A New Slate of Apps Aims to Disrupt the Lucrative Erotica Market
By: Lux Alptraum
Tags: Io, Digital Life, Erotica, Industry, Apps

A New Slate of Apps Aims to Disrupt the Lucrative Erotica Market

Can erotica apps stay weird and attract major investments?

Credit: Michael Freeman/DigitalVision/Getty

For as long as humans have been writing, we’ve written erotica — stories, poems, and novels intended to titillate and arouse each other. And over the course of those millennia, the format of these erotic works has remained largely unchanged.

Now a collection of startup entrepreneurs is betting that erotica is due for an upgrade. Apps like Dipsea, Shades, and the upcoming Do You all give this classic genre a revamp, repackaging erotica into apps that offer immediate access to hot stories and built-in communities. The pitch behind these apps is compelling: You don’t listen to music, watch movies, or enjoy TV shows the way your parents did, so why should your erotica resemble theirs?

Despite a general reluctance among investors to go anywhere near sex-related content, erotica has long commanded a massive literary market, accounting for nearly a third of fiction market sales and 45% of all Kindle sales. That market is finally starting to attract attention from tech investors. This past February, for example, Bedrock and Thrive Capital co-led a $5.5 million seed investment round in Dipsea, which offers users access to a collection of erotic audio stories. But can romance and erotica fans be wooed away from the books they love and won over by apps?

Six months after closing on its seed round, Dipsea is available in the U.K., United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Australia. The app has been downloaded more than 170,000 times. Gina Gutierrez, Dipsea’s co-founder and CEO, says technology can make erotica accessible to a wider public. Gutierrez — who credits the megapopular meditation app Headspace with inspiring Dipsea’s collection of short, audio-based erotic tales — notes that long-form erotica formats lack immediacy. With erotic books and romance novels, she says, “there really was a lot of search involved. You were digging through a lot to find anything that you like.” That process can be off-putting for people who don’t have a ton of time or who feel awkward and embarrassed about looking for erotica in the first place.

“Over half [of my book sales] are coming from audio.”

Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of the Best Women’s Erotica of the Year series, sees obvious upsides to giving erotica a high-tech makeover. For one, Kramer Bussel says, “you can read them privately,” noting that keeping a physical copy of an erotic book on the shelf might be a deal breaker for parents or people uninterested in publicly broadcasting their interests.

And it’s clear that adding audio to the mix offers something compelling for many erotica fans. As the numerous erotica anthologies that Kramer Bussel has edited over the years have become widely available as audiobooks, she’s seen a major shift in sales data. “Over half [of my book sales] are coming from audio,” she says, noting that the experience of listening to a story can be incredibly appealing for readers who want a more effortless erotica consumption experience — or those who are eager to share their favorite stories with their partners.

But these apps come with definite trade-offs. Erotica apps tend toward shorter-form content — eight-to-10-minute audio stories — and some in the erotica space feel that focus on bite-sized stories cheats users out of a more intense experience. “I personally think that long form is more ideal to get you in the mood,” says Carly Pifer, founder of the online erotica publication Aurore.

Short form may also be worse for business: In the porn industry, a shift from full-length films to short clips distributed over the internet coincided with a devaluation of the product itself. Encouraging consumers to favor brief engagements may make it more difficult for any one story or author or narrator to truly make an impact — though the shift may not be as catastrophic in erotica, where anthologized short stories are already an accepted format.

Dinosaur erotica may be highly prevalent on Amazon, but good luck finding it on any of these apps.

The biggest challenge erotica apps face may be a somewhat paradoxical one. In order to secure the support of investors, erotica startups generally create a product that leans anodyne in nature. As much as erotica entrepreneurs like to point to the success of Fifty Shades of Grey as an example of the market’s potential, the urge to make erotica more investor-friendly — and hence more “mainstream,” “friendly,” and “accessible” — can also lead to a stunting of the erotic imagination.

Dinosaur erotica may be highly prevalent on Amazon, but good luck finding it on any of these apps. The most-read stories on Literotica wouldn’t be welcome in the library of any erotica app interested in courting investor attention because of their taboo content. And for all the popularity of Fifty Shades, it’s hard to imagine digital investors getting excited about a sprawling, multipart BDSM tale inspired by Twilight. The weird, unusual erotica that catches the public’s interest is rarely something that sounds profitable on paper.

In the same way that an app-based internet creates a walled garden that limits the potential of our online experience, app-based erotica creates a walled garden that curtails the growth of our erotic imagination, limiting erotica to “safe” stories that shy away from anything overly taboo or weird. And that conservatism could hamper the success of any erotica app aspiring to reach the same market value as the romance novel genre.

But even if these apps themselves don’t reinvent the erotica market, there’s still reason to be excited about the energy around them. “The more apps like this that are out there, especially if they’re getting covered in mainstream publications — I see that as a good thing,” Kramer Bussel says.