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Swizec

Porn. Tumblr has porn.

As always, when two technologies are battling, the one porn picks will win.

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Counter example: HD DVD was selected as the format of choice for next generation porn media. Didn't turn out so well.

I think tumblr was easier for people to post stupid pictures of cats and porn. The friction to entry was lower IMHO.

I think the HD DVD/ Bluray era hasn't seen porn on those formats for two reason: 1. it doesn't matter anymore because the Internet has infinite porn. 2. No one wants to see their porn in HD, as it makes the whole thing kinda grosser. A bit like how Cameron Diaz looks great in low def, but has a crater face in HD.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1050627/pornhd.html No, porn definitely was going to be on HD DVD, it just lost the war.

Sorry, didn't mean it wasn't going to have porn, just meant no one seemed to care about HD porn on discs.

Point taken!

That's a strange and interesting theory. I can think of a few anecdotal places where this is the case, but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure...

Edit: Just thinking about the business of porn, this is probably a decent heuristic for simplicity and cost effectiveness. Porn is usually very low budget (compared to other mass market media), with a very high volume of consumers. From my experience in non-profit oceanographic research, nothing focuses an engineering effort like trying to succeed on a shoestring budget (wow, I never thought that'd compare to working in the porn industry).

> but I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure...

For better or worse, FB could be a good example of "platform success" that partially relies on that. It's not porn per se, just beach/bikini photos of one's lady-friends, or his work-mates, or the wife's friends.

Perhaps, but what do think of the JCPenny catalog?

Proves the point: No JCPenney Catalog, profits falling, oust the new CEO.

Apple as a whole is pretty anti-porn, and they dominated the profits (though not necessarily market share) in the smartphone/tablet market for a long time.

If you don't think that the feature of being able to browse porn video sites on an iphone or ipad had a huge push in making their success you're missing out.

What? Their entire brand is "look how sexy we are".

I was responding to GP's sentence "I wonder if anyone has done a study of porn as a predictor of platform success/failure". Apple prohibits porn on their platforms, e.g. the App store is pretty conservative in what they allow.

I think this might be what you are looking for:

http://history.tamu.edu/faculty/coopersmith/coopersmith%20pe...

Except HD-DVD. In that battle, it was the one who had a video game console backing the standard versus the one with porn but a console maker only paying lip service to the technology.

BluRay won in terms of it stuck around, while HD-DVD died off, but I don't think BR has overtaken DVD's the way DVD's overtook VHS. For the longer game (which is probably only another half-decade), I'd argue that streaming/OnDemand is the real winner. If that's the case, then porn helped shape the winner yet again.

Hadn't porn already moved on to the Internet by the time Blu-ray/HD-DVD were released?

The way I remember it, Sony refused to let the porn industry print bluray discs, and the HD-DVD backers just didn't care, but bluray started winning as soon as Sony relented.

Well, that, and teenagers posting stuff about their hobbies. Doesn't even need to be the cool kids anymore. If you can amass enough content from the nerds to get them networking with each other and then make some money off it, it works.

Of course, the issue with Tumblr is the make some money off it part, but Yahoo is from the '90s, so they know not to expect to make money off things.

How is that going to play out with 3d printers?

Very NSFW:

http://www.reddit.com/r/cummingonfigurines/

That's right. For example, Betamax (technically superior) was not licensed to porn studios, while VHS was. See also, American Express would not enable "gentlemen's clubs," whereas MasterCard did, which is one of the ways MC broke into the market.

Counterpoint: YouTube vs Dailymotion

Didn't porn pick HD-DVD to win?

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