Not only is Weiss seeing four times as many clients with online sex addictions than he did three years ago, but clients are getting younger. McPherson says she feels sorry for the spouses of people who struggle with sexual addiction, but she also believes there are positive sides to the adult industry. It s absolutely normal for men and women to look at titillating images. While sexual addiction can be relegated to the weak-willed or simply perverted, online porn is designed to draw in Net surfers and keep them hooked. Although many of these marketing tactics are simply manipulative, others have been deemed illegal.
Some sites use names resembling popular non-porn sites in hopes of attracting accidental visitors.
Even if surfers leave immediately, the site can boast a high number of unique visitors and charge more for advertising, says Parry Aftab, head of Internet safety organization Cyberangels. After successful lobbying by NASA, the site was shut down in late 1997 by InterNIC, an organization that registers domain names. Others try to lure traffic by filling their sites with popular search words, a tactic that s led to some lawsuits within the adult industry. In 1997, Playboy sued Calvin Designer Label an adult Web site company in San Francisco for filling two porn sites with the words playboy and playmate. These two words were also hidden repeatedly in the HTML code so the sites would come up when surfers typed in Playboy on a search.