Pretty much spot on. All content producers are suffering and have been for a long time. we were fortunate in that we came across and picked up the small money from the many sales of non exclusive.
The big difference today isn't the ease of shooting, it's the ease of selling. Video cameras meant anyone could shoot a video and get it right. Setting the exposure for film with a stills camera wasn't rocket science. The hard part was selling it.
Stills was a tough market and anyone who who wanted to sell to this market had to produce a set of 100 good pictures. They were in competition with shooters from our level up to Suze Randall. Most online shooters can only get a handful right and make rookie mistakes. If a magazine never sold off a shelf, the shops didn't take it.
Videos were the same, if a video title didn't sell 5,000 a month, excluding a few at the bottom, distributors wouldn't take it because shops wouldn't take it.
The Internet changed all that, suddenly anyone could open a site and get affiliates to throw 1,000s of surfers at free porn in the hope someone would buy. I would estimate most sites didn't make enough to buy decent content. Exceptions don't make it true.
Once piracy high speed connections and low cost BW was fed into the house built on sand, it started to sink.
The most interesting thread recently was the one asking where someone could retire on $1,200 a month. So many people seemed to know how to live cheap.
This will now be blasted by a load of no sig idiots who will tell us about sites, they don''t have a clue about, all making billions.
The Internet turned the porn industry into a side show of Ma & Pa set ups. Previously if you didn't have business premises odds were you couldn't sell porn. Today most work from home.