Could crowdsourcing transform the porn industry the same way it’s shaken up product development, photography, and venture capitalism through online platforms like Quirky, Shutterstock, and Kickstarter? Cindy Gallop, a former ad executive and 2003 Advertising Woman of the Year, certainly hopes so. Last August, Gallop launched the website MakeLoveNotPorn.tv in an effort to subvert the way people consume sex online. Her crusade started with a 2009 TED talk in which she described her frustrations dating younger men, who she said tended to mimic hard core pornography during sex rather than seeking genuine physical connection. Gallop wants to dispel the stigma and embarrassment attached to frank sexual expression, and offer an antidote to the impersonal fetishization rampant in the most widely-consumed pornography. Fearing that hardcore pornography has become the de-facto sex education in our society, Gallop said in her TED talk that, “as a mature, experience, confident older woman,” she’d come to realize that “a certain amount of reeducation, rehabilitation, and reorientation has to take place.”
Gallop’s rehabilitation program takes the form of an online platform for crowdsourcing what she calls “real world sex” videos in order to better facilitate “open, healthy, and better sexual relationships.” As described in a recent SmarPlanet profile, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv users can upload videos of themselves having sex, with the stipulations that the sex must be non-performative, consensual, and between people over 18. Users are charged a $5 “curating fee” for each submission, but can also earn revenue from their videos, which other users rent for $5. Gallop reports that some contributors earned in the four-figure range when the site made its first payments. But because pornography sites often run into difficulties with banks due to chargebacks—customers refusing to pay for charges they deny having made—traditional banks and payment systems like PayPal and Amazon have refused to process MakeLoveNotPorn.tv transactions. Instead the site works in the U.S. with PayPal competitor Dwolla, a development that Gallop says has made her “ferociously interested in the future of money.”
In addition to fusing open sexuality with tech trends like crowdsourcing and payment systems, Gallop’s project delves into demographics and reputation-based markets. “Our target is Gen Y,” she says. “This is the generation who has grown up video-sharing everything.” Lamenting that “porn lacks curation,” she goes on to explain that online sex needs a system like Yelp to help people discover new porn the way they discover a new restaurant. Gallop’s ultimate tech-inflected ambition for her groundbreaking website? To become an accelerator for innovative porn startups. Says Gallop: “I want to be the Y Combinator of porn.”