With VR Porn Banned by Law In China, Taiwan Firm To Release First Chinese 360 Adult Film
As pornography is banned in China, a Taiwanese firm wants to get some skin in the game and is set to release the first Chinese adult virtual reality (VR) film in August. The illegal status of adult content in China means the country will walk sideways from an industry potentially worth billions of dollars.
Taiwanese video start-up Pandora Move said it would release the first Chinese adult VR film next month featuring Japanese actors and actresses, with a local production team responsible for the screenplay, shoot and post-production.
“In the VR film industry, adult movies are the only one with a proven track record for monetization,” said vice chairman of Pandora Move, Ding Baoshan, during an interview with Chinese media.
“Most regular adult movies are watched free online, but VR adult films will be able to bring in much higher revenues. This is our hope for a new gold mine,” another executive at the company said.
Pornography on the web is a huge business. Around US$3,075 are spent per second on adult content on the Internet globally, while 280,000 people around the world watch adult content online each second, according to data from Top Ten Reviews. Around 12% of the world’s websites, or 24.6 billion websites, feature porn. Around 35% of downloaded content are adult related, while 25% of Internet searches are porn-related, according to the same source.
The combination of VR and adult content has been considered a promising and lucrative business model for both creators and hardware makers. Naughty American, an adult film portal that launched VR content a couple of years ago, said conversion rate for adult VR films is much higher. Around one in 300 visitors are willing to pay to watch adult VR films, compared to one in 1,500 visitors for traditional films. The enthusiasm has led the company’s revenues from VR films grow 433% year-on-year in 2016, according to Chinese media reports.
In Japan, where average spend on porn is around US$157 per person in 2011 (more updated data is unavailable), adult VR films have also soared. Japanese adult film company DMM saw its revenue double in May from two months ago to around RMB12 million (US$1.8 million). The company launched its VR portal in April, featuring 1,500 adult films, 300 adult animation, concerts and stage dramas.
Global virtual reality revenues are expected to reach US$7.17 billion by the end of this year. The industry will grow to close to US$75 billion by 2021 in terms of total revenues generated, according to Greenlight Insights.
Investors continue to bet on the future of VR. From the third quarter 2016 to the second quarter this year, over US$2 billion investment has been made in the VR industry globally. It’s unclear how much of that total was related to porn content creation, but video content was the second largest recipient of investments, according to Digi-Capital.
Even though porn is illegal in China, the potential to make huge profits has attracted daring entrepreneurs. In February, China’s central government mouthpiece CCTV exposed VR headset sellers on Alibaba’s e-commence platforms promoting their product via benefits of “free adult films”. Alibaba later said that it deleted 2,769 illegal VR products from its platforms.
In January, prosecutors in Shenzhen arrested 19 people who were involved in giving away “free adult VR films” to VR headset buyers online. It’s unclear what kind of charges they would face, but it will unlikely stop people in China from pursuing hard profits.
