recession in the porn industry

I happened to come across this article about recessions in the American porn industry that was quite relevant to what we talked about last week on online pornography. I found it under the news section at Taiwanese msn.com, and found that it is in fact a translated article from the Los Angeles Times. It talks about the rough times within the porn industry nowadays, not so much due to the economic recession but the prevalent use of internet allowing people to be able to access free content at the ease of their fingertips, making a dramatic decline on the number of consumers that are willing to pay for porn. The article pointed out that at least 5 of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, and that industry insiders estimate that revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50%.

I believe how this shift of porn watching is beneficial to the consumers, but I really feel bad for the exploiting of the girls that are in the industry. I think convenience, privacy, and price are perhaps the main factors to people’s choice and development of viewing habits as to why they would prefer porn viewing online over the previous purchasing of DVDs and other hard copies. Apart from that it’s free of charge, I believe it should have an even greater impact in especially to pornography in comparing to the film and music industries, as simply downloading or just video streaming is much less of a fuss and much more secured than physically purchasing hard copies, in the risk of been spotted when you make your purchase or your collection been found by someone you don’t want to expose your personal taste to. After all, evidence of internet browsing history is much easier to hide than that of DVD disks.


(The article from LA times for anyone interested: Click Here)

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