NAUGHTY AMERICA CUSTOMERS HAVE DOWNLOADED 20 MILLION VR PORN VIDEOS
VR gaming may suck big time, but there’s a heck of a lot more sucking going on in a different sector of the VR market that is very profitable. I’m talking about the VR porn industry, which is still seeing a sizable boom thanks to companies like Naughty America providing VR headset owners with lots of premium, fully-immersive VR pornography.
According to a report published on June 11th, 2018 from the Wall Street Journal, Naughty America has managed to move 20 million downloads in the VR porn market.
There’s a strong attachment rate to the viewership as well, with the report noting that one out of every 167 visitors to the VR preview scene become a subscriber for the content. That’s a massive convergence rate compared to the traditional porn media, where they see one in every 1,500 visitors becoming a paid subscriber.
The uptick in subscription rates have been steadily rising since 2016, where they saw an initial 55% gains in revenue from subscribers.
The article notes that there’s an install base of about 6 million VR headset owners across HTC, Oculus, PSVR, the mixed reality headsets, and the mobile VR headsets, according to Superdata. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to have proven to be profitable for Naughty America. At this point the company notes its biggest hurdle is distribution, since all the major headset manufacturers don’t want to distribute porn apps through their online stores.
Back in January of 2018 LA Times reported that various VR porn outlets are having a hard time getting new content to users due to the roadblocks in place by the platform owners. Daniel Peterson, founder and CEO of VRPorn.com, told the LA Times…
The Wall Street Journal notes that Piper Jaffray estimates that VR porn could hit $1 billion in revenue generation by 2020. The LA Times notes that Gene Munster from Loup Ventures expects VR porn to hit $1.4 billion by 2025.
Of course, before growing to that point the hardware manufacturers actually have to sell the headsets first. Right now there isn’t a lot of compelling non-porn software, so a lot of people aren’t buying expensive VR HMDs, so in turn the growth of VR porn – while big – isn’t quite as big as it could be. Some of the only consistent selling software on the VR front are porn games like VR Kanojo.
Even still, as the hardware gets cheaper and the adoption rates begin to rise, one must question what the platform holders will do when the only major software revenue being generated from their expensive VR technology is from porn?
