Originally Posted by Libertine

Of course it's the smaller part. Read it again.



What I am saying is that is, although adult is already a relatively small part of the internet (something I felt didn't need to be explicitly stated - guess I was wrong), it will become an ever smaller part.

Let me elaborate. In the early days of the internet, when there weren't many consumer applications yet, porn was huge. The song that was huge a while ago, "the internet is for porn", actually was true 10 years ago. You had email, icq, news, online auctions and shopping, crappy homepages... and porn. And that was about it.
Then came blogs, wikipedia, social networking, video sites, etc, etc. The share of internet traffic porn had became lots smaller.

What I am saying is that this trend will inevitably *continue* as the internet takes up ever more time in people's lives.

Now, as for the division between porn and mainstream... the funny bit is not the division in business, but the fact that many people in porn, especially old-timers, often seem to think that "adult" and "porn" are the two main niches on the internet, each roughly as important as the other.
Even the original post in the thread hints at that attitude, as it refers to "mainstream classics" - a phrase which was meaningful some years ago, but is less so today, as it is almost equivalent to something like "business classics".
The best way, these days, to look at business opportunities on the internet is the way one would look at business opportunities in a very large city. In a small town, standard "classics" might be worth looking at (a town without a bar? business opportunity -> start one).
In a large city, almost all obvious niches have already been filled, and one either has to do one really, really well and in a slightly different way (Starbucks, Subway), or find something decidedly new.