Is the online porn industry f*cked?

I've been wanting to blog about the Other Silicon Valley for a few days after reading about the Obscene Losses in the porn industry, but flash of the dirty mac to Adriana Lukas for the title inspiration.

The story is about the end of the well known (but seldom mentioned) fact that the porn industry is often an early indicator of where the 'Web is going. Well, we have been getting interested (in a strictly strategic-new-media-direction-sense of course) on the impact of all the You-Tube like pornsites such as YouPorn, where enthusiastic amateurs have been contributing user-degenerate content with some enthusiasm - and more importantly, for free.

(And the level of, ummmm - personal information - revealed makes even the most debauched Facebook fratboy (and/or girl) positively bashful in comparison)

And not just the video dept - the gentle art of Machinema has also been perverted to the Pornside, so the PS3 crowd are also horning in on the act.

But of more interest, its apparently ripping the guts out of the Web 1.0 "Subscription Based" Porn industry - apparently we prefer to see people like us rocking and rolling (for free), rather than the credit card enhanced silicon shakes of the pros.

And therein lies the rub...to quote the Portfolio.com article linked above:

Much like the TV networks, movie studios, and record labels on the other side of town, porn companies are also engaged in a frantic attempt to diversify their offerings, filleting their films into smaller pieces that can be easily sold via an ever-shifting variety of digital distribution channels. From the pay-by-the-minute model on video-on-demand sites such as Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network and Hotmovies.com, to the four- to six-minute clips edited for mobile devices, the industry is looking to take the 90-minute sex videos from its old business strategy and carve them into bite-size moneymakers.

But for many companies, the sum of these new revenue streams doesn’t even come close to offsetting the decline in DVD sales. What’s happening in porn right now is directly analogous to what’s happening to the music industry—CD sales are down 16 percent since 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan—but worse.

“What you’re losing in the DVD market, you’re not making up on the paid internet side,” says Fishbein. “Instead of 99 cents a song on iTunes, these guys are doing 10 cents a minute for porn.”

Now what is very interesting to me is that maybe for the first time, Porn is behind the curve - most non-porn media has been Ad supported for a long time. so is actually in a better position vis a vis free new media plays.

We await with interest the first IPTV porn plays, as an attempt to capture new subscription revenues.

( By the way, the analytics tell me that Porn, Facebook, PS3 and IPTV are the most frequent combo searches leading to this blog, so this post is a honey trap for all you dirty buggers who typed that in )