is porn a 13 billion dollar market? XBIZ needs your input here.
 

I was reading today's Los Angeles Times article on the struggles of the porn biz, and came across the 13 billion dollar figure which apparently has been based on an educated guess all along.

1. Is it even possible to make an educated guess on the size of the global porn market?
2. If you did manage to somehow obtain revenue information from key companies around the world, would the numbers be reliable/verifiable enough to support an educated guess?

I ask because XBIZ is interested in getting to the bottom of this fascinating topic.

They pulled that number out of their ass.

The LA times is going to get accurate figures from LA, let alone places like Japan or Korea.

13 Billion
 

I can't imagine how they would come up with that without just guessing. Nobody is going to reveal their numbers. Most companies are privately held and won't divulge their numbers.

i hardly think it's really possible to get true numbers..
a lot of adult is mixed with mainstream as well.. such as satellite, and cable stuff, and novelty..
educated guess is def good, but the problem is that most adult accompanies are not public, and you can't get the data.

i made 13 billion before i got out of bed today.

they cant know

i dreamt of making 13 billion when i went to bed yesterday

since when did ANY "adult" article writing corp care about facts when it comes to stats? LOLz

$ x tubesite = 0

It's a bullshit figure.
AVN made that number up to satisfy advertisers 5 yrs ago and it stuck.

I work with the mainstream media a LOT and everyone I do interviews for asks me that same very question.

My answer is, " No company would be foolish enough to give you real figures, especially private companies" Since there are only three publicly listed ones where you can actually see the revenues- how can anyone really be sure these numbers add up?

Lest anyone forget about all those video companies here in the Valley selling product out of their backdoor for CASH.

That practice had been going on for years, fucking distributors and bookstores in the process....but that's another story


I can tell you from experience that the companies that once boasted $35- $100M a year were all BULLSHIT- That includes Club Jenna, Wicked, and Vivid.

None of these companies did anywhere near those figures.
If I am lying, or you think I am talking out of my ass then prove me wrong.
:1orglaugh

You cannot gauge how many DVD's are sold, you cannot measure On Demand/ PPV downloads in hotel rooms- why? every bookstore/ video store does not report numbers

as well as companies like Marriott and AT&T will never release those numbers. Period.

IMHO- the industy at it's peak maybe did $15- 20 Billion and that golden age was between '99-01

as they say, 75% of statistics are made up on the fly:2 cents:

Not many on GFY have the knowledge to "prove you wrong' however, would you lump VCA (Babenet) in with those saying they never made 35mil a year?

curious what you think...

i know for a fact that there are companies that make around the 40 mil a year as i worked quite a while for one and got to see the books. So guess you are wrong. Plus trust me 35mil is not that much. Mainstream companies are making way more than that. And jenna has her own income already at 15 mil. don't tell me her company is making less than that.

I just had to work a little harder since last year, but honestly I'm seeing better #'s now..

Babenet definitely made more than $35 Million a year for a few years-
Then they suddenly disappeared owing webmasters MILLIONS if you remember correctly.

Now they are back as a different name and people still send them joins...
:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I am not hating- I love Rob, but it's fact, not fiction

Mainstream companies are making way more than most adult ones.

Tell me two of the companies who's books you saw that did over $40 Million???

And yes, Club Jenna is not doing $15 M a year- if they were I think Playboy would be a lot more profitable wouldn't you?

They are owned by Playboy.

you have to separate online adult from dvd/mags, strip clubs, etc

for online adult (not counting VOD, just paid membership), given various discussions with credit card processors, my estimate for online adult last year is around $1.5B


Fight the hat trick!

well I was curious, I worked for VCA for years, and wanted to see if you lumped them in with your "all those programs" list ;)

I know for a fact they sure did make mils, I was there through it all, I moved to LA to work for them. LOL

I doubt they (CJ) would be getting into the PPM market if they were doing 15 M annually.

