Las Vegas – from www.askmen.com – Booming music reverberates through a colorfully lit auditorium as hundreds of people filter in to take their seats. From atop his podium on the stage, in front of a huge screen, a DJ skillfully mixes music videos from the likes of Jay-Z, Eminem and Biggie. People in the balcony row behind me are singing and rapping along.
I’m here in Las Vegas, at the Pearl Concert Theater in the Palms hotel, ready for the start of an awards show. To the undiscerning observer, it could the Emmys or the Grammys, but in fact it’s a very different kind of event. It’s the Adult Video News Awards — also known as the Oscars of porn.
The AVNs are a big party held to honor and celebrate the best in sin and skin. Every year, the industry gets together and congratulates itself for everything from best sex toy to best orgy scene. Unlike other similar events, it’s a raucous and raunchy affair.
The show kicks off with Lisa Lampanelli — the “queen of mean” comedian recruited from the mainstream to shepherd the evening along — launching into an industry that is relatively easy pickings. Her jokes are expected but still funny, about this actor spouting more than a BP oil spill or that actress getting naked more often than Lindsay Lohan.
She lands herself in some trouble, though, when she tries the stereotypical one about how there are no Asian men in porn because of their supposedly small penises. The crowd up in front — the nominees and other industry types — shout her down and point to a gentleman who stands up to reveal that, yes indeed, he is a male Asian porn star with a good-size appendage. D’oh!
The laughs keep coming, the music continues booming and the crowd keeps interacting. It’s a lively party, and everyone involved seems to be having fun.
But given what’s going on with the porn business these days — how it’s fizzling faster than a libido after imagining Betty White nude — it’s easy for an outsider to wonder why everyone is so buoyant.
With its first ever contraction, a decline that doesn’t seem to have an end, what sort of future does the porn business have? Will there even be porn stars to celebrate a few years from now? Or are these AVN Awards just one big party on the Titanic?
For the past few years there have been complaints of a “perfect storm,” a term repeatedly used to describe the double whammy that has hit the industry: the recession and a wave of online piracy.
The economic downturn has caused customers’ wallets to clam up, particularly when it comes to discretionary spending. And let’s face it, there’s little else more discretionary than porn.
At the same time, a number of porn-flavored YouTube clone sites — YouPorn and RedTube, to name a few — have sprung up to offer aficionados all the copyrighted adult content they want, for free. Like their mainstream counterparts, porn producers are also seeing their content swapped freely through file-sharing programs.
As such, the industry says it is losing millions of dollars and scores of jobs, not only on the performer side, but also in production and distribution.
Specifics are hard to come by, since most companies are privately owned and tight-lipped on financials, but one look at the stock prices of the handful of public firms tells the story. Over the past two years, shares of Barcelona-based Private Media, Colorado-based New Frontier Media and Germany’s Beate Uhse have lost more than half their value.
Chicago-based Playboy has seen a recent uptick, but that’s only thanks to speculation that founder Hugh Hefner was leading a bid to take the company private — a trigger he finally pulled this week.
Some insiders think that no new porn will be made because they can’t stay in business.
Anecdotally, one look around the Adult Entertainment Expo — the annual fan and trade convention tied to the AVN Awards — is also proof of the contraction. The show’s floor space at the Sands Convention Center is steadily shrinking, down to about 270 booths this year from more than 300 middecade.
Some big companies don’t even really want to be there anymore. Vivid, one of the top U.S. porn producers, chose to conduct business in a nearby hotel suite this year. Digital Playground, another large studio, is also having second thoughts.
“The show isn’t satisfying the business, and it’s not satisfying the consumer,” says company founder Ali Joone.
How deep is the industry’s overall malaise? Everyone expects the effects of the recession will eventually subside and that business may bounce back somewhat, but piracy is clearly the much bigger long-term problem.
“In a couple of years, all you’re going to be left with is old movies, because people just can’t stay in business,” says Vivid founder and cochairman Steven Hirsch.
“We have educated an entire generation to expect adult content to be free. As a result of that, it’s very difficult to change that culture.”
