Quote:
Originally Posted by CDSmith
It's not gone. It lives on in all us oldies. 
Actually there's nothing wrong with talking about industry history here. There was just a porn city thread not too long ago (because that board finally went offline for good) and a lot of alumni from there posted their memories, hello's, etc.
What I do find odd is the fact that not many newer (younger) people to the board express an interest or any respect at all for the people and all the stuff that came before them. No interest in the history of the game at all, just attitude. Me, when I started my first sites back in the 90's the FIRST thing I did was go looking for what the vets were doing and how they were doing it, and where they hung out etc. But that's just me, when I'm new to something I don't think I'm "the end all be all" of it, I tend to park my ego and learn from those who came before. |
It goes both ways.
Before I started last summer, I read the past 8 or so PRVT annual reports.
Here are the PDFs
In terms of publicly available hard data, which is very limited in the industry, I think those reports are the best way to retroactively map out the past decade. I know they only represent the results of one company, but the reports do contain a lot of industry-wide market insight from the perspective of a 45 year old publicly traded company.
Here are a couple of other interesting articles that some of you may remember.
Naked Capitalists by Frank Rich - NYT Magazine 2001
Here's A Follow Up Article by Forbes
The Forbes article basically refutes the NYT Magazine article. I personally feel the Forbes article was probably a bit more accurate. I mean, this excerpt from the Forbes article, in reference to the reportedly $4 Billion industry, is comedy gold.
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."
It's a pie chart! Hilarious.
That guy was obviously a real piece of work from what I've read, but he also managed to become editor-in-chief for the #1 trade pub in what was an allegedly $4B industry.
Are new people supposed to blindly respect people like Mike Ramone?
Inflating numbers back then did serve as an industry wide marketing plan. It basically told people that it was OK for them to buy porn because everyone else was buying porn. But doing so also caused a large number of idiots to enter the industry because, after reading these obviously bullshit numbers, they thought, "Hey, why not me?. They happened to be in the right place at the right time and have somehow deluded themselves into thinking that their success is the result of intelligence, not timing, I'd like to see a little more humility from those people.
To put things into perspective, even Mark Cuban has acknowledged how lucky he was to sell Broadcast.com to Yahoo before the dotcom bust and he's worth billions. Real, actual billions.
Yet somehow that same type of humility is lost upon people who lucked out in buying a keyword rich domain 8 years ago and are now sitting on so much indexed content that it's nearly impossible for them to fuck up the SEO no matter how hard they try! It seems to me like many of the original innovators retired or left for greener pastures before the inmates took over the asylum and left a giant mess for others to clean up.
Don't get me wrong. There are plenty of highly intelligent, very successful people in the industry who deserve the respect of people just starting out and deserve the respect of people who have been around since the 90s.
What people need to realize is that , while some of them did indeed start 10-15 or more years ago, some of them have just started in the past year or two.
Creativity + Intelligence + 1-2 Years of Experience > 12 Years of Mediocrity