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Sausage, too many people confuse "web2.0" with a license to steal content. Youtube and Google video have a business model which essentially gets the users to go out and steal the content and share it with each other with the site getting in the middle and trying to make money.
web2.0 at best is a marginal business model, and certainly one that goes against the idea of the adult business. Adult is a margin business, 30-50% margin on everything, if not more. Web2.0 sites appear to be about a 1% margin business, and judging by the amount of advertising many of those sites feel they need to jam on the pages, I would suspect even less.
It is as if there is a rush to make adult into a business with a margin similar to prime rate. 6% profits aren't going to make this business very attractive to anyone except the largest of companies that are willing to grind it out.
DVD producers are screaming: They are lucky now to move 250 pieces on a new release, where they were moving 1000 pieces not a few years ago. The retail prices haven't gone up either, leaving them with at times a 75% drop in retail income on their products. Many of them are making that money back up either by licensing scenes from their movies for web use, or licensing entire DVDs and catalogs to VOD houses, hoping to pick up some money that way. Their buisness use to be high margin, now it isn't. The DVD guys are the canary in the coal mine for us, some of them are suffering very hard indeed. Some are doing well, but many are having a hard time of it.
Don't make the mistake of thinking tube sites are the future. They are an evolutionary dead end, as they seek to give more and more of the product away until there is nothing left to sell. If a porn video runs 60 minutes, how much can you give away before nobody bothers? 30 minutes? 40 minutes?
The only people making real money off the tube sites, IMHO, are the dating, cam, and other non-adult sites that are buying the post-orgasmic traffic. These guys are smart too, paying what appears to be big payouts but in reality they have bought out 75% of the market already and now they pay a huge finder fee for the last crumbs on the table, meanwhile they gorge on recurring members they will never pay for again, even if the member quits and comes back. A large percentage of dating traffic is driving back people who are already members and getting them to spend money again - without the refering site making money.
Sorry to ramble, but "web2.0" isn't evolution, it is slash and burn "I can give more for nothing" mentality that has quite likely already pushed this business model off the cliff.
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