Obscene Losses

Claire Hoffman writes in Portfolio:

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse.

…Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.

…One of the items on Reeder’s to-do list [at AEBN’s PornoTube.com] is an age-verification complaint about a video called “Adriana Lima Blowjob.” It has no 2257 info. So Reeder cuts and pastes the name into a search engine and clicks through a few sites that say Adriana Lima was born in 1981. Reeder is about to move on when I point out to her that Adriana Lima is in fact a fairly well-known model and that the woman in the video is probably not she. Is PornoTube concerned about that? Knudsen, standing behind Reeder, tells her to take it down quickly. “We do the best we can,” Knudsen tells me repeatedly.

Fred emails:

Sir:

It seems to me that the following are and will cause profit margins to drop for porn:

1. the enormous amount of free porn on the web (including youporn.com, which posts free porn videos)

2. Piracy

3. The number of people willing (for whatever reason) to post pictures and videos of themselves on the net. In effect, there is no longer any entry barrier for those interested in going into the porn business.

4. As social opprobrium against porn drops, factor 3 will increase.

Regarding piracy, I suspect that many pirates, in the future, will be "fly-by-night" operators, some being overseas. Chasing them will be like playing "whack-a-mole" (if you remember that game). You sue one, he closes up shop in location 1 and opens shop in location 2. If you sue him as an individual and "win", you will discover that he has no money, and you will get nothing for your efforts.

Meanwhile, for every producer who operates above board and in the open, the government will be nipping at their heels, e.g. Cal OSHA, the Justice Dept., etc.

On top of all that, "foreign competition" from poorer European countries will ramp up.

On the other hand, I suppose that this line of work has perks (some of which are quite perky) that are unavailable elsewhere.

I’m afraid my curiosity got the better of me. After reading the comment posted regarding "obscene losses", I looked at "beasttube.com". This is a first for me–I was so grossed out by a web site that I couldn’t bear to click on anything. I congratulate whoever put this monstrosity together.

XVod writes on XPT:

I’ve been saying this shit for years but nobody listens ever. This YouPorn & SexTV1 thing is the end of monetized pornography. Hollywood is in no way having as big a problem with piracy as porno is because they are willing to employ thousands of people to scour the web and get pirated product promptly removed. I see so much stolen XXX crap on these free sites that its sick, yet I’ve never even heard of one lawsuit to shut down one of these shady websites.

If the industry is really serious about making money then the first thing they will take a four step program:

1) Fire AEBN, Gamelink, or any other VOD provider they signed up for. Do you idiots realize they can cut up your product for promotional purposes and distribute it for free any way they see fit to get people to their websites to ‘buy’?? These guys don’t give a fuck, they’re just surviving on volume.

2) Cut off the affiliate programs, stop producing cuts and photo galleries for ‘webmasters’ who take the shit and dump it on the web for free.

3) Then they’ll stop allowing the downloading of full scenes from corporate websties to stop the bleeding.

4) They’ll turn their websites into true marketing websites to sell DVDs (or whatever pops up next) either direct to consumer or via retailers.

Unfortunately none of this will ever occur because most of the idiots running porn studios aren’t rocket scientists. Besides, we’re in an age where the fuckin’ butt ugly performing skank makes all the money – and for the most part these below-par chicks in porn are the type you wouldn’t pick up while drunk.