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Vodafone and Porn – It’ll end in Tears

?ccording to yesterday’s International Herald Tribune Vodafone, Orange and O2 are trying to figure out how to make money from porn without looking irresponsible.

They are trying to set it up so that they can guarantee that minors are fenced off from adult material. That, they think, will make it OK.

Unfortunately, it won’t. There’s no way of getting around it. Pornography is a seedy business. It’s very difficult to maintain a clean image and be involved with it in any substantial way. The financial markets in Europe and the US might not take immediate offence, but certain elements of the marketplace will. For example, an association with a porno company will definitely be an obstacle for a mobile company if it is bidding for a 3G licence in a Muslim country (or even in some Christian countries).

It could also cause public upset. Look at what happened to Bank of Ireland, a high street Irish financial institution which got involved in a deal to purchase a chain of porn magazines in the UK.

What will Vodafone do if it turns out that some of the models it features in its highly profitable ‘risque’ offering turn out to be drug addicts, prostitutes, illegal immigrants or child abuse victims? It is very hard for a corporate to guarantee everything its vendors do is above-board and it will be difficult to counter the image of Vodafone profiting from the misery of others.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that porn isn’t going to be part of the drive toward 3G technology. It’s inevitable that any new medium will get exploited for this purpose. Every other medium invented so far (print, electronic, Internet) has been.

So what should the mobile operators do? Well, if I were Vodafone or Orange, I would stick to the business of providing data services, and facilitating content providers by integrating with payment sytems. They should provide these services on a ‘common carrier’ basis – providing the same facility for all content providers regardless of what their content actually is -. (Of course, there would be no obligation to allow content providers to send anything illegal over the network.)

They should stay well clear of the porn business itself. It should be up to content providers to decide what they want to sell to customers, and how they want to market and restrict it. The content providers will get the bulk of the revenue, but they will also take the risk of developing and marketing more innovative, more competitively priced content. They will also be responsible if the public reacts negatively to a particular type of content. The networks will benefit from increased data traffic and transaction fees.

But this isn’t what the mobile operators will do, at least not the big ones. The mobile companies like to control as much of the content and the revenue as possible.

This strategy could prove to be their undoing in providing porn services.

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  1. Hmm, good post.

    How do the Japanese operators do it? I hear there’s quite a lot of adult content over there, and their mobile content production industry is massive (for all types of content, not just porn in particular).

  2. The idea that porn inevitably involves abuse is as silly as the idea that everyone who has a beer every now and then will end up sniffing petrol under a bridge.

    “drug addicts, prostitutes”…? Of course – no woman would willingly choose to go into porn. They must be forced! Who’s being naive here?

    FYI, try looking at Yahoo or MSN’s European portals. Spot the porn topic, right next to business or sport? This is an absolutely standard business for any media company outside of the US and UK.

  3. Benedict Evans wrote:
    “FYI, try looking at Yahoo or MSN’s European portals. Spot the porn topic, right next to business or sport? This is an absolutely standard business for any media company outside of the US and UK.”

    URLs, please. I’ve made a quick browse through Yahoo’s, German, French and Italian portals, and through MSN’s German, Spanish and French portals. Purely for research purposes, mind you 😉

    Couldn’t find anything even remotely risky material, which would be expected as the portals are also supposed to be accessed by kids. I didn’t bother checking out Yahoo’s possibly promising DVD on-line shop selection, though.

    Anyway, on MSN’s French portal, the topic “Femmes” led, as predicted, to fashion and cooking stuff.

    On MSN’s Spanish portal, there’s a cute gal pic pointing towards — the horror! — “?ltimas tendencias en maquillaje” (latest trends in make-up)

    Nothing untowards either in Yahoo Italy’s
    * Societ? e culture/Amore/Lettere d’amore
    * Societ? e culture/Amore/Poesie d’amore
    These Italians can be such softies 🙂

    As for the UK, the Sun’s paper version’s page 3 can be, um, interesting, though perhaps tame compared e.g. with Playboy stuff.

  4. Benedict Evans wrote:
    “FYI, try looking at Yahoo or MSN’s European portals. Spot the porn topic, right next to business or sport? This is an absolutely standard business for any media company outside of the US and UK.”

    URLs, please. I’ve made a quick browse through Yahoo’s, German, French and Italian portals, and through MSN’s German, Spanish and French portals. Purely for research purposes, mind you 😉

    Couldn’t find anything even remotely risky material, which would be expected as the portals are also supposed to be accessed by kids. I didn’t bother checking out Yahoo’s possibly promising DVD on-line shop selection, though.

    Anyway, on MSN’s French portal, the topic “Femmes” led, as predicted, to fashion and cooking stuff.

    On MSN’s Spanish portal, there’s a cute gal pic pointing towards — the horror! — “?ltimas tendencias en maquillaje” (latest trends in make-up)

    Nothing untowards either in Yahoo Italy’s
    * Societ? e culture/Amore/Lettere d’amore
    * Societ? e culture/Amore/Poesie d’amore
    These Italians can be such softies 🙂

    As for the UK, the Sun’s paper version’s page 3 can be, um, interesting, though perhaps tame compared e.g. with Playboy stuff.

  5. Voda needs to avoid the trap of content creation. They already facilitate titillating content in the form of “nip slips” and “thong spotting” that certain mobile channels offer now. Plus you can download celeb wallpaper to Nokias (i.e., Janet Jackson’s Superbowl slip and Courtney Love on a table) over Voda. That could mean the horse has bolted already and the news item is simply getting a public sounding before Voda starts marketing the adult themes themselves.

  6. Antoin

    The approach you recommend Vodafone take (acting as a common carrier for third party content providers, and opening up their billing systems to them) is indeed the approach they are taking for all sorts of content (including adult), through Vodafone Live.

    Tom