Grumble - Check Out That Asset!

or "The Dow Ain't the Only Thing That's Up"

-by Fish

Hey, kids: if your boss, clergyman, parent, or delicate family pet is in the room, don't click on any of the links below. Okay?
Actually, if you answer to "kid", don't click on any of these links at all.

In a very telling episode of Seinfeld, the character George has come into possession of far too many computers and is now desperately trying to sell them off. Trying to encourage his friend Elaine to buy one, he notes, "There's stock quotes. And porn."
"Stock quotes and porn." The Internet is certainly useful for a lot more; you can buy books, and pay your bills, and research Aztec gods, and learn how to protect yourself, and listen to lots of losers whining. But for Ma and Pa Kettle, the average American who's never "logged in", never "surfed the Web", never "ridden the Information Superhighway", the Internet is basically about, well... stock quotes and porn.
Why? Well, TV ads for on-line brokerages have cropped up amidst the billion annoying ads for cars and beer -- while the now-ubiquitous telejournalism shows bombard us with tales of innocent, mute, blind, 14-year-olds who were lured into indecent affairs, via the Internet, by demented, felonous, satanic, leprous 42-year-olds. The Internet's real advantages are hidden behind a collage of high-money sweet-talkers and salicious sensationalism. The result? Common perception of the Net is that it's just a high-tech vehicle for stock quotes and porn.
To that end, I decided to see exactly how accessible each of the Internet's "primary features" really are. Assuming the role of an Internet novice who's just plugged his/her new cute little computer into the wall, I embarked on a search: to find stock quotes and to find porn.
Now, what makes me qualified to judge this experiment? Well, on the stock quotes side, I do, in fact, work in the dreaded finance industry, albeit in a very sans-suit-and-tie capacity. As for the porn... ok, I admit it; I'm underqualified, despite my seeming obsession with a certain porn publisher. To date, my largest exposure to blue video has been a "tequila and porn" party held by friends last Feb. 14 as an antidote to the saccharine character of that holiday, but we spent most of the evening mocking the videos MST3K-style. But hey, blindly ranting on subjects about which you know jack is the essence of journalism.

The ".com" domain has become synonymous with the Web, much to the delight of Network Solutions. (Many people think that if an address doesn't end in ".com", it's not a real Internet address, which certainly must cheese off the folks at .org and .edu sites.)

So the first test was pretty simple. Open up a Web browser and point it at www.stockquotes.com or www.porn.com.

www.stockquotes.com
It's what you'd think. You specify a number of stocks you want to track; it gives you basic quote data on them. Does gain/loss, if you're into that sort of thing.

www.porn.com:
This site, uh, lives, uh, up to its billing. I didn't poke arou... I didn't browse around much, because after getting past an appropriately lurid intro screen, the site started asking for my credit card number "for age validation", insisting that my card "will NOT be billed". Which is a good thing, because my card is already "maxxed out" from buying "the Brooklyn Bridge".

Winner: None. It's a tie.

Yahoo is the foremost portal/search site, being the most popular in terms of number of hits, and the only one to be anywhere near making a profit. It's where our canonical novice is going to go to find anything. So I went there and entered "stock quotes" and then "porn" into its search field.

On the day of our test, we found:

Porn: 13 categories and 693 sites.
Stock Quotes: 3 categories and 4279 sites.

Stock quotes clearly whips the pants off of porn. Of course, being without pants is kind of the whole point of porn anyway.

Winner: Stock Quotes.

If our novice was going to maintain brand loyalty, where would he go? (Or "where would she go". But let's face it, women might be making their way in the business world, but they're not buying anywhere near as much porn.)

Porn: Playboy, of course. www.playboy.com. Right from the main screen, we have links labeled "(Nudity)". Ground zero. No wasted time¹.

Stock Quotes: Where do you go? What brand names stick out? There's no one common place where people go! Maybe CNNFN, maybe their local paper... there's too many things to try. And even if our novice knew to go to www.nyse.com for the New York Stock Exchange, all we get there are delayed quotes. You don't see Playboy giving you "delayed porn", do you? In this test, stock quotes provide, but imperfectly.

