Image by Modern Citizen (sound alert but oh so worth it).
Oh. My. Gawd.
Tough times in the porn industry (latimes.com)
NO ONE saw this coming. No one. Not a single fucking fapping girl, boy, LGBTQQ or any fifteen year old with a phone. Especially not the whole goddamn world of the rest of us who do not live in the tiny, tiny eensy bubble of Porn Valley and Hollywood microbubble media navel-gazing culture of self-replication and utter disdain for originality. And all the truly creative types trapped there. Or the guy worth tens of millions off that porn site in, not the Valley, um… San Francisco? Or the hundreds of websites I blogged about on Fleshbot (est: 2003, ruled and run by women) that had *nothing* to do with mainstream porn. Imagine what would have happened if someone, somewhere, saw this coming from a long, long way away. I’ll admit it was fun watching them try to commodify altporn into their antiquated business models without understanding why it even existed.
I’m personally shocked. What the fuck are we going to do if the porn ‘industry’ dries up and its weak business model collapses because the distribution model was so arrogantly short-sighted and careless about who its viewers are and what they really want to see? Imagine a world where you can’t go to Joe’s Jack Shack and buy a product for $50 that you know you’ll like some of, or an overly expensive rental that you know you’ll like one scene from because it’s packed with the same old shit to wank to — and that’s your only choice? I can’t imagine this world. With… what? Different standards of beauty and sexual expression? It’s like, a pornpocalypse.
Praise the lube and pass the ammunition. The LA Times tells us,
(…) For Stern, 23, the rapid decline of job opportunities in the porn business over the last year has been dramatic. She has gone from working four or five days a week to one and now has employers pressuring her to do male-female sex scenes for $700, a 30% discount from the $1,000 fee that used to be the industry standard.
Less than two years ago, Stern earned close to $150,000 annually, sometimes turned down work and drove a Mercedes-Benz CLK 350. Now she’s aggressively reaching out for jobs and making closer to $50,000 a year.
As for that Mercedes? She’s replacing it with a used Chevy Trailblazer — from her parents.
“The opportunities in this industry really are disappearing,” Stern said. “It’s extremely stressful.”
Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply.
“We’ve gone through recessions before, but we’ve never been hit from every side like this,” said Mark Spiegler, head of the Spiegler Girls talent agency, who has worked in porn since 1995.
“It’s the free stuff that’s killing us, and that’s not going away,” said Dion Jurasso, owner of porn production company Combat Zone, which has seen its business fall about 50% in the last three years.
Porn is hardly the only segment of the media industry struggling with these issues. But its problems appear to be more severe. Whereas online piracy has forced big changes in the music industry and is starting to affect movies and television, it has upended adult entertainment.
At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users and some is acquired from cheap back catalogs, but much of it is pirated.
Sites like Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube attract more users than TMZ and the Huffington Post. The porn sites are even bigger than Pirate Bay, the top portal for illegal downloads of movies, TV shows and music.
Frustratingly for porn producers and distributors in the Valley, none of these sites appears to be making much money. Suzann Knudsen, a marketing director for PornoTube, said the site’s parent, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, uses it to attract customers for paid video on demand.
“PornoTube isn’t a piggy bank,” she said. “Its true value is in traffic.” (…read more, latimes.com)
It is too a piggy bank. They can keep blaming it all on “free” when we all know it’s *freedom of choice*. That’s what that value of traffic (understanding the space), reputation and truly serving/respecting and listening to your customer means. Even if your customer is paying you for something to jack off to. Also, if Knudsen thinks the ‘free’ sites are not raking it in, she might want to “spend some time in the space” she works in, as they say up here in the other Valley. Think I don’t do consulting? I do. I have for a long time. Okay, /rant.
* Let’s not forget that the LA Times ran “Yes on 8” ads.
** Brought to you by TinyNibbles, the home of free porn and real sex ed since at least 2001. Open Source Sex, do you speak it?
Like the music industry, they did it to themselves by being so boring and focusing on easy short term money and by having a factory mentality. Sex is a perfectly valid topic for art. It’s both completely universal and completely unique to each individual. More creative forms of erotica need to be pushed to the forefront instead of the same cookie-cutter material.
There’s still going to be room for people to make a living but the middle man is going to be cut out because they deserve to be cut out.
