Yahoo! and Pornography

In their efforts to take advantage of the lucrative Internet pornography market while being inoffensive to advertisers, Yahoo! has made some management decisions that provide the company with some profit from pornography and, at the same time, go unnoticed by those groups that protest.

A couple years ago, Yahoo! was besieged with complaints from the American Family Association and other conservative groups about adult products and quickly reversed its policy. They removed ads from its US portal for pornography-related products and services and changed its Yahoo! Groups message board services by making it more difficult to find adult-oriented materials. This they did by deleting the Adult Groups Directory. These actions reduced the level of protest but Yahoo! was still in the pornography business via its international portals, in particular, the one in Germany.

Since 2001, Yahoo! has reentered the business of adult products and services through the acquisition of Overture Services in which they also acquired AltaVista and AlltheWeb.com. These two search engines provide a pathway for Yahoo! to sell to hard-core websites. By avoiding the US Yahoo! portal, their reemergence in the pornography business is generally unnoticed. Additionally, the adult ads appear on smaller websites not normally identified with Yahoo! and are also exported to websites outside the Yahoo! family. These include the search engines, Infospace, Dogpile, and Metacrawler.

Yahoo! is not the only Internet company doing everything they can to stay in the pornography business. Google and eBay also have special adult-oriented categories.

There is considerable money to be made in pornography and Yahoo!, along with other Internet companies, are trying to take advantage any way possible.