Gov't crackdown deals blow to China's porn sites
Staff Reporter
2014-05-10
Video chatrooms on the 9158 website. (Internet photo)
A crackdown by the Chinese government has dealt a blow to popular pornographic websites in the nation.
Ms. Y, the 20-something star of a pornography site, on which she poses as the "anchor," dressed up in various styles, from a pristine student, to a heavily made-up seductress, or a wild girl with a blonde wig, offers online chat services to callers at night. The Shanghai-based China Business News reported that Ms. Y typically collects tens of thousands of yuan a month from the part-time job, several times her wage for her day job as a model.
The lucrative job, however, ended on the eve of Labor Day on May 1, following the launch of a nationwide crackdown on websites featuring pornographic material.
According to Hong Kong-based research firm ISSL, in 2010 12% of websites worldwide offered pornographic content, to varying extents. According to statistics from Double-click, an online ad service provider under Google, dozens of the top 500 websites worldwide in terms of traffic are pornographic sites, one fourth of online search requests are porn-related, and over one third of downloads are pornography.
The newspaper cited the former operator of a pornography site as saying that pornographic sites boast loyal patrons ready to open their pocketbooks.
There have been a series of successful online pornography startups in China, such as YY, 9158, and Six Rooms. YY, a Nasdaq-listed firm, for instance, raked in 183.6 million yuan (US$29.44 million) in net profits in the first quarter this year, up a whopping 187.2% year-on-year.
9158, under Tiange, took in 70 million yuan (US$11.2 million) in revenue per month in 2012, from its over 20,000 chatrooms, which typically host 700,000 users simultaneously.
Six Rooms was estimated to have racked up 400 million yuan (US$64.2 million) in revenue in 2013, with its business scope having been extended to mobile phones and tablet PCs.
Those pornographic websites derive their revenues mainly from content, services, ads, and other hidden sources, according to the paper.
