Internet Porn Killing Off Traditional Porn

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From film to print journalism to the music industry, the rise of the Internet has proven potentially ruinous for a host of media paradigms. With the rise of do-it-yourself capability, we have, for the past decade, found ourselves in the midst of a mammoth cultural shift away from centralized production. Perhaps no industry has ridden this new wave to greater heights and potential ruin than the porn industry. Porn has thrived online, in all of its various forms: photographs, video, prose, chat, and webcams. In fact, with its straight to your computer distribution system (replacing the need for magazine-concealing trench coats) one might argue that the Internet was made for porn.

What percentage of all internet activity does porn account for? Difficult question to answer. But the success of internet porn has spelled trouble for traditional industry outlets. Playboy, for instance, is learning that soft-core images of busty women just don’t sell anymore when one can indulge in so much free flesh online. Just like newspapers around the country, Playboy is considering scaling back print operations, which suck money away from more lucrative web and video enterprises (including the surreal television series “The Girls Next Door“).

As with news aggregation sites like Huffington Post and The Drudge Report, the bulk of internet porn is, in fact, pirated from other places. Producers of the original content are seeing their efforts cut and pasted on to sites who make big dollars from companies advertising dating and web-cam services. To make matters worse for the purveyors of old-school porn, there’s the recession:

It’s been extremely challenging for adult filmmakers, who are not only wrestling with anemic consumer spending, they’re also competing with a nearly infinite supply of free, amature videos from countless user-generated sites, not to mention a glut of traditional inventory.

The user-generated quotient is another fascinating part of the equation. Slick homemade websites that simply utilize PayPal, make a performer’s transition from amateur to professional as easy as point and click. But given the number of sites where men and women voluntarily send in naughty pictures of themselves for free public viewing, one gets the feeling that paying for what’s behind the green door isn’t really quite what it once was.