Is Internet Porn Killing the Adult Industry?

[Cyndalie]

Hard Times for the Porn Industry? , MSNBC

(Summarized below)

The adult film industry is unlikely to be worth as much as it claims—and the Internet that made porn so pervasive is driving a sales slump.

two big stories that emerged from the Adult Entertainment Expo in Sin City last month: 1) the adult film industry is large enough to potentially be the deciding factor in the battle for format dominance between Blu-ray and High Definition (HD)-DVD, and 2) the adult film industry may be in its worst sales slump in recent memory.

Inflated Profits
The reason may well lie in the lack of confirmable information about the porn industry’s true size. These numbers—specifically that the sales and rental of pornographic videos and DVDs are a $3.6 billion industry—have been repeated so often in industry and mainstream news outlets that they have acquired the patina of fact. Throw in cable and satellite television, the Internet, magazines, strip clubs and novelties, and the oft-bandied estimate balloons to nearly $13 billion.

But observers both inside and outside the industry have increasingly been calling that figure into serious question. "It's bogus," says Luke Ford, a lone-wolf industry gossip columnist, former investigative journalist and failed pornographer. "AVN is exaggerating by sevenfold on DVD sales and rentals."

(Oh well, we all know Luke Ford is the most honest guy with the integrity of a professional journalist)

"Everybody lies about their numbers," Paul Fishbein of AVN tells NEWSWEEK. "Almost every year I want to abandon our survey [of the industry]. It's a lot of work for an estimate."

(Yet Fishbein responds that he has "no reason" to mistrust his head researcher.)

These estimates of course don’t account for the elephant in the Web: Internet porn. It’s nearly impossible to get any reliable data on how much people are making online, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it’s much less than the $2.8 billion business AVN makes it out to be.

(Goes on to talk about pirating woes like the music industry is going through, why pay for porn when you can get it free..etc)

“Never has so much porn been released,” writes director/producer James (Jimmy D.) DiGiorgio in an e-mail. “It has become harder and harder for a (newer) manufacturer's product to stand out, and that has resulted in harder and more extreme content being produced. Like many others in the adult industry, I've seen my personal income take a hit as a result of all this ... If the adult industry produces so many billions of dollars, where are the billionaires among its ranks?”

(Talks about Blu-Ray and how with DVD sales down porn will have little effect on the prevalance of BluRay in the long run)

Where is porn driving the bus? “The most profitable area in porn is still the Internet,” says Ford. Despite the flood of free online content, Vivid still derives 30 percent of its roughly $100 million annual income from the Web.
And momentum is building toward services like video-on-demand—both online and through satellite television.

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