Last month Apple announced that its customers were buying 1 million videos per week from the moving picture service that started in October, bringing the total number of downloaded videos to more than 15 million.
With numbers like those, Gilbert sees a blue Apple as a no-brainer.
“It's pretty obvious, if a little dismaying, that adding an adult video section to the iTunes website would generate a ton of new visitors and additional revenue for Apple,” he writes. “If the tiny 2.5 inch screen on the video iPod is no deterrent to people watching ‘Desperate Housewives,’ it's not likely to hinder potential viewers of, errrr, desperate housewives.”
While Gilbert acknowledges that porn doesn’t exactly fit Apple’s image, he sees money as the ultimate barometer.
“Money, though, is the root of all evil, and there's a lot of money to be made from the alleged evil of so-called adult entertainment,” Gilbert writes. “Porn is, literally, the Internet's dirty big secret. There are 4.2 million pornographic websites, with 372 million porn pages handling 68 million search requests per day, according to TopTenReviews, which analyzes software products and Internet services.”
Gilbert cites Apple’s recent decision to introduce software that lets Apple computers with Intel chips run Microsoft applications as evidence that profit, above all else, is king at the company these days. While Gilbert thinks it sad that the one-time maverick is selling out, his column suggests that Apple could have it both ways, making money and blazing trails by jumping headlong into adult content distribution.