NEWS: The Interwebs Are Killing Our Porn

CULTURE: The Interwebs Are Killing Our Porn

We all thought that the Internet would revolutionize the smut business. Bringing democracy to porn! What could go wrong? We were right about the revolution, but it turns out that all things may not be roses and chocolates in the skin flick business.

Look, I’m not one for alarmism or anything, but if the porn industry is really gravely threatened by the availability of free pr0n on the net, then maybe we should just shut this whole world wide web thing down and cut our losses. Sure, it may be difficult to adjust initially, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Most importantly, we’ve got to keep our priorities straight.

To give you an idea of how bad things were for the porn business this year, take a look at this handy graph printed by the New York Times.

Jeepers! That’s a heck of a decline right there. So what’s driving this drop off in revenues?

It’s basically an issue of supply outpacing demand combined with an industry that is struggling to provide the content that will bring them maximum return on investment. In an era where you can download free mpegs of your next-door-neighbor’s bedroom activities for free, it’s hard to justify spending money on things like “sets” and “plots” and “big name actresses.” Nevertheless, some producers keep trying to provide just that.

Well that’s nice and all, but I’d much prefer watching my next-door-neighbor fuck to watching Frodo get his dick wet.

Thus, the quandary: I believe I speak for everyone when I say we’d all like as much porn around as humanly possible. Too much porn is killing the profitability of the industry. The internet is giving us too much porn.

There is only one solution: Shut it down. For the good of the porn. It’s the only way.

As much as I love porn, I think I may love the internet more.

No. Costly porn has had its day. The market calls for free or nearly free pr0n.

Rapidshit it, yo.

So what happens to the music industry?

It will be interesting to see if it is comparable to the porn.

Packaging is total waste for porn. I still order DVDs online sometimes. (For the actresses believe it or not, not the fancy sets btw.) But I throw out the package. What, I'm gonna proudly display it? I'm surprised retail porn stores still exist in any number.

i has pr0n

Oh noes! they steels mah pr0n!

I miss mah pr0n

it's just bringing the day closer when i can shake my cane and say....

"we used to have to take the santa monica blue bus 3 miles to the pussycat and watch porn in a theater...with strangers!"

i was unaware of all the free sites that offer videos of my neighbor. she is sort of old anyway. is the author exaggerating when he/she talks about the gratuitous porn available for free on the net?

There are gigs and gigs of it on usenet and bittorent, which are both part of the internet.

Of course they're comparable. Except in the music industry, it's the consumers who pay for crap like Nickleback CD's that are getting fucked.

I think music and the pr0n are comparable. I can buy an album on iTunes for $10 that has 15-20 tracks on it, but if I buy the same thing from a store I'm liable to pay atleast $1 per track or more. It makes more sense to me to get the tracks online and burn a cd for the car unless you have one of those things where you hook up you rmp3player to the car, then... no need to burn.

Likewise, If I can buy a porn subscription for $30 a month and watch and download whatever I want, that is much better than paying $20 a DVD. Plus online sites always offer previews, whereas dvds are hit or miss. Plus, online gives a person anonymity, since there is this bizarre stigma that people who like porn are perverts. Just like with the music I can download the videos, and put them onto DVDs if I so desire, and watch them at a later date.

I absolutely love that the New York Times made an infographic for this bot-button issue.

The company I used to buy my porn from (online, in the later years) is now selling some stuff via download, in some cases per scene. I like that idea. There's been more than one movie I've bought for a particular girl or scene... the rest is just, er, fluff.

Yet, I haven't bought anything from them since my brief Viewers' Wives fixation. Might be the same reason I go for long stretches of not commenting on SG sets. In any case, I'd rather go back to ordering DVDs than lose World of Warcraft.

It's a shame that porn studio execs don't look like baby sea otters, or maybe baby seals or prairie dogs, so we could really drum up the sympathy for them. Instead, they look like boring middle-aged dudes who developed a good business model in the late '90s and then more or less sat on their asses. Boo hoo.

I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I never have really found any of these big budget porn videos very arrousing, not enough to pay for anyway.

You mean I might not have to watch a sea full of middle aged fat guys have sex with 30-something year old women who have been surgically enhanced trying to pass off as 18 year olds? Whatever shall I do! Maybe the "industry" should give quality erotica a try, hire genuinely attractive people and give passionate real-feeling pornography a try.

Are you saying I don't have to pay $4 a month?

Dude. There is so much good free porn out there. So much. A friend showed me the world that is free porn and it was good. Little sunbeams showered in and onto my computer like heavenly bukkake when I was taught The Way.




and I think I missed a point you were making. But I'm leaving my statement up, because heavenly bukkake is a good term and I want others to enjoy it. Carry on past my density.

Digital is squeezing out the people in the middle. There's tons of opportunity to make a little bread at the low end of the scale, and a little opportunity to make tons of bread at the top. I used to shoot 40 weddings a year and make costly albums for 30 of them. Now I shoot 20 weddings and make 5 albums, and they all want their high-res files from me so they can get their reprints at Walgreens. So like the guys in the music industry and elsewhere, my income has dropped through the floor because everyone now has ready access to digital technology.

So it goes.

and then I replied instead of editing. sigh

it'd a "well-lit set"

and this is what is happening, i feel, in the mainstream movie industry...Joe Schmo, who thinks he's hot shit, with his Best Buy-bought cheapo video camera and his PowerBook, just uploads his crappy "film" to YouTube (the bane) and everyone flocks to him, and it shouldn't be that way

Honestly, the big problem is probably the price of porn DVDs compared to what you're getting. I haven't been in a while, but the last time I went to any of the porn shops around here DVDs were between $40 and $50 each. I can get box sets of major television series for cheaper than that. And on top of that, so much of that porn is basically the same thing, guy fucks barely legal-appearing girl on a couch. That's worth $50? I don't think so. They're basically running into the same problem the record companies have ("$15 bucks and there's only 2 good songs?") and only now realising it.

Ron Jeremy's rich!! what more do you want from us, porn industry?!

For a while now I've been wondering how it is that there seems to be such an endless stream of porn produced (talking videos here), when I can't really picture people shelling out for it with all the free product available. I can remember as a young perv being thrilled to make another discovery of how to get free shit... back doors to websites (Punkpussy had about 10 back in the day), TGP sites, password sharing sites, and now there's the terrabytes of dvd rips up on rapidshare and a million other hosting sites. I can't picture the bigger budget studio porn lasting much longer, really, as I doubt that core fanbase will continue to support those kind of budgets when they can just download a rip for pennies.

I can only agree with that, I've always thought what's the point in spending a chunk of money on a bunch of DVDs when you can get the same thing for free on any number of free sites. Even if you haven't got the bandwidth to download movies you can still watch them on one of the many host sites, as porn becomes far more accessible people are going to want something a little more "out of the box" to keep their attention which explains the vast number of niche sites that are around but you can get the vast majority of that for free too if you look hard enough. Unlike music where people may buy a CD 'cause it's got artwork by a particular artist or has a bonus DVD with it or something else unique to the CD you can't really do that with porn 'cause at the end of the day pornstars don't really go on European tours.