Virtual world Second Life has put in effect some new measures to keep adult content away from users who might not want to run into it. Or fly into it, as avatars might do.
Later this year, parent company Linden Lab will create a standalone "continent" for adult content, and members who don't purchase private "land" will be asked to migrate there if they wish to partake in adult-related activities. Second Life is an 18+ environment already, but stricter age verification policies will be put in place. You'll need a "verified" account, either through credit card information or through Linden Labs' filtering system, to get into the adult "continent."
Members will be asked to start flagging content as adults-only as part of a new content rating system, which will start to roll out in an update to the downloadable Second Life client that will be available next week.
"The people that are on our mainland and in our estate, if they are going to engage with adult content, are being asked to do that in the adult content area," said Cyn Skyberg, vice president of customer relations at Linden Lab. "Private land owners will be asked to tag their searches for adult-related listings so that it goes into the adult filter."
So what does this mean for Second Life, which was briefly a marketers' paradise before swifty falling from grace in the Silicon Valley pecking order? Well, it'll help make it a friendlier environment for some of the new "residents" whom Linden Lab hopes to woo. The company is profitable, due largely in part to the sheer volume of virtual goods and transactions made on the platform by loyal users, and Linden Lab sees corporate and academic institutions as an area for future growth. Keeping porn in its place could be good for P.R.
"A portion of this will be perceived as definitely being more corporate- and educator-friendly because you'll have more control over the things you're experiencing," Skyberg said.
There's no more room for smut and naughty bits on build-your-own social network service Ning, according to a post on the company blog. Ning has announced that it will shut down its "Red Light District" of adult content, and on January 1 will formally ban it.
"We are exploring ways for adult networks that will no longer be available on Ning to export their content in addition to their members," the post by CEO Gina Bianchini read. The reasoning, she explained, is that it's costly and problematic--something you just can't deal with in a recession.
Advertisers don't like it, Bianchini said. "Our ad partners aren't big fans of the adult networks and therefore require us to identify adult networks or risk our healthy advertising revenue," she explained. "We don't want to be in the policing business and, unchecked, that's where this is heading."
And if legal adult-content networks are allowed, the illegal ones invariably weasel their way in, Bianchini said, and that means more work for a small team. The number of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices is also higher for adult networks: "Compared to our other social networks on the Ning Platform, the additional work created by adult networks alleged to have violated the copyrights of others is enough for us to discontinue adult networks in favor of investing time and energy in growing the Ning Platform from here," Bianchini wrote.
Ning isn't the only site to be cracking the whip on porn. YouTube, owned by Google, said on Tuesday that it's "tightening the standard for what is considered 'sexually suggestive.'"
Bianchini co-founded Ning with Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, and famously raised a $60 million round of funding in anticipation of a "nuclear winter." Guess that was a good move.
Zivity is demoing its service today at the TechCrunch 40 event. It's a photo gallery of hot women, both clothed and not, and with a twist: Users who pay $10 a month for access to the nudie pix also get five votes a month, which they can parcel out to models they see on the site. Each vote is worth actual cash money to the models and their photographers.
She can be yours for $10 a month
By default, 60 cents goes to the model and 20 cents to the photographer who took it. Established photogs on the site can strike their own deals with models.
CEO Cyan Banister called Zivity a cross between Playboy (obvious), American Idol (the voting system), and MySpace. The last because there's a social angle to the site: Users will be able to interact with the models. The models, presumably, will take to the interaction in order to boost their popularity and earn more bucks.
Banister thinks that top-performing models will be able to earn more from Zivity than from a typical online model shoot (a few hundred bucks) and possibly even more than a Playboy centerfold model earns ($25,000, she says, plus $100,000 for Playmate of the Year). That's a lot of votes for a site that's got to walk the line between tasteful (but not so tasteful it's boring) and exciting (but not too: There will be no sex in the pictures). An initial reaction to this business plan is to scoff: Who's going to pay for straightforward girlie pictures? However, we should not underestimate the perennial power of adult content to generate revenue. There are lots of ways to make money in this business.
What I find most interesting about Zivity is that it's one of the few new adult business models that's not actually breaking new ground--not technologically, socially, nor from a business perspective. Although the idea of rewarding nude models directly for their popularity may not have been done online so far, it's not a new idea in the broader perspective: Social and participatory sites (like Digg) have shown us how powerful the crowd of users can be when it comes to sorting content, and how much value accrues to the winners of these contests. I'm only surprised that the concept originated for G-rated content before moving to the adult world, instead of vice versa.
The site is still in closed beta. And no, I don't have invites.
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