As any fool knows, the real success story of ebusiness is not book-buying, travel-booking, music or auctions, but something that gets brushed under the carpet with an uncomfortable cough or a snigger: pornography.

The smut pedlars that have made such a success of online business have managed to crack all the hard ecommerce problems: how to establish trust, how to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, how to turn casual visitors into buyers, how to make customers "sticky" - no pun intended - and how to cope with high bandwidth demands - high-definition pictures and streaming video demand a lot of bits, after all.

Let's get physical

Some of the more, erm, accessories-focused vendors in the sex industry even have to tackle the thorny problems of managing physical delivery and returns.And it's not just in the direct business-to-consumer market that the sex industry has succeeded. From my necessarily circumspect investigations, it seems that application service providers are thriving. You won't have read much about Pimpserver, Maxismut or Porncoaster, but all three appear to be carving out a business hosting the websites of up-and-coming porn barons.

It's a shame that the secrets of their success are not more widely dispersed. These people certainly talk among themselves, at sites like GoFreeHosting.com. What the IT world in general needs is a risk-free crossover point: a way to glean what the porn merchants have learned, without the need to get involved directly. After all, it's not much good trying to explain that you were only looking at Triple-X.com to learn exactly how the Webmaster had made use of XML.

Feel the power

Smutcraft is one semi-serious intermediary that provides a crossover, albeit in a small way. It seems to have started as a joke.

"About a year ago, a minor debate popped up on the Linux-kernel mailing list over use of particular servers and operating systems, and the popularity thereof," the site explains.

"A couple of folks posited that the real test of a high-volume ecommerce server wasn't something wussified like Amazon, that the real test of pumping out files wasn't a toy like CDrom.com; rather the real test of server power was porn sites."

So as a result, Smutcraft now compiles a list of the top web server platforms in the online porn business, aping Netcraft's comprehensive equivalent covering sites in general. Interestingly enough, while both surveys give Apache a commanding lead, the margin is greater among the smut sites.

About 30 per cent of sites in general use Microsoft's Internet Information Server, the second-placed server, whereas only about nine per cent of the porn sites use it.

Porn pays

It seems to me that there could be more of this kind of information. What security systems do the porn peddlers rely on? What customer relationship management systems do they favour? What payment systems do they bank on?

There might even be scope for an exhibition or conference, exploring this topic in detail. One thing is for sure, the keynotes and case study presentations ought to be well attended.