Obscene Profits: Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age
Frederick Lane begins his book by flashing back to a 1997 Wall Street Journal article titled "Lessons for the Mainstream." The story profiled entrepreneur and former stripper Danni Ashe, who runs a popular X-rated Web site called Danni's Hard Drive.
What, Lane wonders, would lead the starched-collar newspaper to treat a big-boobs Web site as a straight - even congratulatory - business story? The answer, he decides, is revenues: Ashe told the Journal she was raking in $2 million a year with her site. Money changes everything.
With the advent of VCRs and the Internet, barriers to pornography's market entry were effectively bulldozed. While still not mainstream, pornography is now fairly widely accepted, with some 60,000 adult sites currently available. (Sex does sell, to the point that pornography has a greater market share of the entertainment industry than sporting events and live music performances together.) As a result, the industry is experiencing classic and not-so-classic shakeouts.
Sex sells. Already a ten-billion dollar business-and growing-most sex businesses require relatively low start-up costs and minimal equipment. No wonder retired porn stars, homemakers, college students, and entrepreneurs of every stripe are eager to jump on the smut band wagon. Following the money trail, or in this case, the telecom routes, the author reveals how some big phone companies are cashing in too. Obscene Profits offers a startling and entertaining new look at this very old business, and shows why pornography, in all of its variations, (videos, magazines, phone-sex, spy cameras, etc.), is one of the most profitable and popular new careers to come out of the electronic age.
The book is written in such a way that parallels can be made to other Internet enterprises.
