A HyperLink Network Analysis of the UK

Mobile Porn Industry

By Steven McDermott, Institute of Communications

Studies, University of Leeds
cssem@leeds.ac.uk
 Introduction
• The so-called ‘free stuff’ “is either a product that
gets you hooked on to another one or makes
you just consume more time on the net [...] The
objective is to have you consume
bandwidth.”(Horvarth, 1998)
• Mainstream space of flows of a highly
commercial activity, not just on the Internet but
on mobile devices.
• The next wave of the distribution of pornography
via the ‘free stuff’ model.
• 23% of United Kingdom residences got
broadband to access pornography. (British ISP
Homecall in Orlowski, 2004)
• iPod launched in October 2005
• 20 Days later Apple Inc. announced that it had
sold 1 million videos and tv shows at $1.99
each.
• After 3 days of suicidegirls (pornographic
site)movies being available via iTunes it had 1
million downloads (Bakker & Taalas, 2007).
• “It is the paramount duty of the Board of Directors to oversee the
CEO and other senior management in the competent and ethical
operation of the Company on a day-to-day basis and to assure that
the long-term interests of the shareholders are being served. To
satisfy this duty, the directors will take a proactive, focused
approach to their position, and set standards to ensure that the
Company is committed to business success through maintenance of
the highest standards of responsibility and ethics.”
• (http://www.apple.com/investor/)
• The claims of corporate social responsibility
(CSR) by the industrial players needs to be
something other than hollow assertions of
misguided virtue (Henderson, 2001).
 Hyperlink Network Analysis
• A report titled Mobile Adult Content 2008
Securing revenue from adult entertainment
published in July of 2008 targeting UK
consumers by Visiongain views the
dissemination and profiteering from pornography
as a “success story”.
• It is this report that provided me with the list
companies, movie production companies,
distributers, mobile infrastructure, magazines
and a small number of child protection agencies.
• I began with 179 companies and found 171
URLs or html addresses.
970 nodes or
Mainstream
Websites, of
companies.
 Social Network Analysis
• I then manually removed the 835 nodes that
were not part of the original list of companies in
the Visiongain report.
• I then conducted a betweenness and closeness
centrality test on the remaining network.
• Betweenness centrality refers to the ‘importance’
or ‘power’ of a node within the network.
Controlling the flow of information/data/images
in the network.
 Discussion
• Allusions to social responsibility are simply
misguided. The current provider of pornographic
material as evident in the graph is Penthouse,
which is one geodesic from Apple Inc., in figure
2. Apple then openly allows for its vast iTunes
‘music download’ business to facilitate the
distribution of pornographic material from third
sources.
• The network is dominated by companies
founded and based in the United States of
America (Apple Inc.) and a mobile phone
producer with a global reach (SonyEricsson), the
gateway into the UK market is via IPCMedia
which distributes an old media form -
magazines. This is not a surprise with the global
reach of numerous technology companies and
the revitalisation of older media as a result of the
Internet.
• The software for converting online Internet
pornography to mobile pornography is
freely available.