03-14-2014, 09:50 AM
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Confirmed User
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 6,697
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Quote:
Money Trouble in Internet Porn
The online porn industry is facing a financial crisis as consumers find free alternatives. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Online pornography helped to build the Internet. It was the cutting edge of e-commerce when sites like Amazon.com were just starting. But today the porn industry is suffering. It?s got lots of eyeballs, but experts say fewer are paying to view. A porn empire based in San Francisco is trying to recover by using data analytics.
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Quote:
Industry crisis
That is exactly the problem, according to Internet porn mogul Peter Acworth. ?We?re suffering what happened to the music industry a while back. It?s becoming much easier to get content for free and people are less apt to want to pay for it,? he says.
Acworth is founder of Kink.com, a San Francisco fetish porn conglomerate that had 205 million views last year alone.
Back in the late 1990s, Acworth was getting his Ph.D. in finance at Columbia University. He realized there was lots of money to be made in streaming sex. So he started video shoots right out of his own room. ?You honestly couldn?t add the sites fast enough. It was like money was falling from the sky.?
It?s becoming much easier to get content for free and people are less apt to want to pay for it.? Peter Acworth, Kink.com founder
Earnings were so strong that, by 2006, the company decided to make a major real estate investment and purchased the Armory ? a towering building that takes up a city block in the Mission District.
But because of piracy and an explosion of free sites, the heyday is over.
The porn industry trade group Free Speech Coalition estimated that global revenue plummeted by 50 percent, from $20 billion in 2007 to $10 billion by 2011. Kink.com saw a decline in its own revenue for the first time that year.
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http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2014/0...internet-porn/
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