Update: use “flickr-eroticr” as your code to gain access.
Yup, we were surprised, too. But a brand new service, currently in private beta testing, aims to extract the “soft erotic” videos and images from the popular social media sites YouTube and Flickr. Members of eroticr (behind a holding page) can import photos from Flickr, videos from YouTube or upload images from their own computers.
Obviously eroticr is being very careful here with regard to the DMCA and child porn: there are warnings about uploading copyrighted content, making sure that those in the images/videos are adults, and only adding “erotica” to the site, rather than “pornography”. I’m not really sure where they’ll draw the line, and I wonder whether moderators could be held responsible if the onus is on the site, rather than the users, to keep things semi-clean (they do have a “report content” button”, suggesting that they want to hand this responsibility to the users). There’s certainly lots of partial nudity on the site, mainly due to Flickr’s relaxed policies, but I guess most of this would be considered “soft” or even artistic.
Technically, it’s an average attempt: images/videos pop up in ajaxy windows with ratings, comments and tags, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds and rank content by “hottest” or “newest”. I get the sense that they should increase the number of source sites, however, especially considering YouTube’s strict moderation policies: it’s well known that Metacafe and Google Video are more inclined to leave this stuff online.
It’s easy to ignore the scores of porn-related submissions we at Mashable get every week, but entrepreneurs should note that adult content is as popular on social sites as it is elsewhere on the web: Pornotube was said to be growing faster than YouTube, for instance. Another data point: did Flickr become the most popular photo site in the UK in June last year thanks to its high brow photography? Nope - apparently it was due to soft porn. As usual, however, companies are faced with a dilemma: VCs often won’t invest in sites than are considered adult. On the other hand, these relaxed content policies can bring a huge boost in user numbers.
Oh, and there’s that whole morality thing, too. Yawn.
Source: YouTube Has Porn?
Originally published on Thu, 08 Feb 2007 04:27:00 GMT by Pete Cashmore