They are getting into the PPM market with Hot Movies and AEBN cause their revenues suck.
They had an exclusive with Gamelink up until last week.

I used to work for Gamelink.
Nuff said.

Fletch- contrary to what most people think about me- I know my shit, in fact I know it too well.

That's why there are so many people who fear me and my big mouth, and why others are in a queue waiting for my consulting services.

I save people a lot of time, and MONEY when they get the straight scoop for me.
I always have the inside scoop.

That's why industry leaders and players call me weekly to find out what is going on.

:-))

I never question you homie, but wanted to see if you lumped in VCA/Babenet in that blanket statement ;) I learned a lot about the industry working for the big doggs back in the day. Everything from setting up live sex for babenet to designing member sections LOL those were good times, new fronteirs... not to mention the parties.

My take was always these $13billion to $20billion numbers were moreso estimates of the economy of porn and no way a reflection of what the actual end consumer spends on porn. They include all the money exchanges from end product owners to advertisers, etc. That was just my assumption of how they concluded that number and seeing what public data is available and knowing that not a single adult co's revenue is in the Billion dollar nor upper 100's of millions range alone.

~Alli

As some one who spent 10 years developing and selling VOD platforms my view is the Video market is dead !!!....dead ..dead ....dead.

kill the tubes and you will recover some...but cats out the bag

so we know of one company at 40 mil? sort of a long way from 13 bil. Anyways it is not that hard to get an educated guess. The few public companies do realse numbers and there guess at % of market share. Use the 80/20 rule and I do not think you would be far off on the rest.

I have a number for you... It is the number of how much money is NOT spent on porn due to password cracking/trading sites, IRC channels, newsgroups, yahoo groups, etc...

And the number is:

Lets say the average payment is $28...

I know of 1 channel where in its height they gave out as many as 25,000 working passwords a day. I know of several that hit 10,000 and I know of about 30 that did 1,000 or more.

One such channel had a newsgroup that also gave them out to the tune of another 1,000 a day.

Then there are the 25 password boards that had real passwords...

Then the forums where another 10,000 or more were given out a day...

So lets add this up shall we?

Roughly that is 100,000 surfers that didn't pay for porn on any given day... or $2,800,000 a day lost...



In one year that translates into $1,022,000,000.00

And guess what? When I brought it up nobody gave a shit.

for a moment, i thought I was on an RIAA/MPAA website

LOL

Fight the opportunity losses!

Now add in tubes... and it makes the heyday of password cracking look like child's play. These numbers were for 2004'ish...

Now those same boards, forums, IRC, etc are all feeling the tube sensation too... I checked out the busy IRC channel the other day.... crickets... and howling coyotes.... but not a whole lotta anything else.

I knew someone that ran one of the boards... He made a couple grand a week before tubes on dating and other shit.... Now he is making a couple hundred a month.

Google probably make half a billion or more on adult/porn every year.

There is no way to sum up the total , too many revenue streams. Besides many of the "industry leaders" make nothing compared to some of the more anonymous companies. Maybe you could get a figure for online porn that would be fairly accurate, but for the rest, no way.

Maybe 3 billion tops. And thats a big maybe.

mikesouth said it best on his blog in 2005
Somebody Is Getting Fucked In This Biz, Chances Are It’s Us:

According to the 800 lb gorilla there’s a new study out that places the porn biz at 13 BILLION dollars this year. More specifically it places video sales and rentals at 4.3 billion, that BILLION y’all $4,300,000,000 . AVN also noted that last year we had 13,500 releases.

Now what the gorilla didn’t do was the math, I guess thats for us upper primates…so here it is

$4,300,000,000 divided by 13,500 = $318,519

Now for all you porn guys and porn chicks who are looking at that and scratchin yer head going huh? that would be the average sales totals on each of those 13,500 videos.

That’s right 318,00.00 per video. hmmm I know I ain’t making even 2% of that and I own the fuckers.

