Plight of the Porn Industry

The vast majority of us are reluctant to admit to ourselves let alone anyone else the significance the pornography industry has played in many aspects of our lives. The simple fact is that Gen Y’s human reproductive education was most often introduced by Jenna Jameson and a faceless gentleman than a stalk with a cloth bundle. That awkward parental discussion was (thankfully) preceded years before by dared missions to the video store and clumsy adult geocities sites.

original unaltered image sourced from http://www.flickr.com/photos/jam19/

The ‘nefarious’ nature of the content has lead us to publicly forsake the industry in its hour of need, yet still extensively access it privately through P2P file sharing technologies. Alex Firestone of firegirls.com believes that potentially 2/3rds of the industry will run bankrupt within the next two years due to the impact of file sharing. A huge proportion of public attention is devoted to the plight of the music and film industry and its attempts to formulate a business model that can benefit economically from web 2.0 technologies however little is heard in defence of the porn industry which suffers to an equal degree. Despite one’s own moral position on its existence, it must not be forgotten the amount of men and women who are legitimately employed within in it in all sectors from performance, marketing right through to digital production.

I asked Firestone what he projected will be the impacts of the global recession on the industry will be and he believes that the pornography industry is one of the few to thrive in a recession, at least it would be were it not for the prevalence of file sharing. This reminded me of something that came up at work in relation to the recession and the entertainment industry. I work in a city bar whose patronage consists mainly of ‘corporate types’, presumably those hardest hit (at least initially) by the financial crisis. One of the owners said that we would survive because in a recession one generally likes to drown their sorrows and ‘still be seen to drive the Ferrari without actually paying for it’ ie same venue, same quantity but swapping Grey Goose for Smirnoff vodka and we would adapt to allow for this. You can apply that analogy as creatively as you like to the porn industry.

So how will the porn industry adapt?

firegirls.com claims to be a more personalised documentary style of pornography that builds upon the personal story of its models and its creator Firestone and from what I can glean, it appears to live up to its manifesto. It doing this, firegirls.com distinguishes itself from more conventional styles of pornography. The success of Amazon.com is attributed to its ‘long tail’ (an inexcusable but unavoidable pun) business model. In this model Amazon equals its profits from its best sellers with those from its more obscure offerings by increasing the quantity of its independent products and aggressively niche marketing. Thus will it be the more disparate forms of pornography  that will emerge from the recession unscathed?

I am curious to see how the birds and the bees will be delivered to Gen Z.  

*Kind thanks to Alex Firestone for being gracious enough to respond to my incessant twittering. Follow him here*