The real problem for porn with online porn is the ease of entry to online porn.
At the lowest level of entry is the affiliate model. There's not much required to being an affiliate and never was. This led to saturation of this level and they ended up competing with each other, largely on who could give away the most free porn. Yes some later went on to buying adwords and blogs/SEO. Still the growth in free porn is evidence in itself to the saturation of this level.
Then paysites. Putting up a paysite isn't hard. It costs a bit and this was a barrier for some. The major cost was content, in the beginning sites were opening with as little as 20 scenes and not adding a lot of content. Some bought non exclusive and stopped buying, then after a few years found their members area was full of "saturated content".
The cull was always the profit margin, could someone make enough to give up the day job? As doing it part time as a hobby was possible to most.
Well that depends what the "day job" paid. US, judging by the intelligence of some here their ceiling would be around $30,000 a year $600 a week. Nothing difficult about that. Take out the travel costs to work, other costs of working for a wage, tax deductions and $30,000 matching the wage of being employed and it's a better paying job.
Reading many of the posts you realise few of these people have earned or worked in a higher grade.
We ended up with a very weak herd and the biggest problem was everything the lowest needed to survive was laid out on the table for them. Their overheads were minimal to nothing. And we took giant steps on the road to 2012.
Today there's probably less money taken in porn than for the last 15 or 20 years. Offline which was a big industry is all but gone. DVD, sales and rental, Cable as a money tree, phone lines, magazines, hotels, etc. Even porn shops are feeling the pinch. Very little money left in any of those. What we do know is the money that was spent there, isn't being spent online. If it was this industry would be booming.
And it's clearly not. Manwin might be the biggest company in online porn. Still no one knows for sure how big they are. Fabian told us he had a 9 figure sum by Wall Street bankers or investors to invest. 4 + months after announcing it has anyone seen him spending it? Manwin must be keeping very quiet or the investors are patient.
Still we have papill0n, B.Barnato, ottopottomouse, Cherry7, DamianJ, TheSquealer, to tell us how much they know and how little I know. as they post without giving a clue what they really know. Guys on $30,000 a year. Banging a keyboard from their spare room?
who knows.
Go on guys waste more time replying to me. I'm going to work in the garden.