It's a story about a pornography startup trying to make a go of it, but this one has a few unique twists. As a profile in Priceonomics explains, entrepreneur Cindy Gallop has a message behind her Make Love Not Porn video platform: She's worried about "the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography" and the effect it's having on men and women and their views about sex. (Gallop explained all this in a popular TED Talk in 2009.) The basic premise of MLNP is that people pay $5 a month so they can watch videos of real people having unstaged, normal, healthy sex. And the result? "Today, MLNP has neither failed nor achieved remarkable success," writes Alex Mayyasi. "Two years after its launch, it is in public beta and, according to Gallop, earns revenues in the low five-figures each month."
Still, the promise seems to be there. More than 400,000 people have signed up, and a slew of market indicators suggests that "sextech" is poised to boom. One huge problem? Because MLNP deals in adult content, many of the tools available to other business startups—Web servers, credit card processing, email services—are either off limits or prohibitively expensive. Which means that in order for Gallop "and her fellow sextech entrepreneurs to disrupt the sex industry, they'll need Silicon Valley to stop being a bunch of prudes," writes Mayyasi. Click for the full story. (A recent study has concluded how often happy couples have sex.)