LAGOS, Nigeria – It often seems to me that for as long as there has been something which could reasonably be called the “adult entertainment industry,” there has been rampant exaggeration about the industry, from both the inside and outside of the porn business.
If you’ve ever attended an adult trade show and listened to people hyping their affiliate programs, for example, you’ve probably heard extremely unlikely claims about conversion ratios (“Our sites convert like it’s 1998!”), membership retention (“99% customer retention makes our RevShare program better than their $70 PPS!”) and overall company size (“We literally employ half of Quebec!”).
On the mainstream media side, it’s utterly useless to try to convince reporters the infamous “$97 billion per year industry” is merely something made up years ago by a company which promotes content-filtering software, despite this being an easy thing to confirm. (Strange, isn’t it, that the numbers haven’t moved an inch in 10 years?)
Still, even in an environment of rampant exaggeration, puffery and outright bullshit, every so often along comes a claim so outrageous, it manages to stand out from the crowd – like the recent claim “Nigeria’s Porn Industry Is Getting Ready To Overtake America’s” for example.
To give the headline-writer the benefit of the doubt, maybe by “overtake” the author means something other than surpass in terms of sales or production of porn. Perhaps Nigerian pornographers are preparing for the ultimate ‘hostile takeover,’ and are about to show up in Van Nuys with several truckloads of heavily armed porno-militants?
In any event, the article draws on information provided by Subomi Plumptre, who self-identifies as “a leading African strategist focused on brands, business and social media.”
As it turns out, Plumptre’s analysis doesn’t have anything to do with the size of the Nigerian or American porn industries; it simply looks at the relative popularity of porn-related searches in the two countries, as compared to searches for other topics.
“In 2015, the popularity of Nigerian Google searches for porn (relative to other searches) on a scale of 0 to 100 was above 80,” Plumptre reports. “Since 2009, porn search popularity has always risen above 70 every December, save one. In December 2014 and 2015, Nigeria outstripped America in the popularity of searches for porn – a nation twice our size and with deeper Internet penetration I might add.”
I’m not sure how the size of a country or the depth of its internet penetration is germane to the relative number of porn searches conducted by people in that country, but either way, it seems like something is getting lost in the translation between the numbers Plumptre cites and the articles written about those numbers.
Regardless of how popular porn searches are in each country, the American porn industry isn’t about to be “overtaken” by the Nigerian porn industry any time soon. For that matter, it doesn’t really mean Nigerians are more interested in porn than Americans, even relatively speaking.
For starters, the greater internet penetration referenced by Plumptre likely means Americans are more aware of major porn brands than their Nigerian counterparts, including being more aware of major free sites like Pornhub, Youporn, etc. For a lot of porn surfers, once they discover and bookmark these sites, the need to conduct Google searches for porn is greatly mitigated.
In fairness to Plumptre, his point has very little to do with the size of the porn industry, be it in America, Nigeria or anywhere else. Once you get past the numbers, it’s clear Plumptre’s concern is porn’s impact on the minds and behavior of its consumers. Unsurprisingly, in voicing his concern, his post sounds a lot like those you’ll find on the websites for American anti-porn groups.
Drawing on a TED Talk by Gary Wilson, Plumptre flatly asserts various “devastating effects of long term consumption of porn on the developing brain including Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), social anxiety and depression.”
“Porn also numbs the ability to feel real life intimacy,” adds Plumptre. “The longer a brain is exposed to porn, the more hyperactive it becomes at the sight of porn. In other words, the more you view porn, the more your brain desires it. It is a vicious cycle that ultimately erodes your willpower and self-control.”
Not everyone shares Plumptre’s confidence in Wilson’s claims, of course, but even if you are convinced of their truth, it’s still not clear to me what any of this has to do with the Nigerian porn industry taking over the American one.
Wait a minute, I’ve got it; that Fabian guy is secretly Nigerian, isn’t he? Great; the next thing you know, he’ll be running some sort of cat food scam…
