Daniel Peterson runs the world’s biggest virtual-reality website. It just happens to be dedicated to porn. He claims his site, VRporn.com, gets 10.5 million views per month. According to SimilarWeb, this is almost double that of Oculus.com, the website for the VR company that Facebook bought for $2 billion (£1.5bn) in 2014. “I don’t want to say we’re a big deal, but we are kind of a big deal,” Peterson says.
In VR, success is something to celebrate. After the excitement created by the release of the first wave of headsets, the medium is still in the process of finding its place in the world and funding is hard to come by. Peterson puts his achievement down to business acumen. “It’s not really about how to make a great porn company, it’s how to make a great company,” he says. “It’s about startups, entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley and philosophy.” The fact that he runs a hardcore porn site is, he says, “no big deal, really”.
For me, as a VR creator, this raises a difficult question. Given VR’s challenge in finding a marketable product, is it possible that Peterson is correct?
Peterson, 37, created his site in 2013 as a VR fan site: he called it VRporn.com, he says, the way a food blogger might talk about “food porn”. Then he tried a few posts on actual VR porn – and the reaction was immediate.
“I would write some article about a technology topic and some other article about an adult CGI VR experience. Those NSFW posts received 20 times the interest as the safe-for-work posts,” he explains. In 2015, Peterson followed the viewers and went into porn professionally – not as a creator, but as a distributor.
VRporn.com is a “tube” site – an ad-funded aggregator of lots of VR porn studios’ content. Every VR experience it offers is free, but links through to subscription-only websites. (Peterson won’t say how much money he makes, but jokes that the traditional adult industry expects him to turn up to events in a Lamborghini.) The site’s aggregator role gives the team of 12 a bird’s-eye view of the genre and its evolution. The people making VR porn are either larger, commercial studios such as Naughty America, which has recently branched out to VR, or smaller VR-specific studios such as BaDoinkVR. So how do studios decide what to make next? “They just follow the money,” Peterson explains. “They see the stuff that sells and will make more of it.”
What sells, it turns out, is 360° video in a point-of-view style. You look down and there is a body – usually that of a white man. While the viewer stays in a fixed position, performers move around them. As it’s video, rather than interactive CGI, you don’t have any control over what happens: you are locked in for the ride; the experience is on rails.
“There are limitations,” Peterson says. “The male has to stay still. Can’t be moving around. Can’t be shaking.” He tells me that only a small proportion of VR porn is interactive – the ratio has “gotta be ninety-nine to one. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree video is where all the big studios are pumping it out. They are much easier to make, and that is where the money is.”
One appeal of VR is that it lets us see the world through other people’s eyes. But when it comes to VR porn, the vast majority of the eyes you can see through are those of a straight, white male. Occasionally, Peterson says, studios will produce a male version and a female version of the same scene, so that couples can step into someone else’s sex life. Still, the “vanilla”, straight and fixed format dominates. The burgeoning VR industry is emerging in a space geared towards male desires.
Peterson is keen to stress that he’s just running a business. “I think the producers are just trying to make content that appeals to the widest audience,” he says. Walking into his office, he tells me, “You wouldn’t even know really what we were doing. It’s basically just a technology company. Everybody is very transparent about what the team is working on and everybody is respected. But really our primary value is that we love VR.”
Maybe this is just the way it is. Porn, the saying goes, is innovation’s dirty secret – and VR porn serves as a gateway into VR for hundreds of thousands of people. But no matter how much it helps the industry, packaging women’s sexuality for men in order to sell headsets feels gross.
I truly believe in the potential of VR as a whole new artistic medium and a way to communicate. But if this is the way it’s being shaped – with women the subject of a controlling male gaze – sometimes I worry for its future.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
