Online pornography is absolutely enormous business, but it's being hit with just the same problems as other kinds of digital content: more and more people are pirating their adult movies, so revenues are drying up. Yet at least one major player in the porn industry seems not only optimistic about piracy, but even enthusiastic about it .
"We will be extremely happy the more people are pirating our content and the more they look at it," says Birth Milton, CEO of Private Media Group, one of the largest, multi-national, multimillion-dollar porn conglomerates. "There are ways of making money from non-paying traffic and that's what Private is going to do." Private Media Group's strategy going forward will be to monetise "things you can't copy," such as live shows and "experiences". In other words, internet pornography is about to spill over into real life.
A few weeks ago, I suggested that record labels should just make so-called "infinite content" - ie, anything that can be infinitely copied and near-instantaneously shared - free, and investigate alternative sources of revenue to keep themselves going while artists decide if they're still relevant and useful. That's exactly what the pornography industry looks set to do, though with decidedly more chilling consequences.
Milton doesn't mind you knowing how popular his products are ("There's never been so many people watching adult content," he says) but what this pornographer would rather not talk about are the potential sociological consequences of vast quantities of free porn. An entire generation is about to get a free ticket to all the violent, exploitative pornography their fevered imaginations - and their destructive internet porn addictions - demand.
The consequences are deeply troubling. Because, increasingly, pornography is becoming more violent, more extreme, and more disconnected from the act it purports to represent, as the industry struggles to satisfy ever more extreme desires from its customers. It's almost like these young men are on smack: they need bigger and bigger "hits" of humiliating and borderline-illegal acts on screen to get the same effect. This explains the glut in recent years of "barely legal" productions that skirt tantalisingly close to paedophilia by employing actresses who look like schoolgirls.
Milton is capitalising - one might even say preying - on a worldwide explosion in internet porn addiction, which might sound amusing but which, according to author and researcher Gail Dines is having a profound effect on our sexual behaviour by distorting our sexual preferences. Pornography offers a safe, mediating space between the individual and real-life sexual relations, acting as a proxy for healthy intimacy. But addiction to pornography is making it difficult for men to form healthy sexual relationships by breaking the conceptual link between sex and the emotions.
Milton, of course, is determined that as much of his video content as possible should be shared and enjoyed by the largest possible audience. Which I imagine must be a comfort for the legions of grubby weirdos who spend their afternoons knocking back Mountain Dew and clearing away tissues, and for whom the prospect of actually doing it in the real world remains terrifying.
But I wonder, despite my enthusiasm for its innovative business models, whether the porn industry is poised to cause massive and irreparable emotional damage to a generation of young people.
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