Adult films are where the money is

Silly me, earning minimum wage by stacking books at the library. Turns out, literature is… Silly me, earning minimum wage by stacking books at the library. Turns out, literature is great – but not where the money is.

I used the library for the only thing it’s good for – tidbits of wisdom – and checked out the essay “Big Red Son” by David Foster Wallace. Its 50 pages explore the experience of attending the Annual Adult Video News Awards, allowing a valuable glimpse inside the adult movie industry. It turns out Wallace knows where the real money lies. While all of mainstream American cinema makes an impressive $2.5 billion in annual revenue, which is nothing to sneeze at, the real money lies in the American adult film industry, which takes in more than $4 billion through all its various forms.

Bill Asher, the president of Vivid Entertainment, told Forbes Magazine he spends up to $200,000 on production of his films. Because of the high production values, he banks more than $100 million per year in revenue. But these days you need not be signed up with a major player to make some bank.

According to an article by Simon Castles in The Age, there are more than 8 million porn sites on the Internet. He goes on to weigh the effects porn has on men and how it can potentially destroy their relationships, all the while missing the bigger picture: The 8 million porn sites means that there is plenty of room for an average-looking guy to break into the industry and, most importantly, get that cash.

Naturally, it didn’t take much time for the middlemen to carve out their territory. Affiliates of the big production studios set up their own sites that allow consumers quick previews of the material available for purchase. These affiliates see their cut upon delivering traffic or subscriptions to the production studios. Everyone wins.

Or at least they all win when the demand for the product is there.

After a few hours of anecdotal research, it appears that the Internet porn market is being flooded by the amateur genre. Conde Nast Portfolio recently ran a feature documenting a meeting between the founder of Vivid Entertainment, Steve Hirsch and Stephen Paul Jones, the creator of YouPorn.com.

Jones’ creation is currently the most visited adult site on the Internet, a YouTube-style creation that allows users to upload their own adult-themed movies for everyone else to view free of charge. Its popularity is undercutting pay sites like Vivid.com, which doesn’t even rank in the top 5,000 adult sites anymore. Much of the money being generated from the adult Internet industry is drying up as amateurs flood the market with gratis performances.

Apparently, the recession applies to porn consumption, too.

The statistics are there to back it up. According to ABC News, DVD sales and rentals have together shrunk 30 percent from levels they had reached just two years ago. Even paid sites on the Internet have been seeing little to no growth in the same period. Higher end production companies, like Hustler Video Group, have responded by shifting priorities and concentrating on producing material primarily for Internet consumption.

And although the major sites allow free previews of material, hoping to lure the viewer into purchasing full-length content, it hasn’t helped business much. One out of a thousand browsers who view free-preview videos will actually plunk down cash for the otherwise abundant online resource, said Luke Ford, a columnist who covers the adult industry.

The future of the industry leaves much room for speculation. As the past half-century has demonstrated, porn usually lies at technology’s forefront. VHS, DVD, hi-definition and the Internet were all embraced by porn before other mainstream forms of media. Anticipating the next big evolution in the industry will inevitably mean big bucks for those involved.

Industry veteran Ron Jeremy predicts, “The live dolls and holograms, they’ll certainly be in the future. You’ll be able to see porn in 3-D