with the periodical's logo on them, according to Gerard Van Der Leun, former director of Penthouse.com and current contributor to American Digest. At the time these modems offered the fastest way to access the magazine's popular XXX bulletin boards. Clearly, in the early years of the Net, nobody had a greater need for a bigger, fatter pipe than the adult industry and its customers.
Though the evidence is largely anecdotal, various authorities believe that "acquiring higher resolution pornographic images faster promoted broadband connections," as Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M, put it in a 2006 paper on the nature of computer-based porn PDF.
According to an October 2000 report in the New York Times, nearly 20 percent of AT&T broadband customers were paying to watch "real, live all-American sex" online, at an average rate of $10 per film. A 2003 study by Nielsen/NetRatings found that online music sharing and pornography were the biggest factors underlying broadband penetration in Europe.
Of course, nobody from Time Warner Roadrunner or AT&T Broadband ever showed up at the door saying "We're here to install your porn connection, Mr. Clinton." But when broadband rear its head locally, users could thank the adult industry for getting it there just a wee bit faster.
8. Naughty: Browser Hijacking
Among the earliest instances of browser hijacking occurred when slime lords would use spyware and adware to hijack a browser's home page or change a user's default search engine, redirecting the hapless surfer to bogus "search engines" loaded with pay-per-click ads for adult sites. The owners of these pages would receive a few pennies every time some the rube clicked on one of the links -- a commercial arrangement that might translate into tens of thousands of dollars in revenue each month.
9. Nice: Traffic optimization
Long before blogs appeared -- or aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit, or affiliate ad networks like Link Exchange, or even Google Adsense -- X-rated online venues were building massive site traffic by sharing links, customers, and revenues among themselves.
"The porn folks have led the industry in traffic development and monetization," says Ariel Ozick, chief of operations for Wired Rhino, a search marketing optimization company. "They developed the concept of top sites linking to generate traffic and were among the first to develop an affiliate revenue-sharing model."
Since the dawn of the Net, adult sites have been sharing customers, says Frieser. "Back in the '90s, if you subscribed to an adult site and left after three months, you'd get an e-mail offering access not only to that site but to three other networks for the same price. There was a lot of that going on."
Now Frieser says that the phenomenon is starting to regain strebgth, in part because pay-to-view adult sites are losing their audience to a plethora of free smut on the Net.
10. Naughty: Domain-Name Hijacking
There's probably no more egregious example of someone filching someone else's domain than the circumstances prompting the legal battle over Sex.com. In 1996, Stephen M. Cohen allegedly used a faked document to convince Network Solutions that legal ownership of Sex.com had been transferred to his name. He then operated a wildly profitable porn operation on that site. In 2001 the domain was returned to its original owner, Gary Kremen, and Cohen was ordered to pay him $65 million. Cohen refused and is still at trial for contempt after going on the lam for five years; Kremen sold the domain in 2006 for an estimated $14 million.
11. Nice: 3G Mobile Services
Pocket porn is the new frontier. Just as adult content helped push the propagation of cable and DSL connections, mobile porn will undoubtedly arouse demand for high-speed 3G data services.
Last June, iRoticNet launched a service that
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