Paul

1) Global Recession

We've just experienced a global recession that's lasted over half a decade, we've not had a recession this severe in living memory. That's the number one thing that's impacted consumer spending, the internet is 5 years older and consumers are 5 years wiser.

The credit binge that allowed everyone in the west to live above their means is nothing but a distant memory and a new reality set in very quickly around 2009/2010 once most people realised they'd have to cut their cloth accordingly and start living within their means again.

Consumers think and research a lot more before they make purchases online now compared to 5 years ago.

2) Social Media

There was also the rise of social media, that's had a massive impact on porn because it's knocked porn off it's purch as the top internet activity and number 1 reason to have an internet connection.

3) The Rise Of Tablets & Smartphones

This is really where adult has been left in the dust compared to mainstream, mobile and tablet traffic has been increasing dramatically over the past few years. Mobile & Tablet traffic is set to overtake desktop traffic in 2014, give it another 5 years and it'll make up the majority of internet traffic (if some new technology hasn't taken hold by then)

I test a lot of competitors tubes, paysites etc on the main tablets and smartphones and I'm absolutely amazed by the amount of companies (still in business) who haven't even bothered to code or optimise their websites for tablets and smartphones. It's truly unbelievable, this is 2014 not 2008!

4) The Rise Of The App

This is completely changing the way the next generation use the internet and it's making a lot of developers very rich. The mobile app market could be worth as much as $25 billion by next year

If you have a good, original idea or even an improvement on an existing app that's where to focus your energy over the next couple of years because this is a major growth industry and if you happen to create a popular app you're going to do very well and it's the best platform to see explosive traffic growth in a short space of time.

5) Piracy

To be perfectly honest piracy isn't even in my top 5 but since I've only scraped the surface of this topic I just wanted to make the point that yes Piracy has had an impact but there are so many other factors that have had a much bigger impact in the last 5 years. Youtube was a game changer for online digital content, it was inevitable that digital content would have less value as broadband speeds improved, bandwidth dropped in price and the barrier to produce content decreased.

The facts are, you take Youtube, xHamster, Pornhub or whoever and you remove all the piracy and these companies are still going to own most of the traffic. I go to YouTube and I can pick any topic under the sun and there are many independent content producer creating fantastic content in HD that they are offering to the world for free to view, they make some money through advertising if they are popular.

With the porn tubes even if all the piracy disappeared overnight you'd still have all the amateurs, couples, swingers who upload their content for fun. You'd have a lot of the webcam performers who would upload content to build their fanbase and you'd still have 100s and 100s of adult companies that will upload their content to the adult tubes daily.

So in a nutshell nothing changes!

You can't turn back the clock, you need to adapt to the new reality and stop complaining about things you have no control over