My take on the online Porn Industry
 

(I posted this to an older thread but I think it's worth a topic in it's own right. it was in answer to a thread started by Punkworld about why prices had gone so ridiculously low for content, design etc.)




The industry is devouring itself.

Once porn made money because it was not so easy to access, had a little social stigma attached to it, little adult book stores formed the main distribution channel and people were prepared to pay high prices as consumers to access the material.

When things started to go online first with BBS systems then the Net, the adult bookshop model was transformed with a few sites offering material (much of it stolen/scanned early on) then a few more content providers providing original material. Porn still had a stigma attached, consumers found online access to porn a novelty and prices remained high.

In the late 90s but more this century two major events have taken place. One is a huge infux of internet pornographers trying to cash in on what has been perceived as an easy cash cow. The second is that by making porn so freely and widely available, just about all the stigma attached is gone. This is in turn driving the adult industry to devour itself in the scramble to keep the interest of consumers who don't see porn as dirty anymore.

Now at the end of 2003 we see the start of the third major event in the online porn industry's history. The crash. Prices are driven low to insane prices, there are some people still making money (those with empires and volume) but for every one of those there are 100 making nothing yet contributing to the huge pool of freely available porn. It is no longer just a bid by webmasters to capture the imagination of consumers but a battle for content providers to even move content.

Porn has changed now, irrevocably. It is no longer a sought after product that could only be bought in private situations. It now a highly commodotized , universally available thing which no longer holds the imagination of consumers. The huge popularity of Reality Television has provided a last gasp for many porn providers as they have been able to use the model in web sites but now even the Reality TV shows are barely distinguishable from the Porn sites which mimic them.

Webmasters see Card Associations (eg VISA) and Government Regulation as the big enemy of the online adult industry yet the biggest real threat to the industry is itself.