The Keyword Is Porn's Best Friend and Worst Enemy (MEL Magazine)

Read the full article by Tierney Finster at MELMagazine.com

Inside the adult industry, performers and advocates are fighting to make sure their work isn’t reduced to terms like ‘BBW,’ ‘shemale’ and ‘interracial’

The keywords you use to search for porn have more of an impact than you might think. Like anyone else in the modern economy, porn companies are constantly taking stock of their data patterns and trying to emulate and optimize them. This means that every time you search for what you like, you’re driving traffic for those key terms, increasing the likelihood that more of that kind of porn will be made (and that the terms you used to search for it will eventually become as commonplace as “MILF” and “BBW”). 

It also, of course, trickles down to the performers in those scenes. That is, like the larger companies and tube sites, they too are branding themsleves around content that capitalizes on popular key terms while also experimenting with hyper-specific key terms to lock in niche audiences (and, in turn, create even more terminology and tags, many of which take on lives and meanings of their own that don’t necessarily push in progressive, evolved directions). For most performers, this means achieving a delicate balance between the key terms they believe best represent them (and that also don’t offend and/or typecast them) and the key terms they expect potential fans to most frequently search for (two things that aren’t always the same). 

To see how this all works — as well as how it’s driving the future of porn — I convened a panel of porn performers, producers, distributors and journalists to discuss how they classify their content, how the words they use to describe porn have evolved since the dawn of the internet (and their careers) and how they imagine emerging tech will produce a whole new language.