Porn Valley- The aroma of Auchincloss cigarette smoke wafting through the receiver, the Grand Vizier calls to tell me it was 16 employees that got laid off at AVN Friday in what’s being called “streamlining.”

Though AVN didn’t announce the number of layoffs in it’s own press release, Mike Albo was supposedly among those to get pink slipped. The advertising base has been eroding and with DVD sales down, there’s no justification for $4,000 a page ads.

“But who’s counting? AVN’s time has finally come to pack it in,” states The Vizier. “With a new way of doing business out there, it’s been irrelevant for a long time, and it’s rah-rah, look the other way reporting style is totally disingenuous to the realities of the business. There’s never been actual documentation to support it’s claims of multi-billion dollar revenues in the industry. And the sales charts have been the fancy of whoever’s compiling them.”

“I know a lot of that from first-hand experience,” I tell The Vizier.

In turn, the Vizier tells me he had a chat this morning with a disgruntled AVN advertiser.

“Who can afford to pay $4,000 a page for ads?” I ask The Vizier. “It’s a new economy now. There’s no longer the vast video store network that AVN used to embrace. That’s what the ads were all about- the distributors and the video stores. The mom and pops are closing up.”

“I talked to this one guy who told me he didn’t get one sale out of his AVN ads,” says The Vizier. “He advertised for four months and saw nothing. That’s a lot of money.”

“And didn’t AVN sell off the award show and the AEE show?” asks The Vizier who told me he had to get off the line because he had an incoming from a singing fat lady.