn has been good to me, gave me an outlet for my sexual frustration (oh I never imagined I'd be talking about that on HN...), gave me something fun to watch and to make, gave me pleasure in one way or another. It hasn't made me skanky or promiscuous or hating on healthy relationships or preventing me from having them. It hasn't hurt me and it hasn't made me hurt anyone else, unless your idea of hurting people is safe, sane, and consensual fetish acts. There are far worse things in life, in my life? Maybe how I started playing WoW... :P
Personal anecdotes, yes, but hey, if we're all offering up our personal opinions and unsupported thoughts here...
I am not in the least interested in porn, I prefer my bed partners in the flesh, but I find it interesting that you say these things with such certainty.
Families as such are not harmed by porn in any but the rarest cases, and then usually there are other factors besides.
There are people that are harmed by porn, but rarely directly, more usually as a by-product of a society that tries to control the behaviour of it's citizens.
The same arguments you make have been made countless times about prostitution, and are used to outlaw it in many countries.
But the cold hard facts are that prostitution exists everywhere, even where it is outlawed. And yet, only there you will find excessive violence, disease and rampant drug use. The reason for that is that by making it illegal the 'sex workers' as they're called get pushed in to being criminals, and that means they lose the protection that every other person is normally given. They can not go to the police when a customer (or their pimp) beats them up. They tend to have unsafe sex, the tend to use drugs.
Whereas in places where prostitution is legal prostitutes are treated no different from other professionals, they pay their taxes, they are protected by the law from their customers, instead of their pimps, they get regular medical checkups and so on.
With porn, it is similar. There are lots of people that simply enjoy it. Just like lots of people simply enjoy sex.
Looking at it doesn't make you go blind, it won't 'harm your family'.
As long as all parties involved in the consumption and the production of it are adults and are doing it of their own free will I have absolutely no problem with it.
As I wrote above, I have a website that has an 'adult part'. It was never my intention to be the webmaster of a site that is NSFW.
But when it happened I learned something about my self. That I'm probably more of a prude than I ever thought I was, mostly because the fact that I thought that these people were using my software for a purpose that I could not even envision were somehow betraying me.
But I learned over time that I was wrong.
They simply have a different viewpoint than I do, and they are - to put it bluntly - right, and I was wrong. And they are completely in the right to use the software that I put in to the world to use for whatever purpose they feel like, as long as it is legal.
They're in their own houses, they are safe from stalkers and other real life nuisances, and they enjoy what they do, be it that they're nudists or people that get it on in front of the cam, whatever works for them.
So, I learned to control my 'kill' instincts, and let go of it.
The practical upshot of that is that we have a website which is separated in to two portions, one that is non-adult, and one that is adult.
The non-adult cams are about 85%, about 15% is adult.
On the viewer side it is probably the reverse.
People are asked to label their content using a switch in the software, and any abuse of that switch (there are always jerks) is punished by a very permanent ban.
So, we all get to live in peace, those that care for porn, and those that don't.
As for my reasons for wanting to get out of this, I've been doing it for more than a decade and it is really time for fresh blood, besides that as I said I never wanted to be the webmaster of a NSFW site.
But that's my limitation, not one of the people on that site.
He's expressed a valid opinion. Don't downvote.
It was a personal opinion that many disagree with.
I shouldn't have to convince you to be respected. I have other things to do with my life than gather together a compendium of research on porn. The truth is out there for all to see. You can find it yourself if you want to. The thing is not malicious, it's just an alternative opinion. I don't stand in your way, you are free to live your life as you like. If I condemn a thing you want to think is good, you don't need to take personal offense, just politely disagree and let's all be on our ways.
EDIT: I'm truly curious to see this one get downvotes. Do you guys really want people to call you out on every opposing opinion and make you run to and fro gathering a corpus of data, anecdotes, and other evidence to support every claim you make? I just don't have the time for it, and I don't have the interest because I know that I won't be changing any minds here, it'll just get written off with, "Well that psychologist/victim/whatever is a religionist so obviously he's backward", etc. Be sensible here, please.
> I shouldn't have to convince you to be respected.
Here, like anywhere really, respect is definitely earned. To make a broad statement like you did without supporting argument you are going to need "respect" for your experience in the field.
For example Tptacek can make pretty broad statements about cryptography/security, Patio11 about business/startup etc. etc. without much clarification because we know their expertise is supporting the statement.
Yourself we know nothing about; except you consider pornography a problem on a level with drug abuse. Which is definitely not going to put your comment on a good footing to start off with. It sounds personal - and while we can respect you feel strongly with it the way it was presented is discouraged.
> If I condemn a thing you want to think is good, you don't need to take personal offense, just politely disagree and let's all be on our ways.
