Adult actress Savannah Stern eats crow, according to L.A. Times
The L.A. Times’ expose (sorry) of porn’s woes capsulizes the dilemma the Internet poses for all content: consumers are willing to settle for less-than-stellar products on the Internet rather than shell out money for higher production values in DVDs, CDs, etc. The availability of free porn on sites like YouPorn, PornHub and RedTube is apparently eating deeply into the porn industry’s profits, providing a glimpse of the mainstream DVD market’s future. “Today, instead of leading the way up (in technology adoption), porn appears to be leading the way down,” the L.A. Times’ Ben Fritz writes.
The irony, of course, is that the L.A. Times is itself getting killed by free content on the Internet. Why subscribe when you can get everything you want from the paper for free on the Internet? And no one can pretend that all those banner ads on the Internet pay more than a fraction of what the paper’s display ads pay.
But porn may still have some upside lessons for media companies. Free porn video sites get huge traffic, and the marketing manager for PornoTube told the L.A. Times the site’s real value was in driving customers to paid video-on-demand. No reason why the L.A. Times can’t put up a story on porn, but charge for access to videos of their reporters interviewing porn stars, research reports on the DVD business or discounted movie tickets. See, you can still learn something from porn.
Posted under Michael's Blog, Video
This post was written by Michael Stroud on August 10, 2009
