Is The Porn Industry Destroying Itself

[planeterotica]

[Arginald Valleywater]

The problem is oversupply and shocking quality output. If you go to a Motor Show you go to have a gander at Ferrari, Aston Martin etc...the stuff you don't see on the roads day in day out. Porn used to have stunning looking girls like Silvia Saint whereas now we have rough arsed tattooed munters with cheap plastic surgery. The thrill has gone as the song goes.....

[one eyed jack]

My observations in recent years leads me to beleive the problem to be a lot deeper than what is said here.

There are actually more great looking girls than there have been in previous years, boob jobs and cosmetic surgery aside.

Complacency, apathy, ignorance, in-fighting and fightng over scraps have bee the real problems for an industry falling apart the seams.

Technological advances and cheap equipment have faciitated independence from traditional paid work then the easiest way to describe this is, If this was an asteroid then its hit the business and shattered it scattering into a hundred pieces in different directions.

[one eyed jack]

From a consumer/ onlooker point of view I get where opinions are coming from though. As an insider Im privvy to alot more reasons why i agree the business is destroying itself

[planeterotica]

Personally i think its just down to over supply as just about everyone has made a porno these days of some degree or another, and now a lot of girls are posting selfies and sexting it means the days of making big bucks just out of porn are long gone unless you own a tube site and run adverts alongside other peoples films, porn is the biggest traffic generator on the internet you just have to re-direct that traffic into non porn advertising and you could be on to a winner..

As for the girls they are just as gorgeous as they ever were, the tatts and the false tits are just a product of our time. !wink!

[Arginald Valleywater]

I am not sure the false tits thing is just a product of our time. I work in a female dominated office, some 120 odd female colleagues. Tatts are common (werrrking claaas as Derek and Clive would have said) but afaik not one set of plastic tits. The scarring is the worst thing, it looks vile and is a turn off for most men. The days of Jordan being the national pin up are long gone. Kelly Brook, Carol Vorderman, Carey Mulligan, Helen Skelton, Susanah Reid etc....gorgeous women and not a surgeons knife in sight.

[frankthring]

The article in the link is intelligent and well-written, but I feel the question is
wrong; "Is the Porn Industry destroying itself" ? No, so long as men enjoy
sexually arousing visual material, porn will be around. We like to wank and,
as the old joke goes, "you meet a better class of bird" in your fantasies than
in reality for most blokes.....But, as a director/producer/occasional
performer of over 30 years in this biz I can say with authority that the Golden
Age of Quality Porn has gone. The video and dvd age (and the film age before
that) from "Deep Throat" onwards meant that companies fixed sufficient
budgets for their crews to make a decent wage, the performers to be paid
fairly (in line with cost of living of the time). Heck, I`ve shot in over 30
countries and often with high budgets (remembering the production
companies were happy to pay and made an even higher profit on top).
Then along came gonzo, Buttman et al. Now everyone is a film-maker, you
don`t even need a video camera, just do it on your mobile phone....
My old friend, Jim Slip, has argued many times with me that gonzo created the
modern democratisation of porn, everyone can do it, everyone can make a
few bob. This is true. But for every site now that tries to realise fully a set
of erotic turn-ons for its audience there are 50 others of lookalike crap.
Worst of all, the web sites, needing just the sex content (eg teen/anal =
any old room anywhere) have dropped and dropped and dropped budgets to
the point where the lowest denominator works. Even an old time company
like Private cannot afford to pay one-third of their budgets of ten years ago
(and I talking simple gonzo here - not an old-style feature movie).
It is in this regard that the industry has destroyed itself. I see no alternative.
Just a plain room, a girl, a guy ( who is probably the cameraman to keep the cost
down), a small camera or even a tablet. And only the quality of the girl if she
is a good looker makes one scene stand out from the rest !!!

[chatterji]

But isn't the point that big budgets don't actually deliver much more to the user? The value we find in porn as consumers comes down to the perceived intensity between performers, how attractive one finds them, and whether any particular fetish one might have is being catered for. You cite Private and, no offence, but I always found their productions laughable with the locations, big boats and mansions etc. Who cares?

The poor quality of film-making can compromise a shoot - angles, lighting, continuity - but with modern kit, almost anybody vaguely familiar with filming digitally should be able to nail that. The fact that they don't amazes me.

Porn, like music and film, was always going to lose when the Net made p2p sharing the default for users. It's taken the money out of the industry, but equally the costs of shooting content must have plummeted too because of the availability of cheap(ish) high quality kit.

Monetising any digital product available for download is a massive challenge. Currently I don't see any way to sustain profitability levels while true encryption technology to protect downloaded digital products remains a pipe dream. Users don't care about producers of content. The assumption is that the tap will always be turned on, and that content will flow, irrespective of whether they pay for it or not. They're probably right.

[william]

Availibility - its far too easyily availiable and the choice is out there - you have producers chasing the market and cutting costs - production values going down and internet freebies and bootlegs.

the hey days of porn have ended and we will never see the likes of the 70 and 80's again.