Porn GIF Site 'The Worst Drug' May Shut Down Next Month

CYBERSPACE—The tech-oriented people at The Worst Drug are having a tough go of it. The popular website whose sole purpose is to literally scrape the Web for the most popular animated GIFs—99 percent of which happen to be porn (which might explain its popularity)—says that it may have to shut down next month. The issue is money—they aren't making enough to pay the hosting bills and no mainstream investors will fund them ... because of the porn. "Although the site has raked in tons of traffic, the team has yet to bring in funding—and that’s a problem,"  reports BetaBeat's Jordan Taylor, who spoke with one of the site's employees, Katie, about the impending shuttering and their frustrating journey trying to find funding in a world in which the vast majority of mainstream investors “generally won’t touch porn.” Katie continued, “Investors purport to find it sinful, apparently, hence the term ‘sin stocks.' I’ve spoken to dozens of VCs, some from very prestigious firms. They say they appreciate our tech and design, and ask us to contact them with our next project. Investors may have different preferences, like biotech or renewable energy, but this is $13 billion of annual U.S. revenue they’re leaving on the table.” Though not really a part of the so-called adult entertainment industry, Katie finds herself making arguments about double standards that are very familiar to the people in it. “The food industry—just one example—wreaks havoc on our environment, keeps animals in torturous conditions, and contributes to obesity and an overwhelming number of health problems and expenses which don’t thwart this being a leading cause of preventable death,” she told Taylor. “But eating a ham sandwich is not a sin (despite the literature). Porn is sin. Gay marriage is sin. Witchcraft is sin.” You go, girl. So what about maybe working with investors more familiar with the adult industry, and maybe even from it? Turns out that avenue was also a dead-end for them. According to the article, "The team also got some offers from investors in the adult entertainment industry, and seriously considered working with a few of them, but ultimately decided against it when they realized their business practices were “corrupt.” Katie explained, “We don’t conduct ourselves that way." The ironies apparently abound for Katie, who rails against the karmic injustice of it all. “Hey, investor guy," she messages through Taylor, "we wouldn’t be a porn site if you weren’t watching so much porn. We didn’t choose the pornographic content, we simply held up a mirror. The site pulls the most popular content, and this is it. It’s a survey of human behavior which happens to be built on some of the best technology on the web.” And therein lies the rub of this uniquely internet story. Fans of The Worst Drug can follow this story from their Twitter account, where there is currently some mention of Kickstarter.