Computing Canada: Sex sells in the domain of e-content delivery: even corporate Web sites selling us

My students were discussing new media revenue models as they prepared to go live with their own news and information site. The course, given in the journalism department of Concordia University in Montreal, culminates in a limited run of a student designed-and-managed site. And even though they don't have to make money at the endeavour, I always ask them to develop revenue strategies as if they do.

These students will likely be the near future's media moguls. My course is a kind of dry-run for the real work of the e-content business, where they try on all kinds of ideas for size.

This is how the Internet is stacking up....

"Even if I was designing a marketing site for a company, I'd want to know how to make it pay for itself," said one particularly commerce-minded student after class. "The Web is such a great opportunity for merchandising and indirect revenue that you really have to make your site pay if you want it to be taken seriously."

It's clear the current crop of twenty-somethings have some interesting ideas on what it takes to make a profit and be taken seriously.

They all agree that advertising doesn't work and subscription-based revenue models are nonsense. Of a class of 20 students, not one pays for online content, and none of them can recall ever reading--let alone clicking--through an ad. Using themselves as a focus group, they unanimously agreed the time has come to cook up other, more creative revenue sources.

That's where pornography comes in. It isn't a secret that aside from maybe Amazon.com and a few others, the only people making money on the `Net are the ones who sell dirty pictures. And videos. And stuff like that. (In fairness, the gambling sites seem to be doing well too.)

My students are part of the generation that grew up knowing the Internet will always be there, and don't think there's anything strange about having a Web cam in the shower. They also know implicitly that traditional business models just don't work online anymore. "We could do hunks of the Journalism Department," said one young woman whose mother probably has no idea how keen she is to be a pornographer. Another murmured under her breath "Hunks? What hunks?"

What struck me is even though they don't have to make money on this project, they are dead serious. If traditional business models don't work, they have to find something that does. And for this generation, sex sells. They did come up with a bunch of other good ideas, such as getting sponsorship for off-line events and using the Web presence to sell services to their information consumers, but sex was the idea that stuck.

So where is the `Net headed? Nudie corporate sites? Virtual slot machine e-business? All girl-on-girl, boy-on-boy, PC-on-PC and--gasp!--PC-on-Mac open source portals? Maybe that's going too far ... then again, maybe it's not so far-fetched in the age of Sex in the City and Christina Aguilera. The e-entrepreneurs of tomorrow seem to think so.

I have seen the future, and it is blue.

Matthew Friedman is a Montreal-based freelance journalist. mwf@total.net