Here is a new twist on something old. Years ago I did weekly list articles before they had a name for them (Listicles, imagine that.) I am using a really cool thing called Listly to make these things look nice for you guys. Last week I did The 20 Most Underrated Porn Stars in XXX History. It got great response and spawned a follow up with fan input. (More Underrated Porn Stars)
For this week, I went with something a little more serious. This week’s list takes a look at the major contributing factors to the downfall of the adult film industry. It has been a long road from the heyday of the early 2000’s to now. What killed porn? Who sank the XXX Titanic? Take a look at this list and see if you agree.
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In the opening volley, you state a “glut of porn” but I think a “glut of low quality porn” would be more accurate because with the transition to DVD, companies skimped on both providing readily available technical upgrades, went out of their way to sell consumers extremely marginal product that was made on the cheap, continually tried to convince us that this performer or that was the “next big thing”, and amped up the copycat mode that continues to this day (anything that even appears to sell is copied ad nauseum, usually without even trying to understand why something worked).
So rather than become early adopters for technological advances such as higher resolution cameras, most companies opted to continue with full frame, ignore high definition, and blow off polishing up their movies because that took time and money, owners wanting to squeeze every penny they could out while continuing to deny performers access to cheap testing and medical coverage. In a related note, porn because so profitable that many more outside investors entered in, buying into existing companies or pairing up with industry veterans under the belief that they could cash in long before the insider knew they were getting screwed, offering fanciful benefits like residuals while shuffling money out so fast no one saw it coming.
Then the press often abdicated it’s role as watchdog, playing along as needed in order to make advertisers happy, every new movie “the best thing ever” while big companies paired up with pirates and tubesites to teach them the basics of the business which came back to haunt all of us, still others taunting conservatives political leaders which led to jail time for some but the threat of jail causing many to scurry into hiding rather than fight for their rights. This led to a lot more vanilla porn being made and increasingly sensitive owners who were/are under the false belief that their works were beyond reproach in terms of quality, all while hiring some really marginal characters that liked to beat women, physically attack the press when they couldn’t handle their coke, or looked out for their own opportunities at the expense of everyone else. :)