By some estimates, around 15 percent to 20 percent of the entire internet is pornographic content. Because of this, it is an almost inescapable fact that most people, regardless of their age or maturity, have come across adult content in some form or another.

Studies suggest that there is more pornographic content available freely online now than there was produced during the ‘golden age’ of adult content — between 1969 to 1984.

However, distributed pornography such as magazines and VHS began to decline in the 1990s, during a time when the internet started to become a part of every modern household. During this time, it was a common assumption that the adult film industry was on the verge of collapse.

With the turn of the new century, it had become almost completely redundant to pay a premium for pornographic content delivered by VHS or on DVD — since adult-content connoisseurs now had an almost endless library of content which could be accessed at next to no cost, with only a few clicks.

During this transition from the offline era to the online-focused industry, it was the performers that suffered the most — since earnings were essentially abolished as the world transitioned from paid material to near free online media.

Despite the adult entertainment industry going through a dip in the early 2000s, it has since seen explosive growth, as studios and individual performers began to better target the huge number of online users. Inevitably, when the cryptocurrency revolution started to pick up the pace in the mid-2010s, an amalgamation of the two industries was to be expected.

The Burgeoning Era of Adult Entertainment

After making a comeback — thanks to the explosion in internet usage — the pornographic industry underwent a lot of functional changes. New niches were formed and dozens of sub-industries were born, within which were thousands of performers competing for views.

With an ever-increasing number of pornographic websites, businesses in this niche started leader-business models while finding ways to increase profitability as competition dramatically exploded in recent years. As a side effect of this competition, production houses could no longer afford to pay underperforming actors, while entire underperforming niches and genres dried out. As a result of this, standardized content that appeals to most consumers became the norm.

However, as production houses began producing standardized content, homemade and amateur-shot content began gaining significant traction. Similarly, public and private adult streaming sites became commonplace and have since become the mainstay in the online adult entertainment industry.

With the middlemen removed, adult entertainers were now faced with the challenges of finding platforms that paid them well — though many performers still struggled to make ends meet, thanks to the excessive fees and obstacles involved with their work. Moreover, many payment processors, including banks and some non-banking institutions, refuse to process payments related to adult services — which became a major hurdle for both consumers and adult performers.

To get around these problems, performers for erotic live streams were forced to spend potentially days searching for the right platform that is able to process payments in their jurisdiction while avoiding the myriad fraudulent platforms looking to take advantage of their situation. Correspondingly, these sites became even more competitive, many of which introduced ranking systems to improve the visibility of models based on the time they spent online — further increasing the challenges some performers faced.

In a nutshell, performers are now plagued with the ill-effects of a lean business model in an industry that has been largely economically centralized in an attempt to reduce operating costs.

An Industry Turns to Cryptocurrency

Again demonstrating the innovation that spawned a new industry, these performers and models started looking for alternative solutions to their problems — while a plethora of new cryptocurrency projects, including Titcoin, Pornx, and Spankchain, were launched to cater to the growing market. Behind these cryptocurrencies is a largely male-dominated community of developers and tech enthusiasts who have developed solutions for an adult entertainment industry almost entirely comprised of young females with non-tech backgrounds.

Because of the freedom that cryptocurrencies offer, it was only natural that adult performers began accepting them as payment for their services since cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) provide performers a way to escape the risk of unjust prosecution and manage their own finances. Beyond this, various live cam sites have been accepting cryptocurrency for years now, whereas NSFW Reddit group Girls Gone Bitcoin, in combination with similar social media groups, has grown into a major channel for driving new customers and performers to accept the market leading cryptocurrency.

Online strippers, cam models, and other NSFW performers all live under the same threat of being shut down by the police — whether or not they violated any local law. Because of this, these online groups and specialized platforms have grown into something of a safe haven for those in the industry.

With the advent of cryptocurrency, online adult performers now have a way to escape unjust local laws and now have the freedom to perform from their own homes in a way that cannot be easily cut off.

What is your opinion on the online adult entertainment industry and cryptocurrencies? Are the banks justified in refusing services to these industries? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!