THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

Yes. That’s right.

Today, it was announced that social media, a niche in the wide world of marketing, has overtaken pornography in terms of popularity. I heard this while attending a webinar this morning.

In the mid 90’s, when the world looked at the web as a smorgasbord of pornography first and everything else a distant second. It was nothing to be ashamed of, unless you had to deal with Wall Street. 

Even the home entertainment industry began as a discreet pipeline of X-rated entertainment. The difference here is that it took the home entertainment industry just five years to change the paradign. It took the web business a tad longer.

I can remember a meeting I had with Microsoft in Philadelphia in the 90’s. We were meeting with a chatty young woman whose card read "Internet Evangelist.". Her mission was to check out the product environment in video stores for her PC game software. "Too much porn on the shelves. Bill doesn’t like that," she said. So, we missed out on all of their buggy and slow games that would almost always cause our tiny hard drives to crash. And, of course put the blame on the video store.

And, remember CES in years past. Big porn section. Fun and games amidst the Sony’s and Panasonics. Hey, be honest. Better parties at night. Right?

To me this announcement is more memorable than YouTube grabbing more viewers than network TV. More important than the paradigm shift of young people away from e-mail into the Sidekick world of texting and instant messaging.

Poor porn. From a leader in pre-recorded media relegated today to a second tier business model. Say it isn’t so. But it is.

Your sarcastic comments are welcome.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.