Mobile porn. Man, the directions I could take this if we were not a family friendly site. Anyway…yes, I think there is some interest there. While the whole thing escapes me personally, I can only imagine the young men of the world sitting there on a….oh yes, I can’t go there. I almost forgot.

Pornography and gambling can often be counted on as key drivers of new technology, with devoted and often high-spending audiences keen to jump on the latest advances. Mobile data is no different — gambling is already on board, and porn is reportedly well on its way.

The latest claim giving a boost to mobile porn is that “one in two Koreans Bought Cell Phone Porn”. The only problem, of course, is that they didn’t. A South Korean politician created the fact by badly butchering some real numbers: operators there earned 113 billion won ($110.4 million dollars) from adult content, and given the average charge was 2,000 won ($1.95), the politician says there were as many as 18.7 million uses of the service. South Korea has 36.5 million mobile users, ergo half have bought porn. It doesn’t take that guy from A Beautiful Mind to figure out that his math is more than a little screwy, but this isn’t the first time a politician has bent numbers to advance a cause (legislation to restrict juvenile access to porn, it seems, in this case), and won’t be the last.

In any case, the claim that half of Koreans have surfed porn is bogus, but the revenues are slightly interesting, working out to an average of about $3 per every subscriber in the market — a metric porn purveyors in someplace like the US would certainly accept. But in any case, it’s still not huge, and not in line with some expectations. [Read the rest]