The Death Of Porn

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Booming music reverberates through a colorfully lit auditorium as hundreds of people filter in to take their seats. From atop his podium on the stage, in front of a huge screen, a DJ skillfully mixes music videos from the likes of Jay-Z, Eminem and Biggie. People in the balcony row behind me are singing and rapping along.

I’m here in Las Vegas, at the Pearl Concert Theater in the Palms hotel, ready for the start of an awards show. To the undiscerning observer, it could the Emmys or the Grammys, but in fact it’s a very different kind of event. It’s the Adult Video News Awards — also known as the Oscars of porn.

The AVNs are a big party held to honor and celebrate the best in sin and skin. Every year, the industry gets together and congratulates itself for everything from best sex toy to best orgy scene. Unlike other similar events, it’s a raucous and raunchy affair.

The show kicks off with Lisa Lampanelli — the “queen of mean” comedian recruited from the mainstream to shepherd the evening along — launching into an industry that is relatively easy pickings. Her jokes are expected but still funny, about this actor spouting more than a BP oil spill or that actress getting naked more often than Lindsay Lohan.

She lands herself in some trouble, though, when she tries the stereotypical one about how there are no Asian men in porn because of their supposedly small penises. The crowd up in front — the nominees and other industry types — shout her down and point to a gentleman who stands up to reveal that, yes indeed, he is a male Asian porn star with a good-size appendage. D'oh!

The laughs keep coming, the music continues booming and the crowd keeps interacting. It’s a lively party, and everyone involved seems to be having fun.

But given what’s going on with the porn business these days — how it’s fizzling faster than a libido after imagining Betty White nude — it’s easy for an outsider to wonder why everyone is so buoyant.

With its first ever contraction, a decline that doesn’t seem to have an end, what sort of future does the porn business have? Will there even be porn stars to celebrate a few years from now? Or are these AVN Awards just one big party on the Titanic?



A sinking ship

For the past few years there have been complaints of a “perfect storm,” a term repeatedly used to describe the double whammy that has hit the industry: the recession and a wave of online piracy.

The economic downturn has caused customers’ wallets to clam up, particularly when it comes to discretionary spending. And let’s face it, there’s little else more discretionary than porn.

At the same time, a number of porn-flavored YouTube clone sites — YouPorn and RedTube, to name a few — have sprung up to offer aficionados all the copyrighted adult content they want, for free. Like their mainstream counterparts, porn producers are also seeing their content swapped freely through file-sharing programs.

As such, the industry says it is losing millions of dollars and scores of jobs, not only on the performer side, but also in production and distribution.

Specifics are hard to come by, since most companies are privately owned and tight-lipped on financials, but one look at the stock prices of the handful of public firms tells the story. Over the past two years, shares of Barcelona-based Private Media, Colorado-based New Frontier Media and Germany’s Beate Uhse have lost more than half their value.

Chicago-based Playboy has seen a recent uptick, but that’s only thanks to speculation that founder Hugh Hefner was leading a bid to take the company private — a trigger he finally pulled this week.

Some insiders think that no new porn will be made because they can't stay in business. That's next...