It won't be the "death of porn." It will just force them to change and adapt. There will be ways to make money for innovators. Maybe vivid (or any other big name porn company) starts it's own tube site for it's videos and gets advertising revenue, etc, etc. There just won't be any more raping customers by trying to charge them $50 for a damn movie.
It won't ever die. Advertising, alone, will keep it going; it will just be less like HBO and a lot more like public television. Thank God for the hobby; I try to DO more and WATCH less.
It's certainly not the death of porn, more like the evolution.
Good article....whoops, gotta run. Some of my free sites may have posted their daily updates.
Vivid is just like the RIAA, with the exception that they were quick to adopt online distribution but were too greedy with their pricing structure. $39.99 for a monthly membership to access their content library killed their customer base. The site charging a more reasonable monthly fee still do ok so long as their content is unique and fresh.
I've also heard that the pay scale for porn performers is very low. There are not very many big budget films being made, the market is saturated and the short vids for these companies like Bang Brothers are filmed in one afternoon. I've heard that the guys get around $250 per shoot and the ladies get somewhere around $750.
Looks like the "Golden Age" has passed us.
You see a lot of girls now do a few movies so they can say they are a pornstar and then spend a lot of time webcamming. I think they keep more of their money that way.
This documentary ran on BBC last year. It was pretty interesting, and pretty negative on the future of the industry as a whole. One producer postulated that in a few years there would be no big porn stars as the money just wasn't there any more.
Fifteen years on, Theroux returned to the San Fernando Valley for another crack of the whip in Louis Theroux: Twilight of the Porn Stars(BBC Two). What was apparent from the outset was that time and technological progress have not been kind to the porn producers. The internet – which did so much to bring pornography to within a mouse click of the mass market – had, according to those he interviewed at least, devastated their business by flooding the web with free erotic material. Gone are the days of easy money and rampant, drug-fuelled excess. Yet, they soldier on, the economic blight having had little obvious effect on the number of people willing to engage in extreme sex acts on camera in return for cold hard cash, however diminished the earnings.
The mood was a lot wearier and warier than back in 1997. Still, doing the rounds of the “model” agencies and film sets threw up plenty of ironic Theroux footage – directors encouraging stars to groan in a “less porno” fashion; two inexperienced actors experiencing a “courtship in reverse – starting with sex and ending up as something like friends” as Theroux described it. There were revealing moments, too, as when one model agency director declared she wouldn’t warn off newcomers from porn but wouldn’t want her own daughter getting involved as she “wouldn’t want to be the mother of a whore”.
A few years I was curious about this. I contacted a distributor who specializes in "amateur" and asked what they pay for acquisitions. Based on quality and length - basically $1200 per scene. I ran an ad offering $350 to ladies interested in doing lesbian scenes. It was easy to shoot three scenes a day in a nice hotel room. But after a while the distributor dropped the price to $900 - and I'll bet it's lower now. Very hard to make money as a producer.
the net has changed lots of things...some for better, some for worse. on the one hand, it makes it possible for a guy living in the boonies to hook up with hot girls for some fun. on the other, as a photographer, it's made a wasteland populated with zombies out of our business.