Tough times in the porn industry

[Rochard]

Originally Posted by Cleo

I was at the gym yesterday and two different people that I know there came up to me asking how business is lately. The first one is a guy that runs HIV gay cruises and he was telling me how bad business is due to credit card declines. The second person is a woman who runs a well known mainstream book and magazine store that is located in walking distance of our downtown and a major hospital that told me the same thing about credit card declines.

While I'm sure tube sites and other sources of free porn hurt sales I believe the major reason that sales are so bad is we are in a major recession and credit has dried up along with very restrictive scrubbing by the credit card companies.

When times are good expensive bottled water sells well despite water being freely available.

Finally someone has seen the light.

There has ALWAYS been free porn on the Internet. Since day one. The problem is we are in the biggest recession we've seen in our lifetimes. Sales are down EVERYWHERE.

Vivid says "sales are down 20%". Well, they are lucky. The local Wendy's up the street from my house closed down. A nearby gas station also closed down. One out of four houses on my street (five out of twenty houses) are empty because they lost their jobs and couldn't pay their mortgage. Discretionary cash is at a minimum; People are afraid to spend because they are afraid they might be next to loose their job.

Do tube sites hurt us? They sure do. But they aren't killing us. Our industry is seeing what all industries are seeing.

[Jeremy]

Originally Posted by Rochard

Finally someone has seen the light.

There has ALWAYS been free porn on the Internet. Since day one. The problem is we are in the biggest recession we've seen in our lifetimes. Sales are down EVERYWHERE.
[...]

I pretty much agree with you that credit card issues / discretionary spending are where the main problems are at the moment. That and summer. I'm still seeing similar levels of clicks to sponsors but drastically fewer sign-ups. (I even saw a sponsor posting to see if any other program's ratios had suddenly doubled recently - that was refreshing honesty!)

People still click links and go through the tours but I'm guessing either their CC won't work, or they don't have the money for a subscription at the moment, or they'll only spend on something that's really special to them and, unfortunately, I just don't have the right sponsors to meet that need at the moment.

I wouldn't exclude tube sites as being part of a problem though - if you run (or ran) a tgp or mgp then tubes have pretty much just nicked half your traffic and taken your submit pass revenue with it, as well as the revenue from that traffic. But, I have seen some TGP / MGP people say that although their traffic has dived, revenue has't decreased by the same amount - so maybe the people who flock to tubes really are just lookie-loos who like to wank themselves sore.

The one thing that people always forget is that having "free porn" drastically increases the market size of potential porn purchasers.