So either we need to come together for a more equitable deal as directors and talent or those numbers are pulled out of someones ass….or both…

I heard it was 82%. No? ;-)

not anymore

close... it's 75%, 82% of the time... :thumbsup

To get fairly accurate numbers, stop looking at the companies and look at consumers instead.

Poll a significantly large and representative group of the population on their spendings on porn, and you have a fairly good idea of what spending in that specific country is.

There are some caveats (porn sites promoting other things, people underreporting their spending, etc), but it's the best way to get numbers that at least have some basis in reality.

Now, as for the size of the adult industry... Let's try to make a very rough guess just for the US.

There are roughly 200 million adults in the US. About half of them are women, who appear to spend much, much less on porn than men do. What do the men spend? $20 per man per year does not seem unreasonable... that's an average of 1-2 purchases a year. It could be way off the mark, of course - we'd need an actual study to come up with actual numbers.

Now, if we make the rough assumption that women spend 10% of what men do on porn, that leaves us at about 2.2 billion for the US market.

Of course, that's a very, VERY rough guess. So let's set some limits instead, to establish a reasonable range.

$5 per man per year spent on porn is the absolute minimum imaginable. That would only require 10% of men spending $50 a year on porn. And for female spending, let's put the absolute minimum at 1% of what men spend. Those numbers combined, the US market would clock in at a very meager $505 million a year.

On the other hand, an average of $50 per man per year seems about the maximum imaginable, considering the huge amount of men who spend absolutely nothing on it. For female spending, let's put the maximum at 50% of what men spend. With those numbers, the total would be $7.5 billion a year.

Again, what we really need is a representative poll, but these numbers do give an indication: for the US market, the real number is likely to be in the (very) low 10 digits.

One big question arises, however: why the hell doesn't XBIZ just spend a few thousand bucks to get that poll done?

that 13/14 billion dollar figure that now gets quoted in every article written about the porn industry comes from a Forbes magazine article years ago. They pulled the number out of their ass.

IBILL's numbers were public since they were doing an IPO at one time - based on those numbers, a crude estimate of what % of online porn sales they were doing on the time it looked to me like online porn sales were 3-4 Billion a year gross.

Of all my friends I know of only one that has spent any money on internet related porn or products.

Pretty sure it is 63%

LOL- I can see where this sudden spat of psoting came from..... touched a nerve I guess

In my opinion those #'s that you see all over the media are so over inflated they are laughable. If the industry as a whole was making that kind of scratch why do you suppose there are so many companies folding or cutting back. Our sector is still the one sector that is making a few bucks and as we all know that isn't as much as we used to back in "the day".

Second, I don't know how anyone could legitimately make an educated guess on revenues outside of the public companies like PRIVATE, PLAYBOY etc... but from those public number I suppose one could extrapolate an estimate.

The easiest way would be to go through the numbers of the biggest payment processors such as ccbill

Yeah, that's a good way to go

And now the 'billion' dollar question:

- even if you would took into account only those who are able to pay (have a valid cc, have money)

Is it say:

80 / 20

paying / freeloading

or

20 / 80

paying / freeloading ratio?

:winkwink:

Even more scary question - what's the trend?

You mean Epoch ;)

you mean, that will cop to it :winkwink:

I think it's impossible to even guess at the true market size of porn.. but it's fun to try ;)

1. To the point... NO it is nearly impossible to make an educated guess on the size of the global porn industry. That is unless you consider "Anywhere from $5 billion to $25 billion" annually as an educated guess. There are TOO many private companies and TOO many revenue streams being generated on a global level for anyone, even those that have been in this industry for 10 to 15 years, to be able to quantitatively predict the size of this industry.

2. Again to the point... NO. We are all aware of who the major players are in the industry and know that these are privately held businesses that will never release any accurate and verifiable numbers.

Bottom line the pie is still HUGE and the businesses that find their true calling, dig in for the long haul, listen to what their customers want and then provide a product with the proper price to value relationship should have no problem being able to get their fair share of the pie. :thumbsup

Just my :2 cents: