SEATTLE – As you may have heard, Amazon has added a “private mode” to the Silk browser used by the Kindle Fire and the company’s various Fire smartphones. As is often the case when privacy features are added to any web-enabled technology, the operative tech-media assumption appears to be porn websites will see a corresponding spike in Kindle-using porn viewers as a result of the new feature.
Will such a spike actually occur?
In all likelihood, if there’s any increase at all in Kindle Fire usage by porn site customers, it will be a modest bump. More likely still, the effect will be something that won’t be visible in the stats: usage of the privacy mode by Kindle users who already surf porn on their Kindles, but now have a function they can take advantage of to keep their browser histories cleaner than they have been to date.
Either way, there are two mistakes adult internet companies tend to make when an announcement like the Kindle Fire privacy mode goes out across the wire. The first can be characterized as an overenthusiastic overreaction: Some dive into the Kindle market head-first and commit significant time and resources to Silk-optimizing their sites and mobile properties. The second mistake is the opposite: no reaction of any kind, totally ignoring any bump in traffic Silk’s new mode might offer.
The zone you want to aim for is the sweet spot between those two polar opposites; you want to take action in proportion to the opportunity the new Silk feature represents, whatever it may be. The question then becomes “How does one strike the proper balance?”
The good news is it’s easy, and doesn’t require much from you, initially at least. The first thing you need to do is simply observe.
Assuming you already have some manner of analytics set up to track your site’s incoming traffic (If you don’t, shame on you. Google Analytics is free and does everything you need.), your first step is to take note of how much traffic your site already receives from Silk-enabled devices. It’s probably a very small percentage of your traffic, so you may have to dig past the first 10 most common operating systems before you find Silk on the charts.
Make note of the initial “browser share” you see for Silk. Every couple days thereafter (or every day, if you’re the compulsive type), check the same figure to see whether it is growing. If the number never shifts significantly, you might never need to make a change to your site(s). It may be that the Silk privacy mode is of no consequence to your business, and you can forget all about it.
Don’t make a decision based solely on your own analytics, however, because if your sites never see an increase in Silk usage among visitors, you can’t conclude by extension no such increase has taken place in the broader web-surfing market. Remember, your site is not representative of the market at large. Realistically, your site is a tiny, tiny slice of the broader market, even if you receive hundreds of thousands of unique visits a day.
Once you have collected several weeks of data (four to six is plenty), the next step is to do some research about Silk’s overall browser market share. You probably won’t be able to find any reliable stats which are porn-specific, but you should be able to track down some general stats regarding Silk’s position in the race for browser supremacy. Again, odds are Silk will not crack the top five among browsers anytime soon, but it could make enough headway to become something worth paying attention to.
Once you have gathered the data, compare the position of Silk in your analytic stats to its general position in the market. If the percentage of Silk-using visitors in the general market is greatly outpacing its presence in your stats, make note. This still doesn’t mean you should leap on Silk-optimizing your sites, but it’s another thing to keep an eye on as you consider the option.
Two things will signal that it’s time to make changes (if any are needed) to your sites in order to optimize them for Silk: a significant increase in Silk use as reflected in your site’s analytics and/or a growing disparity between Silk’s share of the general web-surfing market and its presence within your analytics. Either suggests Silk is becoming a player worthy of your time and attention.
To be clear, even if Silk’s market share grows quickly and significantly, it has a long way to go before it becomes something worthy of iOS- or Android-levels of attention . It’s not going to make the difference between retiring on Easy Street and having to sell your possessions and wrap your feet in newspaper on cold nights.
What Silk might do, if it helps Fire devices catch on with consumers, is provide a little bump to your revenue by bringing in some new customers or by giving your existing customers a better way to watch porn than their current method.
Regardless of what Silk and its new privacy mode accomplish in terms of market share, the smart play for now is to watch and wait. This isn’t 2007, and the addition of a privacy mode to Fire devices is not exactly the advent of the iPhone, so what you need isn’t urgency and enthusiasm. It’s patience and realism.
