
Tough times in the porn industry - SwellJoe
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-porn10-2009aug10,0,4788614.story
======
owyn
Oh man. I'm so glad I am still up and drunk posting on HN at midnight. Hold
on!

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)

~~~
alaskamiller
I like the cut of your jib. Internet porn: the world's most sexiest ponzi
scheme.

~~~
jgrahamc
Or least sexiest.

------
ZachPruckowski
I suspect the changing society has a lot to do with it. Porn used to have to
be delivered in brown packing envelopes, and girls wearing tankinis was
scandalous. Now we've got 16-year-old celebrities pole-dancing on broadcast
TV, and no one bats an eye at crazily short skirts so long as it (barely)
covers everything. As we become a more and more sexualized society, the idea
of paying for porn seems sillier and sillier.

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.

------
chaostheory
The adult industry has often been the predictor of future trends, given that
they were typically earliest adopters for stuff like the VHS, DVDs, and the
internet.

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)?

~~~
alaskamiller
That's kind of traditionally been the means for the less known and non-
contract girls to make money, the strip clubs or escort services.

------
s3graham
> Reliable revenue and employment figures for the adult industry don't exist,
> since no analysts or economists track it. Adult Video News estimated in 2006
> that it was worth $13 billion...

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...?

~~~
anamax
> 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.

~~~
SwellJoe
Whatever happened to the planned Penthouse/FriendFinder IPO? It actually had
some significant coverage in the industry, and would have been the first
significant public porn company (aside from some of the mainstream media
companies that have soft core porn subsidiaries).

------
chmike
So free apparently provided a "backpressure" to it. Could this apply also to
drugs ?

------
SwellJoe
Porn seems to hold universal appeal to tech entrepreneurs. I think every
startup founder has a backup porn plan. Seems like even in porn you have to
actually run a good business, and deal with competitors and the ever present
reality of being killed by "free"; just like any other kind of web-based
business.

~~~
ScottWhigham
Wait just a minute, here, Joe - what is _your_ "backup porn plan"? I actually
haven't ever come up with one and am intrigued (a) that you have one, and (b)
that you think others have one. :)

~~~
SwellJoe
I _know_ others have one. It's a pretty common topic of discussion at startup
events around the valley, including among YC companies.

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.

------
DanielBMarkham
Here's a startup idea for you guys from the article: write something that
enables amateur porn to spread over cell phones.

(Is it impossible to comment on this story without making a pun?)

~~~
Dilpil
This is actually a built in feature of many phones (picture/video mail), and
there have been several scandals about minors using it.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Much the same way that texting was a built in feature of cell phones before
twitter came along?

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.

------
noonespecial
I always figured that the multi-megapixel camera phone, once ubiquitous, would
upend the traditional porn industry. There's got to be a startup in there
somewhere providing the shortest route from iphone to porn site, but not one
you'd brag to your momma about.

------
danbmil99
maybe if they had some creativity instead of producing the same old insipid
crap...

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:

<http://www.beautifulagony.com/public/main.php>

~~~
alaskamiller
This seems silly, there is a huge diversity in porn genres that caters to
every niche or fetish you know of or unheard of. What exactly are you asking
for? A reboot of traditional Showtime/Cinemax porn titles?

~~~
ZachPruckowski
That niche diversity is probably their way forwards. It's hard to compete with
a generic free product on RedTube or whatever (unless you literally have a
girl who's a 10.0), so you've got to compete on something else. If putting her
in a cheerleader's costume or dying her hair green makes her more attractive
to your audience, it increases your odds of getting a sale with someone who's
otherwise only a 7.0-8.0 and competing against a 6.0-7.0 on RedTube.

------
annoyed
in order to combat piracy, they need to add incentives to buying a dvd.

------
altano
I wonder if gay porn has experienced a noticable uptick in sales since January
from all these out of work Republicans.

