LOS ANGELES — Mainstream streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime are taking their design cues from adult websites like Pornhub, according to a University of Toronto professor.
Patrick Keilty, an associate professor at the university's Faculty of Information, appeared on CBC Radio's Spark program to talk about the adult website design elements cropping up on the big streaming sites.
"Most people would think of good technical design as being minimalist, something along the lines of Google," said Keilty.
But he says the streaming sites are copying adult websites' penchant for "rambling and chaotic images."
"They want to keep enticing you to click and view more, so they will give you pop-up advertisements or thumbnails that are animated and move — something that was developed very early on in [the porn] industry and that's been picked up in more mainstream media like Netflix," he said.
Keilty specifically studies the business, technology and culture of pornography. He serves as the archives' director of the Sexual Representation Collection at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies.
"I would say that many of the technologies that are ubiquitous to us now are either partly developed in the pornography industry or they were embraced by that industry — and it's the very embracing of that technology that made them ubiquitous," Keilty told Spark host Nora Young.
Keilty recently published an article on design elements carried over from adult websites, "Desire by design: pornography as technology industry."
Click here to read the CBC Radio report and listen to the interview.
Image source: CBC
