If you people remember, I wrote an article a months back about filesharing and opensource software. Well, for the adult industry, filesharing has arrived. Everybody's discussing filesharing and how it works. The Swapbucks program is picking up very fast and won't be long before you see a lot of companies jumping in. I'm writing this article just to throw some light on the do's and dont's and how to's for putting your files on fileshare networks.

First up - What are fileshare networks?

What all the hype about is very simple. The P2P networks, like Kazaa and imesh allow public access to certain folders of every user. What's more, these folders contain files which every user can search by keyword. So what a kazaa user does is, say - he wants a lesbian video - he types in 'lesbian video' in the kazaa search bar and the software then goes through all the users(2.1 million people downloaded kazaa in the last one week) folders to see if there's any file with matching keywords. If yes, then the results are displayed and the user has the option of downloading one or more.

What does all this have to do with adult biz?

Well, to put it mildly, these millions of users, most of them are internet addicts, and mostly use filesharing for 3 things:

1. Exchanging gaming files.

2. Music - mp3 files.

3. Porn - Bingo!

Ok, so we got millions of users who are exchanging porn files. We have the capability to include our content promos in the fileshare networks. These promos will be seen and downloaded by a lot of people. Every time someone opens or views one of your files, a popup shows your website. Even if the conversion ratios aren't as good as other forms of advertising, the net number of conversions is likely to be higher simply because of the massive number of eyeballs.

Very rosy picture, but it's not so easy and there's a lot more to be done and safeguards to be put up before you jump in. First of all, you need to know firsthand how fileshare networks operate. Also, fileshare networks are full of the most innovative hackers on the net. You can be sure that if they get a whiff of this money, they'll jump in and they have access to unlimited free content from hacked sites. What's stopping them from putting up a website, putting promos on the fileshare networks and getting memberships? If they don't advertise their sites outside the fileshare networks, no way are the legal owners going to find out. Also, people could just use your promos and not mention your site also. A few more problems are in the form of viruses, adware and spying software. Do you know that a company on the fileshare networks generated 4 million hits to its sponsors' website in 3 days by including adware in a few applications. Every few minutes, the downloaded software would ping the sponsors server. These things are bound to happen. The only way to keep away from this mess is to focus on signups. Don't even think about pay per click or impression, or you'll bombarded with hits and end up a massive bandwidth bill and no sales.

Legal Problems Expected:

And now we come back to the same old thing - what's the government going to say about this? As it is, the cops and corporate hawks are going after the fileshare networks - Kazaa operator Sharman Networks had 24 of it's offices and residential premises in Australia raided 2 weeks back. This might be the last straw. If we're giving the filesharers legal porn, it's likely that the networks will get even more users. So, you can expect the government to crack down heavily on both - the filesharing networks and adult service providers. Well, nothing new about that.

To finish it off, let me say that I feel that current applications and softwares are insufficient to handle this issue. I'm working right now on something which could sort out the copyright and legal issues. I found a way to mix media and html files and bundle the whole thing up as one executable, so that your website is displayed along with the promo video in the same window and the user won't be able to break it up. More on this in a few weeks.

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