The geography of adult tech


If you exclude Chinese firms, the world's biggest tech companies are all based in Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area) or Seattle. The trillion-dollar club are

  • Apple, Bay Area
  • Amazon, Seattle
  • Microsoft, Seattle
  • Alphabet (Google et al), Bay Area
  • Meta (Facebook et al), Bay Area

And there are plenty of other Bay Area firms in the next tier, such as Twitter, Uber, and Netflix.

Now let's look at the world's biggest adult-related tech firms.

  • Match Group (Tinder, Hinge, et al), Dallas, Texas
  • Bumble, Austin, Texas
  • MindGeek (Pornhub, YouPorn, et al), Montreal, Canada
  • OnlyFans, London, UK
  • Tumblr (pre-2018 family-friendly reboot), New York
These are all multi-billion-dollar businesses, but notice that none of them are located on the US west coast. OK, technically Bay Area firms like Twitter and Reddit tolerate adult content, but it's a small part of their traffic, and they're rather coy about it.

It's not like a Silicon Valley venture capitalist to pass up a billion-dollar opportunity, so what's going on?

Let's speculate ...

Here are some possible reasons why Silicon Valley steers clear of adult tech ...

  • The Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) has had a chilling effect on online commercial sex services in the United States. It might explain why OnlyFans and MindGeek are located outside the US.
  • Legal restrictions limit the size of the market. Users under the age of 18 can't (legally) access adult content, and some countries, such as Singapore, ban it altogether. And parental control filters may automatically block the content. On the other hand, Silicon Valley has enthusiastically invested in the cannabis industry, whose users must be at least 21, so they're willing to invest in some adult-only products at least.
  • Nerds are clueless about sex. There's a stereotype that nerds are emotionally immature, and nervous and incompetent around the opposite sex. But even if the stereotype is true, not everyone in Silicon Valley is a nerd, especially the people working for venture capital firms.
  • The political/cultural environment Silicon Valley and Seattle is hostile to the (heterosexual) sex industry. Although Playboy is based in Los Angeles and much of the world's porn is filmed in the San Fernando Valley, maybe the culture is less tolerant further north.
  • It's a dodgy industry. Historically, the adult industry has attracted its share of shady characters — perhaps because it's an industry where customers are too embarrassed to complain. The industry is rife with content piracy, spam, fake profiles, and stolen credit cards. Maybe Silicon Valley has decided that it's not worth the hassle.
But who knows.

Kill zones

If Silicon Valley — and big tech in general — is avoiding adult products, that's mostly good news for startups in the dating space. They don't have to worry about wandering into the "kill zones" that allegedly surround big tech firms, and being wiped out by deep-pocketed marketing and engineering firepower.

On the other hand, it means that investors in dating startups have fewer options to cash out, since an acquisition by a tech firm is off the table. An acquisition by the Match Group — 45 subsidiaries and counting — is still possible, as is a Bumble-style IPO, but a bidding war between tech firms is unlikely.

So, for better or worse, it looks like adult tech businesses — in dating, porn, escort services, etc — will continue to ply their trade while being largely ignored by Silicon Valley.

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