The really big thread!!!!

[Mister X]

It's worth pointing out that the figure of 10 billion dollars for online porn is just a big fat guess. Other estimates are 3 to 4 billion a year. As I already pointed out, the great majority of online porn is coming from privately held companies which do NOT make annual reports. I very much doubt that Visa gets more than maybe 8 or 9 percent of that action at the very most as transaction fees. And it's probably significantly less. Lets be really generous and say they get 10 percent cuz that makes it easier to do the math. That's a billion dollars. "Oh my god", you say, "that's huge!" Well not really. 10 percent of 2.4 TRILLION is 240 billion. So that means that online porn is less than one HALF of one percent of the total. Except that visa accounts for somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40 to 45 percent of online porn transactions. So that drops it to a maybe 450 million at most. That's about one fifth of 1 percent of Visa's total.

Nobody knows for sure but the biggest player in the industry certainly comes in at well under 1 billion a year. So the mysterious big players that us little fish are too "naive" to know about are definitely not going to be high up on the influence list with Visa.

As far as companies being owned in secret by Big Business... very doubtful. If GE or Microsoft or any other publicly traded company had investments in online porn it would be common knowledge. Publicly traded companies have to account for every single bit of income and every investment they make in public reports every year. It would be big news if they had investments in porn and every paper or news website in the country would be running the story. Maybe Paul Allen or Chairman Bill or one of the other billionaires out there has private investments but the companies they work for? Nope.