Violet Blue writes on www.tinynibbles.com – Oh. My. Gawd.

Tough times in the porn industry (latimes.com)

www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=36573

NO ONE saw this coming. No one. Not a single fucking fapping girl, boy, LGBTQQ or any fifteen year old with a phone. Especially not the whole goddamn world of the rest of us who do not live in the tiny, tiny eensy bubble of Porn Valley and Hollywood microbubble media navel-gazing culture of self-replication and utter disdain for originality.

And all the truly creative types trapped there. Or the guy worth tens of millions off that porn site in, not the Valley, um… San Francisco? Or the hundreds of websites I blogged about on Fleshbot (est: 2003, ruled and run by women) that had *nothing* to do with mainstream porn. Imagine what would have happened if someone, somewhere, saw this coming from a long, long way away. I’ll admit it was fun watching them try to commodify altporn into their antiquated business models without understanding why it even existed.

I’m personally shocked. What the fuck are we going to do if the porn ‘industry’ dries up and its weak business model collapses because the distribution model was so arrogantly short-sighted and careless about who its viewers are and what they really want to see? Imagine a world where you can’t go to Joe’s Jack Shack and buy a product for $50 that you know you’ll like some of, or an overly expensive rental that you know you’ll like one scene from because it’s packed with the same old shit to wank to — and that’s your only choice? I can’t imagine this world. With… what? Different standards of beauty and sexual expression? It’s like, a pornpocalypse.

Praise the lube and pass the ammunition. The LA Times tells us,

(…) For [Savanna] Stern, 23, the rapid decline of job opportunities in the porn business over the last year has been dramatic. She has gone from working four or five days a week to one and now has employers pressuring her to do male-female sex scenes for $700, a 30% discount from the $1,000 fee that used to be the industry standard.

Less than two years ago, Stern earned close to $150,000 annually, sometimes turned down work and drove a Mercedes-Benz CLK 350. Now she’s aggressively reaching out for jobs and making closer to $50,000 a year.

As for that Mercedes? She’s replacing it with a used Chevy Trailblazer — from her parents.

“The opportunities in this industry really are disappearing,” Stern said. “It’s extremely stressful.”

Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply.

“We’ve gone through recessions before, but we’ve never been hit from every side like this,” said Mark Spiegler, head of the Spiegler Girls talent agency, who has worked in porn since 1995.

“It’s the free stuff that’s killing us, and that’s not going away,” said Dion Jurasso, owner of porn production company Combat Zone, which has seen its business fall about 50% in the last three years.

Porn is hardly the only segment of the media industry struggling with these issues. But its problems appear to be more severe. Whereas online piracy has forced big changes in the music industry and is starting to affect movies and television, it has upended adult entertainment.

At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users and some is acquired from cheap back catalogs, but much of it is pirated.

Sites like Pornhub, YouPorn and RedTube attract more users than TMZ and the Huffington Post. The porn sites are even bigger than Pirate Bay, the top portal for illegal downloads of movies, TV shows and music.

Frustratingly for porn producers and distributors in the Valley, none of these sites appears to be making much money. Suzann Knudsen, a marketing director for PornoTube, said the site’s parent, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, uses it to attract customers for paid video on demand.

“PornoTube isn’t a piggy bank,” she said. “Its true value is in traffic.” (…read more, latimes.com)

It is too a piggy bank. They can keep blaming it all on “free” when we all know it’s *freedom of choice*. That’s what that value of traffic (understanding the space), reputation and truly serving/respecting and listening to your customer means. Even if your customer is paying you for something to jack off to. Also, if Knudsen thinks the ‘free’ sites are not raking it in, she might want to “spend some time in the space” she works in, as they say up here in the other Valley. Think I don’t do consulting? I do. I have for a long time. Okay, /rant.

* Let’s not forget that the LA Times ran “Yes on 8″ ads.