WWW- What would you get if you crossed The Sims, Match.com and Amsterdam’s red-light district?
One adult entertainment company says the answer is the Red Light World, a 3-D adult-oriented virtual environment that offers the sex-starved a chance to visit the Dutch city’s infamous quarter and take in its XXX movie theaters, Viagra outlets, sex toy stores and adult DVD shops. Players get to meet sexy singles and more, all without springing for a plane ticket or worrying about getting mugged.
“When you download it and go in, you’ll find it’s very much like being in Amsterdam’s red light district,” said Ray Schwartz, president of Nightcandy, the porn site that developed Red Light World, “without having to worry about some of the strange people that gravitate to that place.”
According to a study published by the National Research Council, the U.S. online porn industry was already estimated at $1 billion annually in 2002, with some expect it to grow to between $5 billion and $7 billion by 2007. But the business hasn’t changed much since the Internet first became a popular phenomenon in the mid-’90s. Most sites offer tours with a few free X-rated pictures and then try to get people to pay for instant or ongoing content. So for a service that changes the paradigm, there may well be a substantial reward.
Red Light World thinks it is the service to provide that shift. To those willing to go beyond its free tour and cough up $20 a month for a VIP membership, a pre-release version of Red Light World available today provides nearly all the sin one could handle on a computer. New members create an avatar and then meander through the streets of the virtual world. Along the way, there are numerous encounters with scantily clad streetwalkers, as well as ample opportunities to ogle the women behind the windows.
Where Schwartz hopes that Red Light World can differentiate itself from the endless number of other online adult sites is with its socialization features.
Thus, members can try to pick each other up in several “clubs” or just about any place in the virtual world.
“You may be wandering around in the adult toy store and talking to someone standing next to you, and say, ‘Hey, do you have any idea how this thing works?’ or ‘Have you ever used one of these?'” said Schwartz. “It makes for an excellent opening for starting a conversation.”
Clicking on certain storefronts or red-light district windows and galleries will take members to other porn sites working in partnership with Nightcandy.
As an interactive online experience, Red Light World is actually made up of a large number of online porn sites cobbled together in a way that evokes the feeling of window shopping in Amsterdam’s sin-centric neighborhood. Thus, when you walk your avatar into one of the XXX movie theaters and choose a screen to watch a film, the service launches a website with hard- or softcore movies.
Similarly, clicking to see the women behind the windows opens up third-party porn sites that charge extra for their content.
For third-party merchants like Ron Jackson, having his online sex-toy emporium incorporated into Red Light World was an opportunity to try something totally new.
Most porn sites “seem the same,” Jackson said. “Red Light World really stood out as a different concept, where you’re a character in an erotic world. They’re trying something a little different, and that was appealing to put a store in.”
Meanwhile, although Schwartz doesn’t think attracting women will be a problem, Red Light World’s content still appears much more likely to draw men. Convincing women to sign up will be crucial for Red Light World to ensure that its male members are happy with the socialization aspects of the virtual world.
“There’s a tremendous amount of females that have an interest in going to something like this,” said Schwartz, who doesn’t expect gender imbalance to pose a problem. “A lot of females might be interested in looking at this material…. No one is going to know who they are. There’s anonymity and safety, and they have the ability to go and play and experience things.”
Indeed, Red Light World offers several strip clubs, one of which, Club Obsession, is targeted at women.
“I think it’ll probably be more men, for sure,” said Jackson. “But I think it would be a little more interesting to women as well because it just has more diversity. It’s not just porn. It’s interaction.”