Portfolio has an interesting article on the rise of YouTube and what it means to the adult movie industry, "Obscene Losses," by Claire Hoffman, who previously wrote about being threatened by Joe Francis for the LA Times. The story focuses on YouPorn, the adult video sharing site where porn that wants to be free can be, and the challenge YouPorn and its cousins, like PornoTube, present to the adult movie industry's increasingly thwarted efforts to turn a profit in an era in which free online porn is everywhere. There are plenty of interesting facts and stats--according to the piece, YouPorn is the number one adult site in the world--and it follows Hoffman's hunt to find the man behind the dot-com that's giving Porn Valley a run for its money. While YouPorn has its problems--2257's among them--a visit to a porn set in the Valley makes it clear why the adult industry may fall to an entity that can't even figure out how to sell itself profitably. In the Valley, porn producers continue grinding out big budget, high-production value porn nobody wants anymore. Back in the 70s, porn producers made shot-on-film features starring real actors turned porn stars, smut its creators fantasized was equal to Hollywood's fare. In the 80s, porn producers kept on churning out features with characters and plots to cover their asses if they were dragged into court and their product subjected to the Miller test. Then, the video camera became ubiquitous, gonzo porn was born, and savvy producers began grinding out wall-to-wall sex videos. Now, YouTube and the like have taken porn to its Darwinian conclusion, offering what has survived viewer-driven natural selection, trimmed of fat, stripped to the bone, short-form clips that last as long as it takes to jerk off to it. Here's an example. For six years, I was an on-camera reporter for a Playboy TV show called "Sexcetera," a job I described to those who asked as "I talk to the camera while people fuck behind me." In theory, the show was a soft-core version of "60 Minutes," featuring six stories focusing on sex across America and around the world. In reality, the suits at Playboy had one criteria they used to judge if a story was worthy of being covered by the show or not. Could the guy watching at home jerk off to it? Each story was no longer than ten minutes. Because that's how long the suits figured it took for the guys at home to get off on it. Too bad guys like Steve Hirsch at Vivid Video, the Tyrannosaurus of Porn Valley, didn't read the writing on the wall when they had the chance. Today, they're a dying breed. At the end of her story, Hoffman never quite figures out who the guy behind YouPorn is. Symbolically, it's clear. He's porn's Grim Reaper.
