Even if you have never sat in a dark room watching a 30 year old “teen girl” service a pizza delivery guy (or at least admit it), you still have the porn industry to thank for much of your personal entertainment.

The porn industry is the unofficial leader in entertainment technology and has plowed the way for everyone else, when it comes to utilizing new technologies. In the 80’s they were on the front lines of the Betamax to VHS movement, and then again in the 90’s as DVD entered the market. While the experts were proclaiming that consumers would never give up their vast libraries of VHS tapes to adopt a completely new format, adult film makers were cranking out DVD’s.

They are doing it again now with Blu-Ray. If you don’t believe me watch the market; adult titles will be some of the first to take advantage of this new format. The mainstream movie industry will sit back and watch, and once adult movie sales reach a certain point they know there are enough people with the new players that it is safe to enter the market.

But perhaps the best example of porn’s dominance over technology is the internet. Porn was being distributed via BBS systems and FTP long before the general public even knew what the internet was and it has shaped the way you surf the web in very profound ways.

With an audience of lonely geeks and nerds sitting alone in dark rooms, the flesh market had found nirvana. As the internet grew, adult sites were always the first to push the limits. They were the first to step away from text only web sites and use images in web page design starting the “tables are for data not design!” debate (the geeks know what I am talking about) and changing the way information was presented on the web.

Adult web sites did more than help make the web look better, they helped make it more effective as well. Online payment systems for example, were collecting credit card numbers in exchange for T&A before the term ecommerce ever became part of our daily vocabulary. And dirty dot coms had people downloading media players long before you could rent Hollywood flicks online.

But forget about content delivery for a minute; porn sites all but invented online marketing. Banner ads, link exchanges, affiliate programs, search engine ranking tactics and of course email marketing (otherwise known as SPAM) where all pioneered by the adult online industry. To this day it is almost impossible to do a search or open your email without seeing porn.

By constantly pushing the envelope, frustrated consumers were motivated to keep upgrading, making porn a major player in the proliferation of new technology. This is true, whether or not you admit that the first thing you did when you went from dial-up to broadband was download dirty movies.

Only the porn industry has the balls to venture into new territory like this (and yes the pun was intended). They know that people will go to great lengths to see some skin and though they ultimately did it to put cash in their pockets, everyone has benefited.