1. Why is there any money in porn? I suspect that there isn’t, at least in ordinary non-weird porn. As it’s becoming clear was true of all old media, the real value the companies were adding was distribution — the printing, marketing, shipping, etc. The porn guys were making money from their printing presses, their videotape duplicators, and the networks of pornography stores that sold the stuff. The Internet has replaced all of that, and so now all you need to produce porn is a pair of tits and a camera.
2. I think that this might be why we might be seeing more… unusual porn.
Let’s say that you’re turned on by the naked female body. There are about 3.45 billion human females in the world; half of them are uglier than average, so figure 1.7 billion better-looking-than-average females. Figure that 20% of these are in the prime porn age range, so there are 340 million good-looking young ladies out there. Even if 90% of them would never, ever pose for pornography, that means that there are 34,000,000 potential porn stars out there. Good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn are just not a scarce good, when you look at the problem globally.
Scarcer are good-looking young ladies willing to pose for porn while being defecated on, or tied up, or while fucking a dog, etc., etc., etc.; this can be sold at a premium, because there is less competition. Fewer people are interested in this kind of thing, but they’re willing to pay quite a bit more for it.
Ergo the real talent in porn — the people who put a lot of effort into it, and who are dedicated to making serious money from porn — are going to make fetish porn.
3. This has led to two things: a devaluation of porn all together, or porn inflation, e.g. things like widespread mainstream-media coverage of celebrities with their bosoms hanging out, and at the same time a diminution of what you might call respectable mainstream soft-core almost-porn, R-rated feature films that were thinly-veiled excuses to show breasts on the screen. Maybe I’m not paying attention, but this sort of thing seems to have disappeared completely — as you’d expect, because you can see the same thing for free now without having to also sit through what were usually excruciatingly bad movies.
4. And it’s led to a third thing: the belief, among members of the public, that society is getting more and more depraved.
It’s not that; the reality is that while the porn of an earlier age needed to appeal to the widest possible variety of potential customers (in order to provide for the capital expense of printing, tape duplication, etc.), while today’s porn needs to appeal strongly to niche markets (in order to provide for the greater margin necessary in a world where so-called ‘vanilla’ porn is essentially free).
All of this has undoubtedly and unambiguously happened to the porn industry, and the same thing appears to be happening to the news industry. Basic news and commentary is now pretty close to free; it doesn’t cost much to observe an event or to have an opinion, and the distribution cost has gone to $0. We see news fragmenting into niche markets (examples include Fox News and MSNBC each attempting the narrow-appeal route, and the increasingly transparent political bias of Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, etc.; though this will likely work better for Fox and other conservative news organizations because ‘vanilla’ news is already pretty far left), and we see criticism from both the right and left that the news coverage is becoming more ‘polarized’, more ‘irresponsible’, more — dare I say it? Depraved. Just like the zoo porn.
I wonder what industry this phenomenon will hit next. TV shows would be the obvious answer, but while the distribution cost of a TV show online has dropped to pretty close to $0, I think the production of even a mediocre show might still be too capital-intensive.
