[gaius]

The online porn industry were the first people to really deal with scalability (of managing and serving web content, anyway), the first people to deal with online payments, the first people to come under really heavy, sustained hacking attempts, etc. Don't underestimate how much of what you take for granted technologically in 2012, they pioneered in the mid-90s.

[anamax]

A friend of mine built a lot of porn sites in the late 90s using DB2 and Oracle. He says that Microsoft's SQL Server folks came to him to talk about what it would take to get him (and the porn sites) to use SQL Server.

He said that he was confident that DB2 and Oracle could handle the load. They responded that SQL Server was much more capable than he thought and asked him about the workload.

Their response to his answer was "we can't even simulate that, maybe we're not ready".

I assume that they got better.

[mun2mun]

Relevant http://www.pcworld.com/article/155745/thank_you_porn_12_ways...

[GrumpySimon]

It's not just now either, the porn industry was hugely influential in causing the adoption and spread of video (you know, on casette), movies and photography.

[jgw]

Indeed - I've heard it argued that the real reason that VHS won out over the technically superior Betamax format, was that Sony refused to license the Betamax technology to adult video vendors. Never dug into it, but it seems plausible.

[saraid216]

Having just one deciding factor seems implausible. Straw that broke the camel's back? Sure. But calling it "the real reason" completely ignores every other relevant factor.

[Spearchucker]

They were also first at SEO - all of these sites competing for the same words - "sex" and "fuck" being their holy grail.

[roc]

As well as advertising networks and referral schemes.

Though, oddly, they've been late to the game on social.

[keypusher]

Scariest button on a porn site is the Like/G+ button.

[wisty]

Social took off when Zuck tricked users into giving out their real names, when meant social networks grew much faster (as old school friends would connect).

Porn does "social", but only anonymous social, which is naturally handicapped.

If someone created a social network which allowed better privacy controls, the porn sites would love it.

[dchuk]

porn is invariably a "solo" endeavor 99.9% of the time

[roc]

And yet a significant amount of money is being made by services whose natural market maps directly onto the porn site viewing market.

reviews, 'discreet' dating sites, sugar-daddy match-making sites, etc.