In porn, clichés also have hard skin. For many, pornography is an industry, or rather the engine of the digital “revolution”, shuffling billions and new technologies, and is divided between various multinationals led by bosses with a Californian look of the 1970s more or less refined. Wired stands in false against these received ideas, which the site calls in an article “meso-ideas” that is to say traits that have long ceased to exist but that continue to live in the imagination.
The picture drawn by Wired is much less joyful. If, in the 90s and 2000s, everything touched by porn turned into gold or almost, the appearance of platforms that gather and share thousands of videos for free has reduced the profits of many companies. The arrival on the market of apps, such as Snapchat, whose users can offer adult content without the app announcing color, has also shaken up established positions. In another genre, the rise of YouTube and those of social networks competed with the traffic towards charming sites which were said, at the envi, that it represented 37% of the presence on the internet.
Of course, one of the giants of online pornography like PornHub assures to receive 100 million hits per day for an average duration of nine minutes, or 450 million hours of viewing per month. The score may seem impressive; it is less so if you put it closer to the 60 million Netflix members and their more than 3 billion hours spent per month on the production company’s programs, not to mention the staggering scores claimed by YouTube on a daily basis.
The Economist also looked at the small form of porn. In the United States, the flagship country in the field, the number of recognized pornographic shooting studios has gone from 200 years ago to only twenty today. Actors’ salaries followed the same curve. A porn actor or actress who used to receive $1,500 per hour of work now receives $500. Cinema X is now looking for new ways. One of them sharpens his appetites the most: virtual reality, where, thanks to digital glasses and headsets, the amateur could find himself involved in a sexual act as fictional as it is likely. At the moment, the principle is in its infancy, but porn is counting on it for a possible flashback