Sex sells, yet again

Sex is probably the oldest business on the Net after missile technology, but with the arrival of push8217; strategies, which allow vendors to show you their products even if you didn8217;t ask to see them, its online marketing has become extremely aggressive. It has even invaded the traditionally commerce-free relay chat channels.

Try going to chatzone, one of the oldest, most innocuous channels. Instead of your old friends, you8217;ll meet Brandi, Cindy, Mindy andGwendy, who all regret they can8217;t be there in person instead of talking through robots. But do click on the link the bot serves up and you can chat live with them on their home pages. If commercialised sex has reached chat, it8217;s time to take a serious look at it.

Some of the biggest media operations have been reading the signs. This January, Christie Hefner, CEO of Playboy and daughter of Hugh Hefner, spun off a new media division and took the magazine and its associated products online. In the early nineties, at a time when circulation had dropped by half and advertising revenues were plummetting, she had seen a window of opportunity in cable television. In January, after a six-month survey, her analysts assured her that a similar window is opening in cyberspace.

In the first three months, the online division is clocking 1.4 million page views per day and has raked in 4 million. Not much, for a house with a 300 million revenue base. But by the standards of Internet business, it8217;s pretty good going.Especially when you consider that the 4 million was earned by just 10 employees. Besides, most of the 25,000 committed subscribers that Playboy.com has drawn in constitute a new market they don8217;t subscribe to the magazine. Encouraged, Hefner is now ready to throw serious money at the Net.

This week MSNBC.com, the cable, broadcast and Internet tie-up between Microsoft and the National Broadcasting Corporation, ought to be publishing the results of its anonymous, voluntary poll on cybersex. So far, 69 per cent of its respondents claim to regularly visit sex sites. It doesn8217;t claim to be a definitive document, but it should start other media houses thinking in more concrete terms on whether it is time to change corporate attitudes to online sex, merely in the interests of making money.

Serious profits, however, will have to await new technologies that will complete the convergence between broadcast media, television, telephony and the Internet. Think of it as a TV set with a keyboard and a phone jack.

Here8217;s how it will work: let8217;s assume that you have been watching an X-rated movie on cable. When you finish, you switch to the Web to chat live with the star. Then you buy another of her films on the same site, and download it straight to your PC. Where you would have paid only once to see the original movie, you8217;ve gone and forked over three times.

How long do the companies have to wait? Not too long. Apple is ready to roll with Columbus, which runs CDs, DVD and the Net with the MacOS.

Significantly, it will be sold in the form of a TV-top box.

So the final synergy between all media is almost with us. In a couple of years, it should become widely accessible. Eventually, no doubt, it will be used by every entertainment provider. But the first to cash in will be the sex industry. That8217;s human nature for you.