Someone once said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And with the two new YouTube-inspired video services that have recently hit the net, the founders of YouTube must be pretty flattered. The model is simple: make a video, upload a video, have the world watch your video. But until three former PayPal employees created the YouTube service in 2005, the internet had not yet realized the full potential of video sharing on the web. And nowadays, new video sites aim to exploit the YouTube model to target a more specified demographic. GodTube, founded in January by a student at the Dallas Theological Seminary, is the crazy Christian version of YouTube. While YouTube’s slogan is “Broadcast Yourself,” GodTube uses “Broadcast Him.” So clever. GodTube specializes in funny videos about Jesus, church, holidays, abstinence, creationism, Satan and pretty much anything else relating to the Christian experience in America. Rivaling the religious video site is another YouTube offshoot called YouPorn. It is practically identical to GodTube except the only clips involving Jesus are videos with Latino men with the Spanish name “Jesus” engaging in some sort of lewd sex. That’s because YouPorn, created in August, is all porn all the time, the triple-x version of Google’s YouTube. While YouTube shies away from pornographic content, YouPorn encourages it, so much so that the site shys away from everything that isn’t porn. YouPorn’s vast pornographic library (I did a painstaking amount of research for this post) mixes commercial porno clips and users’ own amateur videos. Similar to YouTube, YouPorn displays its content based on number of views and how recent the clip was added to the site. Thursday’s top clips included “Oriental Hoes Part 1,” a video involving a baseball bat and “Gurkenfick.” According to Alexa.com, a site that ranks web traffic, the porno site gets about 5 times the traffic as the Christian site. Thus, while Jesus may be America’s God of choice, on the web, porn is still king.
•Times Online: Christians Have the Laughs
•The Big Picture: YouPorn!