Learning from the adult entertainment industry may not be the easiest thing to do. Who wants to be the employee that tells the entire conference room they had a brilliant idea for a new product while exercising their forearm? A C-Level executive publicly discussing the strengths of an X-rated website would make any public relations manager cringe. And yet, the industry has heavily influenced mainstream companies in an indirect way.

“We respond to our users’ habits,” says Andrew Pile, the Chief Technical Officer of Vimeo, in reference to how the company thinks of new features. [Full disclosure: Vimeo is owned by the same company as The Daily Beast, IAC.] Many of these habits, such as recommended videos, infinite playlists, high speed scrubbing and live chats are some things that users learned to expect while watching porn.

The success of the adult entertainment industry can be related to how quick it is to adapt to new platforms. The very same day Apple announced it would be coming out with the iPad in January of 2010, Ilan Bunimovitz, the CEO of Private Media Group, announced that his company would be releasing a pornography app on the platform. When the iPad was finally available for purchase four months later, so was Bunimovitz’s app.