It seems that many of the Valley's success stories are trying to find an acceptable way of cashing in on porn, but as with most well-known family brands, this may be a tad more difficult than at first peek. Many publically traded companies are trying to use the backdoor, so to speak, farming out porn on a video-on-demand basis, via Comcast, or other satellite providers, even the tried and tested option of distributing via hotel chains that offer adult viewing to there lonely guests.

YouPorn, with the largest hits per day, remains as basically annonymous as a business and is still tied up in a legal struggle with Vivid Entertainment. As with YouTube, it is essentially one big social network, and both are still looking to find a working business model.

However, there may be hope for a respectable form of investment from one of the Valley's golden boys, Marc Andreessen. The founder of Ning.com has adopted a type of 'don't ask don't tell' attitude to groups on his user-generated, social-networking platform where individuals, or groups, can create a forum for building a network on just about anything. The categories are endless, everything from needlepoint forums to religious groups. However, among Rotary clubs and sites for potters, glass blowing, and basket weaving you'll find 'Real Deep Connections' which will almost make you choke on your tea and biscuits, if you are not careful. True, you have to log in and join the specific social network to be an accpted member..

On January 5, 2008, Mr. Andreessen wrote in his blog that as long as whatever was being posted within a network was legal in the United States, then Ning had no problem with it: "In a nutshell, we aren't pro-porn, but we are pro-freedom." Which is another way of saying if we can make money at it legally, we don't care who creates a network and what the content is as long as it is legal: "Let people fundamentally do what they want."Don't get me wrong, that's more than fine by me, and some of the other censorship PG police should take the same serman. Even so, I am sure with new Ning created social networks being set up at a growth rate of 10 percent a week, that represents a pretty decent return on investment.

It now seems that the 'backdoor' option for an investment model in the porn and adult entertainment biz, via social networks, means that investment in Silicon Valley is on the up-and-up.