We’ve written several reports here on TGDaily about how the adult tech industry took a bit hit during the recession.
Yes, everything took a hit when the economy went down, but the adult biz was presumably one of those entities that was supposed to be recession proof.
I’d always figured if porno went down, our country was really in trouble, and sure enough, the X-rated biz has gone through exactly what the music biz went through with the advent of downloading.
Now Time Magazine has filed a new report on all this, and as we’ve previously discussed, the adult business has pushed a lot of technology through, including home entertainment and the Internet.
And as Time notes, “Cynics have long held that the secret driving force behind the spread of the Internet, and new technologies in general, has been our insatiable desire for all things sexy… One expert confidently declared that porn and other so called ‘adult services’ were, as he put it, the ‘No. 1 income generator on the Internet.”
And sure, there’s plenty of other great things you can get from the ‘Net, and the adult biz has gone down considerably, but as Time continues, “porn – and ‘adult services’ still generate a boatload of cash.”
Although, as writer David Futrelle points out, it’s not true that the adult biz makes more money than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined.” That was reported on Wiki, and Microsoft alone has blown what the adult biz makes a year out the door.
And as CNBC just reported, so far this year the adult biz “stands at a precipice as it heads into 2012, due to piracy and an abundance of free content on the internet.” One vet of the biz felt that right now that live webcams is what makes the bucks these days, because they haven’t taken a hit from pirates.
It’s not clear at the moment where the adult business will go as the economy recovers. Perhaps with the porn biz being hit by piracy, it could have a similar effect like we saw on the music business. it didn’t kill things off entirely, but it definitely did a lot of damage, and things will never be the same again.
