Amongst the industries struggling to navigate a path through the age of digital disruption are newspapers, and porn.
Slate's Jack Shafter ponders the possibility of iTunes for newspapers here.
The Atlantic's Tom Johansmeyer surveys the recent travails of the adult entertainment industry and glimpses the future: iPorn. Handy.
Relatively small, fragmented, and unaccustomed to outside investment, the U.S. porn industry (which generated roughly $12 billion in 2007) is somewhat buffered from today’s credit crunch, but it has its own problems. Video sales have been falling by 15 percent a year since 2005, and online content doesn’t deliver the returns it used to, now that Web sites such as RedTube and PornHub basically give it away. Struggling companies need investors to help right their operations, and those that are thriving in a brutal market need funding for growth.
Enter Koenig and AdultVest. He sees the porn downturn as temporary and believes that technological improvements will trigger a turnaround. One example: iPorn, a start-up in AdultVest’s portfolio that is developing an application to deliver porn to the Apple iPod. “The industry’s not going anywhere,” Koenig says. “You’ve got 6 billion people on the planet,” he laughs, “and they’re all horny.”
