Facilitating the Adoption of Tor by Focusing on a Promising Target Group

The technology for anonymous communication has been thoroughly researched. But despite the existence of several protection services, a business model for anonymous web surfing has not emerged as of today. One possibility to stimulate adoption is to facilitate it in a specific subnet. The idea is to identify a promising target group which has a substantial benefit from adopting the technology and to facilitate the adoption within that target group. We examine the feasibility of this approach for anonymity services. We identify a potential target group – consumers of pornographic online material – and empirically validate their suitability by conducting a traffic analysis. We also discuss several business models for anonymity services. We argue that providers of anonymity services should try to generate revenue from content providers like adult entertainment distributors. The latter could benefit from offering anonymous access to their products by differentiating against competitors or by selling their products at a higher price over the anonymous channel.