Adult industry companies are split on how to tackle the issue. Some, such as director Axel Braun — who helmed the best-selling title of 2010, Batman XXX: A Porn Parody — are going after individuals. In November Braun filed a complaint with courts, seeking the IP addresses of more than 7,000 people who he believes illegally downloaded his film.
Others, including Digital Playground and Vivid, would rather go after the Tube sites because they see them as the bigger transgressors. Under U.S. law, these sites, which make money from the ads they host, have 48 hours to remove copyrighted content once the owner issues a takedown notice. But that’s still enough time for them to make a profit, Hirsch says.
The Tube sites also don’t have to maintain records that the actors in videos are of legal age, which is another unfair advantage they have over the companies that play by the rules.
Shutting down the Tube sites has so far proven difficult, given their often elusive ownership or offshore bases, but that’s not stopping the bigger players from trying. Hirsch says Vivid supports legislation currently before Congress that would make it easier for an international group to crack down on websites regardless of jurisdiction.
“There are a lot of privacy issues surrounding that, and I understand that it has to be done the right way, but we do support some way of shutting down these sites that are illegally profiting from our movies, wherever they are,” he says.
Lawsuits against the Tube sites, meanwhile, are coming very soon, the companies promise.
Legal remedies are only one of the strategies being employed by producers to ensure a future. The bigger companies have for some time been pushing this notion of premium porn — that consumers will pay for movies of higher quality, both in terms of production value and in things not normally associated with adult films, such as acting and plot.
I’ve heard a number of companies espouse this plan, and for the most part, I’ve thought them to be crazy. On the producer’s end, it means higher budgets, something that has historically been the industry’s antithesis since ever-evolving technology has continually made it cheaper and easier to produce and distribute porn.
Then, on the consumer side, free is free. If given a choice of free porn versus paid porn, end users will always take free, especially if they only need that content for a few minutes at a time.
There’s also that old truism that no one watches porn for the plot or dialogue. So why are some producers wanting to supply more of it?
A conversation with Joone at the adult expo sheds some new light on this seemingly incongruous situation, which he compares to the advent of television. Before TV came along in the mid-20th century, the only filmed entertainment available to people were movies shown in theaters. Film studios knew this and had no impetus to produce quality, but once free TV arrived, they had no choice but to raise their game, he says.
Movies necessarily got better and things obviously worked out for each industry, both of whom make a fair chunk of change today. Joone thinks the same thing will happen in porn.
“A lot of [adult] movies were made at a time when the mentality was ‘sex sells,’ that it didn’t matter how good or bad or how much effort you put into it, people would buy it,” he says.
“But hotter girls, hotter scenes, better production values — that’s what people are willing to pay for.”
The big producers are also looking to add an element the mainstream industries have: live performance. While music and movie companies complain about piracy, they still have concerts and box office revenue, respectively, to fall back on. Porn producers want to create similar non-pirateable experiences, such as live interactive chats with their stars or charging customers for behind-the-scenes footage that doesn’t get publicly released.
In that way, the big boys are taking cues from something their smaller brethren have been doing for a while.
Boston-born Joanna Angel started her website, Burning Angel, in 2002 when she was a senior in college. The site featured pictures of her and some of her friends — a group of tattooed and pierced “alt-porn” girls who were the polar opposite of the bleached-blonde, fake-boobed stereotype.
Her company, which won the AVN Award last weekend for best porn star website, has always been predicated on providing customers with more than just straight-up visual porn. Angel runs blogs, chats and even mundane videos, such as her washing the car or doing dishes.
“If somebody wants to join a website where the content is nothing but the same girl, they probably want to get to know the girl real well,” she says.
“I almost make members feel like they’re a fly on the wall in my house.”
While piracy has prevented her website from growing as quickly as she’d like, Angel doesn’t have the same problems with the internet as some of her larger counterparts.
“People say the internet is ruining porn, but if it wasn’t for the internet, I wouldn’t be in porn,” she says.
“We’ve become known as one of the bigger players even though our company is one-eighth the size. We’ve managed to make an impact.”
New technology and the business models they enable may ultimately be the solution for everyone in the industry, big or small.
