Porn industry struggles because of YouTube clones

Steve Hirsch’s Vivid Entertainment, the biggest name in the $12 billion-a-year adult video industry, filed a lawsuit last month against PornoTube, one of a handful of popular video-sharing sites styled as the dirtier cousins of YouTube, Redstone’s legal nemesis. Similar to the Google-owned video juggernaut, PornoTube has become a destination for free porn by letting anyone post sex videos without filtering out clips that might be copyrighted. Hirsch believes PornoTube doesn’t do enough to keep his content off its site, and, like YouTube, it has leveraged the traffic it now delivers into marketing deals with other sex video producers. It has left Hirsch, a leader in an industry that has welcomed new technologies like the VCR and VOD much more than its Hollywood equivalents, with little choice but to sue the pants off the free sites.

“How do we survive?” Hirsch asks. “We don’t produce videos just because it’s fun. As DVD sales decrease, we need to look to other revenue streams.” Domestic DVD spending for mainstream fare was off 3.6% in 2007, but Hirsch told Portfolio magazine recently that Vivid’s DVD sales are down 50% since 2004. VOD is the future, he says, but he can’t compete with free. PornoTube and its brethren YouPorn and XTube continue to draw mass amounts of traffic, and they don’t seem to care about monetizing the eyeballs. North Carolina-based PornoTube didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Vivid’s critics, much like those criticizing Viacom in the YouTube case, argue that most of the porn on the sharing sites is created and distributed by amateurs. It will be interesting to see how this case develops, but there are already tens if not hundreds of similar sites so shutting down one of them will not change much, the pretty same way as closing one bittorrent website doesn’t solve a thing.