Internet Porn and the Adult Industry

With the internet the profits of pornographers rose tremedously. Now the internet with all the free porn available is blamed for reducing them. An article in last weekend's New York Times asserts that giving the milk away for free is no longer enticing consumers to buy the cow, and that the adult industry needs to come up with a better strategy.

The reporter notes that a $3.4 million rise in internet-related revenue from 2005 to 2006 does not balance the $6.6 million drop in DVD sales and rental revenue for the same period, according to numbers compiled by the AVN Media Network. His sources bemoan the glut of amateur content online and express the hope that consumers will soon tire of it and shell out for higher quality material.

To a certain point it´s understandable that too much of a free thing is bad for business. But one might also note that no industry has a god-given right to exist, whether porn or music or television, all of which feel threatened by consumers taking content into our own hands and setting it free online. Here are some facts:

As adult entertainment becomes more accepted in the mainstream, more women see it as an increasingly legitimate career path, one they don't have to hide from friends and possibly not even family. Gone are the big hats and sunglasses of the early '80s - these days, a porn star's business partners may well be her parents. And not all of these women choose to move to the San Fernando Valley and work in movie mills. They set up on their own, performing live on the internet, selling monthly memberships that include real-time shows and archives of past performances. They blog, they chat, they give sex advice, they sell their panties and custom t-shirts, and their annual revenue target is a drop in the lube bottle compared with what even a small production house needs to hit. Yet for consumers, the end result is the same: content that turns them on and gets them off.

Some consumers prefer porn with relationships: Part of porn's appeal is the absence of a relationship. You have nothing invested, no work to do, no feelings to consider. You just start watching when you're ready and stop when you're done. Yet now that we have the opportunity to form relationships with entertainers and fans, we often do. People subscribe to independent cam-girl websites for months and years on end; traditional porn actresses interact with fans on their websites.