The metaphor of an isolated island brings into clarity not only the proliferation of business models and products within our industry, but also the external forces that keep us contained, separate and, therefore, vulnerable.

We've done an excellent job at diversifying our offerings against the demands of our markets, and an excellent job of optimizing our sites for maximum revenue and profit.

But we have not taken the evolutionary steps necessary to protect ourselves from the sort of legal and political disasters we must all agree could overwhelm us at any moment.

As an industry, we have quite rationally responded to the many legal and political dangers we face with an assortment of legal and political defenses. Our efforts to self-regulate in light of issues such as 2257 and to form outward-facing advocacy organizations such as ASACP are absolutely essential and must continue with even greater energy. But there is a strategic response we have neglected almost entirely...

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The Online Porn Business runs on free samples and trailers.  Just like the movie studios that will “give away” a few minutes of the feature film to bring in the paying moviegoer, Porn produces hundreds of thousands of minutes of video and millions of still pictures every year – most of that is dumped for “free”, sooner or later into the churning surf.  If you’ve had any experience with online porn yourself (LOL, as if ), you know that there’s a lot of stuff out there you can see without paying for it.

If I wanted to spare ya the full Porn Industry history lesson, all I'd have to say is the porn guys fucked up – BIGTIME.  A mistake that was made about 5 years ago, fucked things up, and there’s no going back.  In a nutshell, as soon as streaming video technology and broadband availability crossed paths, a number of big players in porn panicked. If you were big in porn 5 years ago, you understood the “free sample” model very well.  

Before online video porn, it was all still pictures.  And the way the free sample hook worked was they gave away the soft-core pix, and used them to make you buy the hard-core stuff.  It worked great.  The money rolled in so well and so fast, it turned a whole generation of computer nerds into Tony Montana’s overnight. You can understand the magnitude of anxiety, if anything should jeopardize that. 

Here’s the big mistake – and it's one of the most costly, I would wager, in all the history of business...

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How the Web Replaced Art as Bridge to Alternative Experience 

The feeling of global connectedness initially fostered by “broadcast communications technologies” was displaced by a feeling of isolation. As television programs and commercials came to dominate the collective sensory experience of the Advanced Nations, it became easier to pretend that nothing which came to us via Television was real. Art, in response, was overrun by Synthetics and Surrogates of all types, which, even from the greatest of artists producing at that time, did little more than stir a vague, introspective melancholy. Had this trend continued, we might today be living in a world pervaded by Selfish Apathy, instead of Xenophobic Paranoia.

But something happened in the early 1990’s that simply changed Everything. All of you know what I am talking about. So let’s just say that the desire to remotely access “tools” and “resources” ended up connecting all of Us to each other.

Able to ignore the hypnotic lure of Television for the first time since its introduction 40 years before, more and more of our time was given over to computer monitors. By way of the Web browser, the power of experiential self-determination came to millions of people who had never dreamt of such a thing. Suddenly, exploration and discovery could happen at any moment. Whatever the physical circumstances of the User...

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