OWN CORRESPONDENT, Los Angeles | Saturday
THE cutthroat fight for economic survival in the struggling Internet marketplace has lead online search engine Yahoo! to embrace the porn industry, the first major net company to do so.
The move has made Yahoo a giant in the online porn industry, one of the few sectors of the Web that is actually profitable, the Los Angeles Times reported this week.
The company, based in Santa Clara, California, near San Francisco, has opened an online store stocked with adult videos and hard-core DVDs, the Times said.
“In the online sex market, size does matter,” Dan Lavin of high-tech market analysis firm International Venture Research told the paper. “There’s no one bigger than Yahoo.”
Other major, mainstream online firms have been reluctant to associate themselves with pornography.
Yahoo’s decision to play a role as a porn online middleman reflects Internet companies’ desperation amid an economic slowdown that has hit the Dot.com sector hard, the Times said.
This week Yahoo said it posted a net loss for the first quarter of $11.5m compared with a profit of $67.6m in the same period a year ago.
Some 185 million people worldwide access Yahoo each month.
Web surfers have always been able to find adult-oriented material on Yahoo, Excite and other mainstream Web portals. But Yahoo’s move transforms it into a promoter – rather than just an indexer – of the racy products, the paper said.
Yahoo refused to comment, but analysts said the company’s porn gamble could backfire by alienating advertisers, its main source of revenue. – AFP
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