Isn’t it time to dabble in the steamy stuff?

Nearly lost in all post-mortems following the death of Mowser last week was this little tidbit: 80% of the traffic to the site was mobile users looking for adult content, according to founder Russell Beattie.
Think about that. Four out of every five actions on the transcoding site were quests for porn. And it’s not like Mowser is a household name. These aren’t barflies and frat boys who stumbled upon the site and decided to look for a little cellular stimulation, these were software developers. Mobile enthusiasts. Geeks who know that Mowser takes traditional, PC-formatted Web content and customizes it for the small screens and limited processing power of mobile phones.
That figure — anecdotal though it may be — seems to support a recent Juniper Research forecast that claims the adult mobile content market will nearly triple over the next several years, reaching $4.6 billion by 2012. Video chat services will help drive that surge, according to Juniper, accounting for one-third of adult mobile revenues within five years, as both networks and handsets make for better user experiences. Text-based services and downloaded offerings are also expected to play a substantial role in the next few years.
And Mowser’s porn-hungry users may not be an aberration. Statistics on real uptake are nearly impossible to come by, thanks largely to carriers who seem to take their cues from the secretive Skull and Bones society. But Graeme Ferguson, who served as Vodafone Group’s director of global content development until 2006, has claimed that 70% of all the operator’s downloads were of the adult variety.
It’s as easy to write off that traffic as “of questionable quality,” as Beattie did. And the adult space obviously is a minefield for operators, as Canada’s Telus Corp. discovered last year.
U.S. operators have been particularly wary of distributing all but the most tepid content, and for good reason. But aren’t there ways for them to address this market without being seen as smut peddlers? Isn’t adult content — not hardcore porn, necessarily, but R-rated stuff — what MVNOs are for? To offer brands removed from the actual network operator and cash in on the kind of content carriers would prefer to keep at arm’s length?
For better or worse, porn has seeped into the U.S. culture, as anyone who has stayed in a hotel in the past 10 years can tell you. (It’s also worth noting that hotel chains have managed to offer adult videos to their guests without becoming soiled by the steamy stuff.) Cable and satellite TV providers pipe in as much of the stuff as consumers can handle. Porn stars are mainstream celebrities. So isn’t it time a U.S. service provider or two quietly rolls the dice and offers content a little edgier than Jessica from “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
“Carrier networks try to filter out porn and restrict what people can do. Give them an open system and they’re going to go out looking for what they want,” Mowser co-founder Mike Rowehl posted on his blog. “Does it mean that the only stuff you can put on the mobile Web and get an audience (with) is adult content? No. But it means that given the methods we used to grow organic traffic we got a lot more adult related searches than other terms. You can draw no other conclusions from it, and to do otherwise would be stupid.”