Porn Industry Blames the Internet for its Ills

(Cross-posted from Gloria Brame's blog.)

There was a NYTimes.com article on the porn business from earlier in the month that I have been meaning to talk about:

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

And unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones, or a well-lighted movie set for a ratty couch at an amateur videographer’s house.

After years of essentially steady increases, sales and rentals of pornographic videos were $3.62 billion in 2006, down from $4.28 billion in 2005, according to estimates by AVN, an industry trade publication. If the situation does not change, the overall $13 billion sex-related entertainment market may shrink this year, said Paul Fishbein, president of AVN Media Network, the magazine’s publisher. The industry’s online revenue is substantial but is not growing quickly enough to make up for the drop in video income.

I think the analysis here is fundamentally wrong. Read this passage closely:

It is an unusual twist on the Internet-transforms-industry story. The Internet quickly presented a challenge to some businesses, like recorded music and newspapers. But initially, the digital age led to a kind of mainstreaming of pornography by providing easy and anonymous access online.

The spread of high-speed Internet access promised even further growth. Instead, faster connections have simply allowed people to download free movies more quickly, and allowed amateur moviemakers to upload their creations easily.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the market continues to be flooded with new video releases, both online and on disc. Mr. Fishbein said that this year he expected to see more than 1,000 X-rated DVDs a month produced for retail sale, a figure driven in part by the new spate of low-budget filmmakers.

Last things first: It's not counterintuitive at all that even with falling sales, the industry would still be cranking out discs. In fact, it's exactly what you would expect, since each individual movie is still profitable; they're trying to make up lost margin with volume.

Second, skip back up to the first quoted section: "unlike consumers looking for music and other media, viewers of pornography do not seem to mind giving up brand-name producers and performers for anonymous ones". Wait a minute. Doesn't Myspace exist? Aren't people checking out bands that have no record deal exactly because the internet disintermediates? Aren't people buying or swiping single songs from their favorite signed bands? Yes, yes and yes. So what "challenge" does the internet pose to the music industry? It challenges shitty music, that's what.

Music and porn are not commodities. The mere fact that the internet exists to give people a cheaper means of distribution does not transform them into commodities. That is to say, quality matters. The porn companies acknowledge as much:

Older companies in the industry are responding with better production values and more sophisticated Web offerings.

But production values are not enough. Think again of music. What's the problem? That the recording quality - the production values - of most music isn't good enough? No, it's that the music sucks. Don't confuse production values with quality. Mainstream porn's problem is not the internet; it's that mainstream porn sucks. The internet allows people to choose indie and amateur producers because those offerings are better from the customer's standpoint.

Mainstream porn came up with a creative formula a long time ago: big-fake-titted blonds with stupid high heels and IQs lower than their waist sizes getting pumped by cretins with monster cocks. You know, lowest common denominator. The industry then went and innovated in all the technical areas: multiple camera angles on the DVD, web offerings with streaming video and seamless online payment. It may be an American thing, but it seems like it's easier to innovate on the technical side because tech is simple to understand. What the mainstream porn industry really needs is innovation on the creative side, which is sorely lacking.

Comments

[shams]

innovation on the creative side of porn?

great post, mithras, but how about an example of what that might look like? seriously. it's porn, not art.

[Mithras]

I don't need it to be Citizen Kane. Just slightly better dialogue and acting, maybe more realism and less glitz (hey, look at the big empty SoCal mansion we're fucking in this time!). And I don't even mean eliminating the old formula, just give people an alternative.

Also, a lot of women watch porn, but few of them pay for it. Why? Because the industry doesn't even try marketing to them, or figuring out what they want in smut.