GooTube's Porn Opportunists: The Expanding World of Upload-It-Yourself Smut

People have been making amateur porn and uploading it to YouTube since its inception; after all, it's human nature to sexualize any new technology. Smart online sites like Second Life, while not a sex site, take this need to sexualize as a grown-up given. In their architecture and business model, they just sort of budget in that adult users will use a certain percentage of their world for sex, and set up all the necessary precautions to make this a safe and sane (and even fun) experience for everyone, and easily avoided if you prefer real estate to RealDolls. According to Linden Labs/Second Life's Catherine Smith, "All 'adult content' is confined to Mature sims in Second Life and takes place behind closed doors."

But in the aftermath of Google's acquisition of YouTube, YouTube's methods of trying to control questionable content and Terms of Use (TOU) enforcement are emerging as clumsy at best, and highly exploitable at worst. Even so, YouTube's policies on porn and adult content have opened up a whole new market for an ever-growing roster of upload-it-yourself smut sites, while raising some interesting questions about businesses whose TOU and operational models turn a blind eye to the inevitable intersection of sex and technology.

Lawyer and executive director at The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society Jennifer Granick adds: "Internet regulations tend to be ill-defined and confusing, and as a result, they are discriminatorily enforced. Companies have to guess whether they are going to be targets for regulators or law enforcement. As a result, general-interest content companies like YouTube or Google Images will choose to ignore regulations that special-interest content companies like a pornography video or photo site believes it must comply with."

As content delivery evolves, porn, as an extension of human sexual expression, follows. The Flickr spin-off sites are a great example: Flickrchicks, Adult Flickr, FlickrBooty (all defunct) and several others made up for what Flicker's TOU couldn't, or wouldn't, deliver (yet appeared on the site, regardless). These sites essentially skimmed Flickr for hotties to repost in babelog-style form and pull in affiliate click-through revenue, many knowing full well that the pictures they link to have a limited life span.

Many businesses have flourished where others decidedly feared to tread, rather than creating a healthy, inclusive and lucrative business structure. Where Google's AdSense wouldn't go, AdBrite mopped up the revenue. And when PayPal decided that grown-up money was filthy lucre, a whole host of adult transaction services were eager to Dumpster-dive for PayPal's sizable leavings.

Similarly, early this year sites like (NSFW) HotTube.wordpress. com and (NSFW) DudeTube.blogspot. com sprang up in the tradition of the Flickr spin-off babe sites, making the most of YouTube's easily accessed user-submitted content and its inconceivably exponential growth rate. Simply sifting through YouTube for porn and coming up with the goods over and over again and then reposting the juicy finds was enough to make these sites merit repeat visits for viewers. And knowing the content was against YouTube's TOU, sites like DudeTube often posted video embeds with the title "not around for long," acknowledging the temporary nature of the amateur offerings, whether the videos were explicit or not, with the understanding that YouTube's policies and policing were often bizarrely erratic and only a YouTube employee's judgment call away from removal.

By summer, YouTube had proved itself simply unreliable for a number of users -- not just for porn, but for being a content-delivery system for anyone whose content might get flagged by concerned or malevolent users and yanked by a YouTube customer service department that seemed to be in over their heads.

Similarly, Internet video site Veoh, which had been a smart, rational, useful place to upload and watch hard- and soft-core video, abruptly changed its TOU in June and no longer allowed adult content to be uploaded to its network -- all video deemed "pornographic (which shall include any depictions of nudity)." Veoh then did what many people have been wondering aloud about YouTube, and they scrubbed their site clean of anything that smelled like copyright infringement -- at least at the time.

Enter sites like (NSFW) Xtube.com, and the new era of porn-loving video sharing, user-submitted communities. Like YouTube (in fact, a lot like YouTube), Xtube has a similar user interface for viewers and uploaders alike, as do the more recently hatched competition (NSFW) YuVuTu.com (Caution: some users are experiencing malware installs) and (NSFW) PornoTube.com.

These sites have quickly filled with thousands of amateur and professional porn (and soft-core) clips featuring dozens of straight, gay and "everything" categories. Same flash upload/encode systems, same tagging systems, same pseudo-social network connecting users and favorites, and nearly identical options for easy URL grabbing and video player embeds for porn-happy bloggers.

For the founders of these sites, it was a no-brainer to build a smart, sex-positive YouTube clone. Steve Jacobs from YuVuTube said, "YouTube clearly missed a trick when they decided not to include adult material, as that is more likely to be monetizable. We started YuVuTu simply because we saw that YouTube and its competitors were staying out of adult. We felt that amateur productions can compete with professional productions far better than in any other genre (sport, comedy, action movies, music videos, etc.), so it's obvious to us that the YouTube model of user-generated content will be most successfully applied to adult content." Jacobs added, "The jury is still out as to whether YouTube has a viable business model."

Lance Cassidy, marketing director of Xtube, explained how YouTube's market practically demanded the delivery system ASAP: "YouTube was rockin' it and no one had an answer to them for the adult industry. We were actually not sure we would be first on the scene and hesitated, but once we looked, we were shocked and hurried to it." Though it may seem like YouTube's sex clones rushed to fill a gap in the market in typical dot-boom style, their business models have been built from the start to openly deal with adult content, making direct eye contact with many issues that could streamline TOU enforcement on nonporn sites like YouTube -- and not just in terms of avoiding dreaded uploads of underage or otherwise illegal content.

For example, from the outset Xtube has actively partnered with adult companies and porn auteurs to offer free DVD previews, circumventing the lure of copyright-infringing uploads from users. They also offer options for filmmakers to sell streaming clips to users, providing a nice one-two of both free and monetized content options outside ad-revenue models. Xtube also has the most stringent user interface for actively managing and explaining copyright permissions and age-of-consent 2257 documentation as requirements within the user interface for upload, explicitly making users responsible for legality of content.

Having a reliable content-delivery system for porn makes all of our hard drives smile -- but being realistic about your users and what they'll want to do with your content-delivery system makes everyone happy, from censorship to legalities to contributing to a more-needed-than-ever healthy attitude toward human sexual expression. Building your tech in keeping with the way people will use it will always make more sense than trying to change human behavior. Just don't actually call it GooTube, OK?

Violet Blue is a Forbes "Web Celeb", notorious blogger (Laughing Squid), high-profile tech personality and one of Wired's "Faces of Innovation." She writes for outlets ranging from Forbes.com to O, The Oprah Magazine. She is regarded as the foremost expert in the field of sex and technology, a sex-positive pundit in mainstream media ( CNN, The Oprah Winfrey Show) and is interviewed, quoted and featured prominently by major media outlets. Violet has many award-winning, best-selling books, a famous podcast, is fun to follow on Twitter, and is a San Francisco native.

Blue headlines at conferences ranging from ETech, The Forbes Internet Leadership Conference, LeWeb and SXSW: Interactive, to Google Tech Talks at Google, Inc. Her tech site is Techyum; her audio and e-books are at Digita Publications.

For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com.