Bullshit. It’s not about choice. 90% of the content on the tube sites is pirated commercial content, anyway, and if you look at the most popular videos on these sites, they’re always commercial content. What it comes down to is that the tube sites are private in a way that commercial porn can never be — you can always be traced through your credit card bill — and more importantly they’re free. There are no excuses for this. You get pretty much the same content that you’d have to pay for, but you get it for free, and there are no repercussions. It doesn’t have anything to do with sticking it to the man. It doesn’t have anything to do with civil disobedience. It’s just the path of least resistance.
My understanding is that the porn industry should flourish in a recession, for a whole lot of reasons, but mostly dealing with the human condition’s need to escape from their worries for a while.
Using that information, it’s a wonder why so many producers haven’t listened to their customers, like you say. That just seems, not only insulting to the customer, but an utterly stupid business practice. If that’s how they operate business, then they deserve to fail, especially during a time that should not be as bad for them, as the rest of the economy.
“We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK,” he added. “It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”
This is one of the best quotes, ever…
I’m reminded of several things here, in no particular order –
Chuck D talking about music companies, how, when CD’s came out, we all knew they were cheap to produce, even cheaper than cassettes, but they charged $18 for ’em anyway, because they could. He likened it to a guy on the corner selling M&M’s one at a time, for a dollar apiece. Then the internet came along, and his bag gets a hole in it. And nobody feels too bad about scooping the M&M’s up.
The housing market, when it seemed like anyone could get rich, and if you weren’t rich yet, you were a damn fool.
Amateur porn? Shit, how much is amateur, still? I remember when amateur/gonzo was gonna knock traditional porn right out of the ring, and then it became full of the same crap that turned me off from mainstream porn, as the actresses (presumably) imitated mainstream stars in an effort to get more mainstream work – phony baloney patter and moaning, staring at the camera, the dreaded ‘Elvis lip’….
Shit, I still have some old Ed Powers dvd’s (quit laughing, this was before he assumed the height-to-width ratio of a yam, and I just kind of blanked out his poorman’s Vaudeville shtick), just because the girls looked and acted like ones I’d been with. Or someone’s hot mom I’d wanted, or a quirky girl in class I’d always meant to talk to…
When I heard Burning Angel was doing porn, not just stills, and holy shit, Dana DeArmond was on them, I ordered that shit so fast my computer smoked. Oof, suckered again. If she and Johanna ever make porn that bears some resemblance to how they screw off-camera, you can be sure I’ll order it. But while they eyeball the camera dude and scream like dental drills, forget it.
Hmm, seems like I lost the thread. But I’ll continue to circulate between Redtube, Pornhub, and Youporn, because it’s better than what the big studios put out, with about a minute of searching.
“part of the problem is that most porn customers don’t want to be heard. They want to deny that they jack off to movies. How do you serve a customer base that denies it’s your customer base?”
would you want to talk to people who make movies where the actors address you, the viewer, with “sick fuck”? (i’m quoting from Violets book here). sounds to me like a business model that takes the viewer for granted.
Go to the gay sites, the big ones, the small ones, the middle ones, and read a few of the discussions to see for yourself what gay men are saying about gay porn, amateur, pro, vanity sites, whatever. just because they are not discussing pron right in front of your nose doesnt mean they are not talkng amongst themselves. go find them there. i talk to other men about porn all the time (in chat sessions where i can have an alias). i have never filled out a customer survey. no one ever asked me to fill one out for them, because they take the customer for granted.
Pay sites might not be losing so much revenue if they responded to their affiliates’ technical issues more promptly. Or at all.
Just saying, Kink.com….
Damn, I remember you talking about this failing business model… years ago? I think so. I’m pretty sure those pirate radio podcasts you did had some talk about it.
What I find interesting (and totally unsurprising) about the article is that they talk to mainstream porn types but not to the people who’re supposedly their mighty enemies. Hmm. Whatashock.
Preach on, sister!
People are still making tons of money from porn. Just, like, not the same people.
pornocalypse? let’s have one!
you know what they say in america:
never let a good crisis go to waste
Great post, VB.
This is just depressing. The free sites usually suck (not in a good way), but for pirated work. If the porn industry stops producing high quality films to pirate, what’s left? Most amateur video is just terrible.
I hear what you’re saying about customer service, but part of the problem is that most porn customers don’t want to be heard. They want to deny that they jack off to movies. How do you serve a customer base that denies it’s your customer base?