MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – According to a report from the BBC, several performers, studios and others from the adult entertainment industry are calling on Google to “help publicize legal ways to buy adult content in an effort to combat piracy.”
With quotes from Angela White, Tasha Reign, Takedown Piracy’s Nat Glass and others, the article restates a series of points that are all too familiar to those who work within this industry—or to any other industry challenged by the profligate copyright infringement taking place online these days, for that matter.
“Pirating adult content hurts real people,” Girlfriends Films President Moose told the BBC, “from the women and men in front of the camera, to the editors, office workers, and adult shop employees.”
Glass acknowledged that “studios do have to convince consumers why they should pay and make that transaction easy, but it doesn’t help when consumers can’t find those pages because they’re on Page 10 of Google after the 100 or so most egregious pirate sites in the world.”
In addition to being familiar, these statements also happen to be true. That’s the good news. The bad news is, from Google’s perspective, the points are irrelevant. Google will ignore the industry’s complaints, and its ideas, and not even offer an explanation as to why the search giant has no ears.
Google declined comment for the BBC story, and my hunch is Google will continue to ignore the complaints and requests of the adult industry going forward. In fact, unless the company is forced to listen by statute or litigation, my sense is Google would prefer to pretend the adult industry doesn’t exist.
Why? That’s an easy question to answer: Google simply doesn’t need the porn industry, at all.
One of the persistent misconceptions people in the adult industry harbor is the notion the porn industry is a Big Money business. People hear incredible (and wildly inaccurate) claims along the lines of “the porn industry is bigger than all the major sports leagues combined.” For some reason, they accept such assertions as truth, with no further examination.
The truth is, porn absolutely is small potatoes as an industry. For that matter, it’s not even potatoes. It’s small potato chips.
Even if the porn industry’s aggregate annual revenue were as high as the most outrageous claims hold it to be (the laughable figure $97 billion has been tossed around, for example) it would still be cause for panic in the boardrooms of AT&T or Verizon, individually, if it were reported as a year of gross revenue for either of those companies.
Don’t take my word for it; look it up. Better yet, save yourself some time, click here, and you’ll see AT&T’s revenue in 2013 was $128.75 billion. In the same year, Verizon clocked $120.55 billion.
That, my friends, is Big Money. If AT&T is General Motors and Verizon is Ford, the entire adult entertainment industry is Funky Fred’s Used Car Lot.
Does anybody seriously believe Google, a company that has been happily ignoring protestations about piracy from Big Boy entities like the MPAA and RIAA for years, is going to pay any attention to complaints from the adult industry? If you believe the answer is “yes”, then I have some lovely beachfront property for sale in Arizona.
However important porn searches and porn ad revenue might have been to Google at one time (and I suspect it was never particularly significant, honestly), the industry means nothing to the company now. Actually, the industry means less than nothing now. Adult is just a pain in Google’s giant, increasingly tight-cheeked corporate ass at this point.
The reason adult means nothing to Google is simple: Google is Big Money now, too—and Big Money companies just don’t give two shits about industry sectors irrelevant to their business model. If adult was ever relevant to Google’s business model, it just isn’t these days. Again: Google doesn’t care because it doesn’t have to.
Granted, Google isn’t as big as AT&T (Google did a mere $59.73 billion in 2013), but I guarantee you Google doesn’t miss porn being a part of its AdWords program. Porn wasn’t even a drop in the bucket; it was a drop that missed the bucket altogether and instead resulted in an ugly water spot on a prominent area of the Google Public Relations Department’s nice leather shoes.
I hope I’m wrong. I hope Google takes the industry’s complaints to heart and does something, anything, to change the playing field for porn, at least within Google’s SERPS…. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
