Time to change the “adult content” policies
We all know it, “adult content” is bad. But does it have to be ?
Most of technologies man has created were/are/will be used to serve all types of adult contents. In response to that, we are building walls after walls of technological means to delete, hide, sort, remove, eradicate it.
As a simple human being…
The need to remove that content is understandable because, I agree with you, it’s usually awful. I don’t believe the adult industry is leading innovation, that’s just an attractive post title to get some visitors. No, most of it is striving to find models that work like they used to in the golden age.
That golden age, for me, is a spam fiesta, a teenagers CB30 pool party and now everyone’s grounded and we have to clean the house.
Hey people, sex is okay, it’s something most of us do, something most of us like, something most of us talk about, something most of us do searches about using private-navigation.
It’s okay to have content about it and that content should follow the same rules : poor quality content will always exist but there should be great one too, and that great content deserves to be accessed by great users.
As a tech co-founder…
(of Gentle, an app made by and for couples wishing to make their sex lives greater) I tell you: we cannot go on like that.
Right now, as a starting company on a mission of accompanying couples in their fantasies, some of the amazing products we are using daily for “normal” work are just… forbidden. That’s not acceptable, content should be king whatever the theme.
Let’s take the basics when launching your product/service: a great newsletter signup. That’s really nowadays startup 101: put a landing page online with your promise, a signup form to get emails and start building your community, fine tuning your product’s pitch and so on.
Well, one of the best online services to do that is Mailchimp. The product is amazing and I love how they do it. I even remember Jon Hicks presenting the new mascot at Future Of Webdesign in London (that was in another time, thus I won’t say the year). Well, fond memories aside, guess what… ? Yep, Mailchimp does not allow the use of their service to serve adult content. You can find the terms here but here’s an excerpt:
Prohibited Content : Pornography/sexually explicit content, Escort and dating services
Sending Subject to Additional Scrutiny : Adult Entertainment/Novelty Items
Okay, I get it. The vast majority of those things are the results of that CB30 pool party.
In our case our content is not sexually explicit (our policy is no public sex pics, that never works anyway guys !), and… escort services ?! Are you serious ? I agree with you guys, that is a terrifying business but… what if someone tries to disrupt/clean/change it ? Wouldn’t that person deserve all the help available ?
What’s the place of great content here ? None.
You have to resort to managing everything yourself like it’s 2004 again. And that’s a vicious circle of low quality. Why would you even want to do something great when the pure players are closing their doors ?
Last example in date is Mandrill, Mailchimp’s baby and great transactionnal email tool launched in 2012. Mandrill didn’t have the same policy, so when we started Gentle we confidently set it up as we do in almost all our internal and client’s projects. That was at least something straight and simple…
until February 24th 2016
…when Mailchimp announced it was bringing back Mandrill under Mailchimp and Mailchimp’s terms, the service being available to all of Mailchimp’s paying customer base.
F**k
Right now, we are looking for other options for both our newsletters and our transactional emails. Options that are from the 21st century, options that could allow us to leverage our content, make it to the next level.
If someone from Mailchimp reads this post, know that we would be more than happy to pay for both Mailchimp and Mandrill and, doing so, proving that “adult content” can be great. Like you said yourself “Starting is hard to do”:
Of course feel free to signup to our just-released landing page if you want to know more about Gentle and access our content !
https://gentleapp.com