On the one hand, there is stronger anti-piracy software coming online. Some adult companies are adopting the latest of these applications, called ContentX, which detects watermarked pictures and video and tries to convert the file-sharer into a paying customer by pointing them toward the legit sources. The software and approach is different, the California-based company says, because it treats the illegal downloader “as an interested consumer rather than as a criminal.”
On the other hand, some producers are accepting that “free,” or alternatively “cheap,” is here to stay. Adult company Pink Visual says it will unveil a new pricing structure this month and that some progressively minded people in the industry are working on a porn version of iTunes, where people would pay a small fee to view a scene rather than the current $30 to $50 for a full movie or site membership.
“That would have been a great model [for Tube sites] if they had had an iTunes-like 99-cent-per-scene charge. They would have made millions and avoided lawsuits,” says Pink Visual brand manager Kim Kysar.
“Something like that would work great, and people would be more apt to pay for it.”
Most think we’ll never see porn moguls like Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner again, but what will happen to the stars of the show?
The adult industry has a history of exploiting new technologies. It was an early adopter of the VCR and DVD player, and it was arguably the first big industry to embrace the internet. But that technology has created a monster, which is now devouring the business. The bright side, Kysar says, is that a slimmer and better industry will ultimately emerge.
“The people who are exploiting technology will stay on top, and there will continue to be some shakedown of late adopters,” she says.
Kayden Kross lays out the present in simple terms.
“I’ve heard that if you stopped producing porn today, every person on the planet could watch a unique scene every day for the rest of their lives,” says the Digital Playground star.
“There’s no extreme need for brand new porn.”
Thumbing through the 75-page AVN Awards nominees list and watching the seemingly never-ending cavalcade of porn stars file past at the show’s red carpet event, I’m inclined to agree. Perhaps there is just too much porn.
Everyone I’ve spoken to in the industry tends to agree, which is why the contraction — known in business terms as “consolidation” — is going to continue. Inevitably there will be fewer companies making adult movies and fewer people working in the industry.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, Angel says, because what was once an overbloated business will eventually find a comfortable size.
“Less porn is good for porn, which is what I care about,” she says with a laugh. “I hope that porn gets back to a place where the only people in it are genuinely good at what they’re doing. I hope that it gets smaller and is more about quality, not quantity, and that everyone’s fantasies can still be fulfilled.”
One additional casualty, however, looks to be the porn mogul — the Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner overlord types who got mega-rich in the era of free-flowing milk and honey. Are the days where a pornographer can get uber-wealthy gone? “Absolutely,” says Steve Javors, associate managing editor of the AVN Media Network, which runs the AVN Awards. Today and in the future, they’ll have to settle for a decent return, which will only come if they’re smart about their business, he adds.
What about the porn stars — the girls who fuel the industry — not to mention the annual AVN Awards? With a glut of them creating content that consumers appear unwilling to pay for, are they too an endangered species?
Chanel Preston, a first-year rookie who was nominated for best new starlet at this year’s awards, doesn’t think so. She says she had no intention of getting into a dying business.
“Anybody could have come in and made tons of money [before]. Those people are still in the industry, but now they’re angry because they’re not making money. Now you have to be more creative,” she says. “It doesn’t have to go downhill. Let’s just change it and change with it.”
Indeed, at a Digital Playground media dinner last week, I sat next to Stoya, another young star who is as optimistic — and smart — about the future as Preston. When an industry veteran at our table suggested that she should mention any good reviews her films get to her 38,000-plus followers on Twitter, she almost took his head off.
Twitter is for interacting with her followers and giving them a taste of her personality, not for simple shilling, she firmly explained.
“If I do that, I give them the impression that I don’t care about them, which gives them more of an excuse to pirate my stuff.”
The porn stars of today — and tomorrow — are evidently going to be a good deal smarter about what they’re doing. If the superrich mogul is on the verge of extinction, the stereotypical sex-crazed airhead porn star is following closely behind.
To succeed in this bold new world of porn, everyone is going to have be smarter, whether it’s in how Stoya uses Twitter or how Joanna Angel runs her website.
“The stars of the future will be responsible for making people feel comfortable with being in porn because they’ll be smarter, sexier women,” says Preston, who is getting her liberal arts degree this semester with an eye to further business studies.
“They’ll be able to do all kinds of things, not just porn.”