Internet Piracy Is Killing Porn's Profits

Porn mogul Jay Quinlan really hates when people on the Internet steal his intellectual property. 

 At a panel this week at the “XBIZ State of the Industry Conference,” Quinlan, tattoo-covered vice president of a company that owns three adult entertainment pay Web sites, struggled to contain his anger over seeing videos from his pages being illegally posted on YouTube-esque porn hubs.

“The people stealing this stuff should be brought out to the back room and shot,” he said. “I mean, who wouldn’t want to watch free porn? I don’t think people are that picky about their masturbation habits. So every year that goes by now, there are new people – especially younger people – watching adult content who think that porn is free. And it’s not good.”

YouTube has an answer in the porn industry, and it’s called "Tube." Web sites like RedTube and PornHub allow users to upload and view an unlimited selection of mostly illegal porn videos for free, and it has devastated the porn industry.

The adult business, already struggling from free, user-generated porn on the Internet,  saw a 22 percent steep decline in DVD sales and rentals last year, more than twice that of Hollywood, according to a Hustler press release at the conference.

The issue hit mainstream media in December of 2007, when leading porn producer Vivid Entertainment Group filed a lawsuit against Porno Tube, alleging the site profited from its copyrighted material. Like with Napster, it made little difference.

The free sites are still wildly popular today. Alexa, a web information company that ranks the top global sites on the web by traffic, on Thursday had ranked YouPorn at #35 and RedTube at #49, both above CNN’s Web site, which was #50 and #72 Apple.com. (LINK)

The adult entertainment business was once grudgingly acknowledged as a pioneering industry that led the way for innovations later emulated by Hollywood – first to adopt video, and first to embrace the Internet, among other things. Now the adult industry is being hit hard by piracy, and what happens could be a harbinger for Hollywood.

YouTube is littered with clips from film and television, but the clips posted on adult Tube sites are far more detrimental to for-profit porn producers. That’s because viewers of adult fare are more easily satisfied by a three-minute clip than perhaps a fan of “The Dark Knight” would be by a three-minute clip from that film.

Reports on the state of the industry prompted Larry Flynt and Girls Gone Wild CEO Joe Francis to state last month that the porn business deserved a $5 billion bailout.

But while speaking at the conference at the Warner Center Marriott on Tuesday, Flynt admitted the request was ludicrous, adding that he is “anti-stimulus and anti-bailout.”“I’ve got a solution for all these companies [that are asking for bailout money]; it’s called bankruptcy,” he said.

About a year ago, it became evident that the rise of Tube sites could harm the industry in a big way.

 

1 | 2