Will Yahoo! Suffer Without Adult Content?
May 7 -- Can Yahoo! strip itself of porn without paying the price?
That's the question being posed by Internet observers as the Web's leading portal continues to distance itself from adult content.
In April, Yahoo! announced it would stop selling adult videos and DVDs as part of its e-commerce efforts. Last week, The Associated Press reported that the portal has made its adult-themed clubs and chats more difficult to track down on the site.
On the surface, such moves, while helping to ward off criticism from family values groups, might seem detrimental to the financial health of Yahoo!, which has suffered through lagging revenues, a falling stock price and an executive shakeup in recent months.
That's because, since the Internet became a commercial entity in the mid-1990s, a popular assumption has been that online pornography was the one form of content that users could be reliably counted on to pay for. And as Yahoo! evolves into a site where an increasing amount of the content has a price tag — real-time stock quotes will cost you $9.95 a month now — porn would seem to be a lucrative part of that strategy.
Online Porn Biz: Smaller than People Think?
But some industry observers believe estimates of the cash to be raked in by selling sex online may be overrated.
David Card, a vice president and senior analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix, says it is difficult to track online adult video sales of the kind Yahoo! just cancelled. But he places the total revenue of the online subscription site industry — nude pictures, X-rated videos and the like — at $185 million per year.
"It's not the billions and billions that people are waving around," says Card.
Tom Rhinelander, an analyst at Forrester Research in Boston, describes the financial picture of adult content providers as "murky." As he notes, no Internet-only adult companies are publicly held, making financial information harder to come by — although Rhinelander believes the leading on-line adult content providers are profitable operations.
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