Image credit: Facebook

Facebook has announced plans to purchase VRPorn.com for around $2 billion in cash and stock. This includes $400 million, and 23.1 million Facebook shares. An additional $300 million earnout will be paid in cash and stock if VRPorn.com hits certain unspecified milestones.

“I’m excited to announce that we’ve agreed to acquire VRPorn.com, the leader in adult virtual reality technology,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a statement today.

Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. So in 2014, we bought Oculus and turned it in to a walled garden. With the combined might of Facebook and Oculus, we thought we would dominate virtual reality forever. But with the family-friendly focus of Facebook, we noticed a huge hole in our strategy: virtual reality is for porn. This is where VRPorn.com comes in. They have great vr porn. When you try their experiences, you enter a completely immersive environment, like a game or a movie scene or a place far away, but with porn. The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you’re actually present in another place with other people, having things done to you that you never would have dreamed. People who try vr porn say it’s different from anything they’ve ever experienced in their lives.

The Long Term Strategy

This move seems to parallel the acquisition of Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion. With that purchase, Zuckerberg said that their efforts with Oculus would continue to focus on gaming initially. But after gaming, Zuckerberg said, they were going to expand into a variety of other arenas.

At the time, most analysts did not realize the true vision of Zuckerberg. They thought that Zuckerberg was talking about things such as developing virtual reality education, vr entertainment experiences, and the next generation social media platform. But now the real end game is clear, Zuckerberg was talking about vr porn.

VRPorn.com says that the benefits of the partnership might not be immediately visible:

At first glance, it might not seem obvious why we are partnering with Facebook, a company focused on connecting people, investing in internet access for the world and pushing an open computing platform. But when you consider it more carefully, two billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money. I mean, what would you do?

Acquiring VRPorn.com could signal a variety of things, but being able to tap into what is potentially the next big porno trend is likely one of them. If VR porn is “what’s next” then Facebook will want to tap the market early to avoid any transitional gaffes this time around.

Facebook, of course, had been avoiding adult content. But this strategy came under question as Google became the unmatched market leader in finding porn on the internet. Microsoft also has its foot in the game with its Bing search engine, which was engineered from the ground up with porn in mind.

The purchase is expected to close in Q2 of 2017. VRPorn.com is a startup known for its popular namesake website. It has already grown to millions of monthly users, with traffic growing higher by the week.

“Over the next 10 years, virtual reality porn will become ubiquitous, affordable, and transformative,” concludes VRPorn.com in a blog post, “and it begins with a truly next-generation porn experience. This partnership ensures that the VRPorn.com platform is coming, and that it’s going to change porn forever.”