Japan's online communities turning from SNS to S.E.X.
The country's biggest Social Networking Service, mixi, recently went
public, prompting it to purge itself of anything pubic.
The result has been a boon for operators of adult-oriented SNS such as
sexii and Private People that cater for people with little more than
lust on their minds, according to trendy men's weekly Spa!.
As those who put racier profiles or pictures up on mixi are escorted
out of the community, they're finding their way toward the mushrooming
adult-oriented SNS sites, creating an entirely new world of online
erotic communication, to put it in the magazine's own words.
With membership already topping 8,000, sexii is so far Japan's largest
adult-oriented SNS.
"We're actually an online advertisement company, but when we heard
that mixi was cracking down on people who were a bit too raunchy, we
decided to step in and fill the breach, and started up sexii in May,"
the site's operator, who is not named, tells Spa! "We never dreamed
we'd get so many people registering so quickly and have had to hurry
up and put in some more servers. We're currently using three massive
servers to cope with the traffic. Mind you, I think we're the only
place where a company is actually running an adult-oriented SNS. All
the others are still being run by individuals."
It's true that other adult SNS sites are packed with plenty of
revealing photos of a type that can't be found on sexii, which is a
deliberate policy of the company.
"We're deleting any risky photos. Even if we are an adult site, that
doesn't mean 'anything goes.' We abide by the law," sexii's operator
says before jokingly adding: "We like to set up fights between our
administrators and users to find out just how far people can go before
we draw the line and take their pictures down."
While mixi has hundreds of millions of yen in advertising on offer as
an incentive to clean itself up, it's hardly likely that companies are
going to be rushing to the adult SNS sites to pay for their products
to be promoted. So, where's the incentive to run them?
"Adult-oriented sites have lost a bit of their steam, thanks to all
the scamming that had been going on. Places that had a lot of
once-popular erogs (erotica-oriented blogs) like mixi and Livedoor
have cleaned up their acts, too. But all we're interested in, really,
is making a fine, adult-oriented SNS where people can have a good
time," sexii's operator tells Spa! "We're an ad company now, but we're
thinking about one day offering pay-per-view contents like videos or
erotic chats. Frankly, we're quite happy to see mixi become even
stricter because that only means all the more people coming to us."