19
through the mail. This created a huge demand for digitalized por-
nographic films. By 2002 “everyone [in the pornography industry]
was making money,” explained Michael Stabile, a journalist who
writes about pornography. “Internet startups had started to figure
out streaming video, and you could still sell DVDs all day long.
Hundreds of new companies sprouted, like mushrooms after a
rainstorm. . . . It was the beginning of porn’s golden age.”
12
Streaming media technology (first developed by a Dutch por-
nography company called Red Light District in 1994) led to the
development of webcam technology, which was used for private
pornographic web chats online. By 2003 Apple and Microsoft
were designing and selling webcams commercially. All of this
created a need for more bandwidth and faster download speeds.
According to “Ten Indispensible Technologies Built by the Por-
nography Industry,” an article by technology blogger Paul Rudo,
“Demand for sexual content drove the market for improved rout-
ers, switches, relays and other fundamental Internet infrastructure.
Early users consistently sought faster, easier and more reliable con-
nections through which to trade increasingly bandwidth-hogging
pornographic text, photographs and video.”
13
E-commerce
Despite the sudden demand for online pornography, in the late
1990s e-commerce was still in its infancy, and online transactions
were looked on with suspicion by the general public. In addition,
the dot-com boom of 1997–2000 was in full swing. Most Internet
companies were concerned about growing as large as possible and
then cashing in by selling shares on the stock market, not in devel-
oping new revenue streams such as e-commerce.
The pornography industry was the first business sector to part-
ner with new online credit card transaction companies that were
developing safe and secure e-commerce practices. The 2009 film
Middle Men
is about the most successful of these e-commerce en-
trepreneurs, Christopher Mallick. “We got a percentage of each
[DVD] sale,” Mallick explains. “At the height of the business, we
were doing about $1.3 billion a year in credit card billing.”
14
These
early efforts in online commerce demonstrated to other industries
