Thanks to one marketing-savvy porn company, about 10,000 people’s first experience with VR this month will be through porn.
BaDoink Hands Out VR Cardboard Headsets So You’ll Buy VR Porn
“For a lot of people, this is the first they’ve heard of Google Cardboard.”
BaDoink
BaDoink, one of a handful of pioneer VR porn companies, is handing out free virtual reality headsets to the public. In a surprise to nobody, the company ran out of its first 10,000 headsets within 24 hours. The company put in another order for 20,000 more goggles to give to customers.
Don’t expect an Oculus Rift in the mail. BaDoink is shipping the far cheaper cardboard headsets modeled on Google Cardboard, which retails for roughly $20. The goal is to seed the community with the gear necessary to run BaDoink’s virtual reality application to buy porn flicks to watch through Cardboard.
“There’s maybe three other sites out there offering this as an adult VR [porn] site on its own,” BaDoink’s CEO Todd Glider told Re/code. “So we thought this is a great way to raise awareness and get a lot of people to see the BaDoink brand. Honestly we don’t know yet whether it will succeed because the first batch was mailed on Friday. Nobody who ordered them has received them yet. ”
Porn’s role in the tech vanguard is no secret. It has served as the tip of the spear of tech platforms since forever. “Adult content for good or ill is the straw that stirs technology’s drink in terms of consumer uptake,” BaDoink’s CEO Todd Glider told Re/code. “When the VCR came along, when the Internet came along, people said, ‘I want to get this because I can watch adult entertainment on it.’”
He added: “For a lot of people, this is the first they’ve heard of Google Cardboard because it’s all so new.”
The company contracted a Chinese company to make a generic version of Google Cardboard. BaDoink pays $3 per device, which includes manufacturing and shipping to the customer from China. It launched its virtual reality porn site at the same time as it started its headset giveaway and has seven adult films currently available, with plans to release a new one each week.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
