Featured Article
Crossing Over: Porn and Pop Culture
Intersect in Ways Previously Impossible By Gene Zorkin For decades, the adult entertainment industry has tangled with obstacles to the promotion and marketing of its products to its fans, due to the agerestricted nature of pornographic videos, photos and other forms of sexually explicit media.
video work, tease upcoming live cam performances and grow their brands in a way that simply wasn’t available to previous generations.
The advent of the commercial internet served to kick down some of the doors traditionally closed to the adult industry – but only to an extent, as popular mainstream sites and platforms largely remained no-go spaces for adult content.
From the perspective of those who first began marketing adult content in the 90s or earlier, the relative degree of freedom adult companies and performers now have in marketing their wares – and themselves – outside the confines of adult-specific media, industry trade events and other traditional avenues, is dizzying.
In the social media age, despite the fact major platforms like Facebook strictly apply content policies disallowing the publication of porn, members of the adult industry have an unprecedentedly direct pipeline to consumers and fans. On Twitter, perhaps the porn-friendliest of the major social media platforms, many adult performers enjoy large followings, providing a means to promote their latest
This is not to say the mainstream world is entirely open to the marketing of adult products and content (many barriers remain, even in the most pornfriendly social spaces), but 25 years ago, the idea of someone like Riley Reid or Tanya Tate having well over a million followers in any mainstream context would have been unthinkable, if indeed we could have foreseen the arrival of social media itself.
5
