Forbes.com recently posted an article by Dan Ackerman that takes to task some of the revenue estimates offered by the adult industry:
The idea that pornography is a $10 billion business is often credited to a study by Forrester Research. This figure gets repeated over and over. The only problem is that there is no such study. In 1998, Forrester did publish a report on the online “adult content” industry, which it pegged at $750 million to $1 billion in annual revenue. The $10 billion aggregate figure was unsourced and mentioned in passing.
The article gives off a vibe of agenda (“The fact is pornography, or ‘adult entertainment,’ is as marginal now as it ever was.”), but part of that may be the simple fact that much of the PR that paints porn as “mainstream” uses economic statistics as its foundation. If people are spending similar amounts of money on porn as they do on other, less controversial media, then porn isn’t just the shameful vice of men who can’t control their urges and women who are morally lost to society. Organizations like AVN obviously find it in their best interest to present their product as something everyone can feel okay enjoying, and you have to wonder about their figures when they can’t explain how they arrive at them:
How Adult Video News gets this number is not clear. We asked Adult Video News‘ managing editor, Mike Ramone. “I don’t know the exact methodology,” he said, “It’s a pie chart.” Asked to break the figure down into sales versus rentals, a standard practice among those who cover the video industry, he said he didn’t think it was available and suggested we call the editor-in-chief, who didn’t return our calls.
Regardless of the economics of it all, though, I think it’s hard to argue that our society is much more sexually open than it was 30 years ago, and that expressions of sexuality — sometimes to the extent of pornography — are more acceptable.
(via sexblo.gs)
Edit: Wow, that was a really terrible headline.