There are some problems here. Firstly the main problem downvoters will have had is how sweeping your statement was with no supporting evidence. You didnt even add "In my opinion".... presenting a theory without evidence is frowned on here :)
Secondly the statement is worded in a way that suggests either your trying to cause offence or trying to brand people who might think porn is ok (probably the majority actually) as bad/imoral/wrong/ destroying their families.
I hope that helps :)
It isn't nice, but it seems to be a reality and since there is no way of looking in to the heads of those that downvote you can't really know why they did so.
That's pretty clearly malicious, and it most definitely breaks the "would you say this at a dinner party if you wanted to be invited back?" rule.
I'm not categorically against it though. For one thing, porn is a proven money maker, and as evidenced here at least some of your potential competition won't touch it.
Regarding the 3 styles, I think #3 (hardcore) is the only one that would work as a startup. To be blunt, the less hardcore the porn the prettier the models have to be, and you can't afford Maxim or Playboy tier models.
There was this thing called 'adultvest', but I think they've died.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adultvest
Porn sites are like the "your parents have sex" realization in Internet business terms. We all know it's there and it happens, but we like to put our fingers in our ears over it. Even though most of us here are surely regular purveyors of pornography, not many people of a certain class/culture or over a certain age want to admit it or acknowledge they like porn. This love/hate relationship makes it easy to get traffic but hard to succeed (whether financially or to just get funding).
To gain and keep an edge in that world is very hard work.
Queasiness isn't preventing throngs of people from competing, the amount of $ going around in porn is what is encouraging lots of people to compete.
The word 'sex' is present (according to google) 574 million times, and is probably the one of the heaviest SEOd keywords on the net outside of some medical bits & pieces.
11.6.3. ensuring that any materials posted on your site or within your Application are not illegal and do not promote illegal activities, including without limitation any activities that might be libelous or defamatory or otherwise malicious, illegal or harmful to any person or entity, or discriminatory based on race, sex, religion, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, or age;
What if someone at Amazon decides that some of your content falls into this category and yanks it off. Remember how quickly Apple booted off iPhone apps with such content.
I think the best way to go about this is: (1) Go after a niche area to reduce the huge amount of competition, e.g. "porn for women" and (2) partner with a content provider so you don't get into the intricacies of producing content. I thought the Fyre Box (http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2008-01-10-po... had an excellent idea (streaming movies with detailed search functionality) but they have disappeared.
Whether or not YC will back your "hack" should be secondary to whether or not you can create a credible business. Youporn was a "hack" created by 2 guys and is now despised by the rest of the industry and is largey credited as letting pandora out of the box. They're also not rolling in cash. If you have a solution to "solve" the current situation adult publishers face then you've got something of real value.
The adult industry is in an awful state due to the rise of free sites and talent brain drain over the years. That makes for a perfect environment for companies to try and innovate in this sector and do what Apple did for music - but you've got to understand the business before you try to fix it. And being a consumer of the product is a lot different than creating a business out of it.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/company-news/amicable-spli...
http://techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/zivity-splits-employees-exe...
* This is LEGAL just about everywhere other than the US (including Australia and the UK).
* The market size is huge
* People will pay serious cash money, unlike online porn
* Far less competition and tech in the business (see myredbook, cityvibe, and erosguide for the state of the art)
* Given the dogfooding imperative, recruiting lonely male programmers would probably be very easy
I say all this only half tongue in cheek. With a little bit of technology you could become the world's biggest pimp.
It's legal in Nevada, except Las Vegas.
Prostitution is legal. Pimping is not. (at least here in the UK).
This is standard across large parts of Europe (with a few obvious exceptions; Holland, Germany etc.)
In terms of a viable business you couldn't really hide it under coy terms like "massage parlor" and "escort services" if you had VC funding :D
I'm in the adult industry, and it happens. We've approached several VC's, angels, and some other investor folks, and we get a lot of "You want to do what?" or "Did you say 'adult'?"
We get slapped around, yelled at, and cursed, but honestly, we run a clean business. We've never had a chargeback in our 6 months with nearly 4,000 transactions. We receive a letter of praise on amazing customer service regularly, and with the exception of an eBay sale to Brazil, we've never had a complaint.
No matter, there's no explaining it. Most VC's and angels run away, for they have some vision of lawsuits and chargebacks, but that aint the way it works these days. Sure, we're shunned, but honestly, its a hell of a lot of fun, and we're not doing too bad.
So in my opinion, bootstrap it, e-mail me, or that guy who has unlimited risk allowance, and run with it. But be prepared for the fury of porn customers who will try to pretend they don't even know what exactly porn is.
I don't think ethics, brand damage, or any other factor would keep investors out of the field if they thought they'd make a lot of money on a porn investment. Thus, I think investors still doubt the ability of most porn companies to have an exit. It doesn't mean porn companies aren't or won't make money, possibly even a lot of money, just that they probably won't do it in a way that leads to the investors making a lot of money.
But, yes, there could be other ways to structure deals that don't require an exit to make everyone happy. But most current high tech investors don't invest that way.