Tough times in the porn industry
latimes.com
latimes.com
So... the (sexy) lead-in is that some performer thought her "career" in the porn industry would last forever. Ha. Enough said about that. Sad but not really interesting.
The meat of the article (lol) is that these free sites all make their money by licensing cheap content (which there is a LOT of) and redirecting traffic to pay sites which pay referral fees (PPA), but the resulting (PPV) revenue is down %50 which has the effect of sucking up (lol) half the money in the pipeline. There are middlemen upon middlemen (hot!) in the porn industry. That kind of drop has shockwave effects through the rest of the industry. Biz 101.
So I guess we're facing a "peak porn" scenario. Future economist PHD's, there's a hot topic for ya.
The existing resources can probably be strip mined for a while. Perhaps the era of get rich quick internet porn sites is over? Dang, I was just about to start one, because I totally read this wired article from 1998 about how that was a guaranteed way to make money on the interwebz. (lol).
Also, any tech geeks out there who can't get laid should remember this: if you hire a girl to have sex with you, that's illegal prostitution. If it's on camera and she signs some forms, it's legal porn! (don't forget your 2257 compliance)
And as our medium changes, the ideal content size changes. It used to be that you could only get an hours-long movie because that's the format TV and tapes worked in. But you only need 10 minutes of it. So as we move to the Internet, the same thing happens to porn as happened to music - the filler becomes extraneous. I don't need the whole album, I need the singles. I don't need the whole movie, I need the best scenes. There goes at least half of your work.
This moves the "porn formula" from "any decent looking chick in a two-hours-long movie" to "absolute stunner doing a few 10-minute scenes", which completely trashes the industry.
What they're experiencing now seems to be an accelerated version of what's to come for other media industries.
I wonder if the solution, at least for the actresses, is to start selling more directly to their fans (i.e. hit the strip club circuit more aggressively while using their films mainly for marketing)?
By contrast, there's a large difference between even a decent amateur movie and The Dark Knight. Part of this is production costs, but a lot of it is that there's not a diminishing return on "epic" or "action-packed", or at least there's less diminishing return relative to porn.
So while the cost of making a quality production in both fields is falling, it impacts porn much more than it ever will film because there's a differing sensitivity to quality.
Those two sentences together seem bizarre. Estimated at $13B, and yet no analysts or economists are evaluating the business? That can't just be because of a puritan aversion to porn...?
Analysts make their money selling research to investors and the like. Since very little of the porn industry is public (Playboy, Hustler, and Penthouse) and there's little chance of that changing, there's no market for research.
Even pg, tlb, and rtm had a plan for pr0n when they were doing Viaweb (a pretty good one, too).
That's not to say most folks take their porn plans seriously...it's just a way to blow off steam over the occasionally tedious aspects of running a "straight" business.
(Is it impossible to comment on this story without making a pun?)
What would you call a service that sent short porn messages between random people? God knows there's some pun potential in there. But the fact is that cell phone integration with porn is still in it's infancy stage (from what I can surmise). If the trends are heading towards free and amateur stuff, then providing a platform to easily facilitate that would be the place to go.
I think it's the usage model that's still uncertain. Could you do streaming 2-way video from some kind of common chat room? Or would it be more of a twitter model? Or perhaps something more along the lines of RSS feeds?
I still think there's lots of money in porn, it's just that the old business models aren't going to work so much any more.
Well, probably not then either. But there are some exceptions to the same-old. I would probably sign up for this one if they got off their PC horse and split up the men & women's clips. This is actually almost SFW:
Haha, this reminds me of the Kenny vs. Spenny episode where they have competition to create the best porno and Kenny does what he does best.
Porn is like any other business it's certainly not immune to a recession or competition and it's going to take some ingenuity to get them out of the hole they're (pun intended) in like any other industry.
p.s.: I wish people weren't so quick to blame something on political correctness!