¹ You are not getting me to use any idiom involving either "beating" or "bush" in this context.

Winner: Porn.

Channels. Sure, you don't use them, but a novice might; they're right there on the toolbar. In addition to being the most annoying feature of Internet Explorer 4, "Channels" revealed no obvious source of either porn (no surprise) or stock quotes (a surprise). Well, okay -- there's a channel for PointCast, the screensaver that shows you news headlines. This might offer stock quotes. But if you think I'm voluntarily going to install an application that will show me ads when I sit still, you're wrong. I already have one of those; it's called a television.

Winner: None.

Microsoft, of course, will soon rule the world, and they ain't gonna do it with IE Channels alone. And when their conquest is complete, there will be only two websites: microsoft.com and msn.com. So let's get pre-emptive, and imagine how our novice will do in the brave new world of the future.

First, microsoft.com: we got jack squat on either stocks or porn. No surprise. This is a geeky site intended to give other geeks the skinny on how to use and buy geek stuff. Although frankly, given geeks' IPO-derived wealth and the average geek's romantic life, you'd think Microsoft could make a killing by catering to each.

Second, msn.com: Look, right there, under the Search field! A link for stock quotes! But do we see one for porn? No, we do not. And frankly, we're glad Microsoft isn't making porn, because we've seen what they've done to word processors.

And there! Near the bottom! The Dow, plus those other B-list indexes that nobody really pays attention to. Do you see a Naked Chicks index? I think not. Stock quotes wins this one.

There is a link at left labeled "Women", but this is a lie. All I got were questions on feminism, and cooking tips, and info on female rock musicians. Clothed female rock musicians.

Winner: Stock Quotes.

...is clearly www.sexquotes.com.

Our novice is not likely to find this one, so we won't count it for purposes of scoring. But it's just too bizarre not to mention.

Billing itself as "The Mega-Merger between High Finance and High Society", sexquotes.com is a production of the Internet Entertainment Group, the folks who brought you nude picutes of Pamela and Tommy, nude pictures of Dr. Laura, nude pictures of Keith Richards², and just about everything else that's lewd and sketchy on the Net³.

This site is the crown jewel of the Internet, the syncretism of its two disparate yet popular trends. Apparently (I say "apparently" because this site also wanted a credit card number for "age verification". But I'm going to take their word on their content) this site gives you porn photos while at the same time providing you delayed stock quotes. In doing so, IEG has cornered that valuable, elusive niche market: people who like to masturbate while managing their portfolio, yet don't find NASDAQ reports to be sufficiently stimulating.

² I swear to God.
³ The author would like to note that the information on the availability of pictures of various people, especially that of Keith Richards, comes via watching The Daily Show and not from first-hand experience. Thank God.

Stock quotes win, two to one. Stock quotes are easy to find. Stock quotes have fulfilled the popular-image dream of the Internet with their ubiquity. Porn, less so.

But remember those 693 Yahoo finds? Follow some of them. I'll bet that at least one of 'em will pay off.

C'mon. It's disgustingly easy to find porn on the Internet. Who are you kidding? Of course it is. Each new medium always finds early popularity by providing a newer and more private way to transmit porn to the home. Much of the early success of the VCR was that it meant you didn't have to put on a trenchcoat and shuffle off to a seedy theater in order to see folks gettin' it on. The Web is the next step: you don't even have to go to the video store and hand a plastic box with an embarrassing title to some pimply-faced clerk. You can just stay in your living room and keep one hand on the mouse.

So moms and dads, pay attention to your kids' computer use just as you would their TV use. If you don't let them watch racy TV, if you lock out those certain channels on your cable box -- your computer should be no different.

But amidst all of this, no one seems to be concerned about kids' access to stock quotes! Every day, innocent youngsters are able to view the heated, steamy rise and fall of the Dow via this new medium. Parents, teach your kids about safe investing now before it's too late.