The adult industry has been an early adopter of home media technology for decades. In the 1980s was the VHS boom, then the HD DVD in the 2000s, and today the internet, so 2018 and beyond will be all about VR and 3D. Open secret: the hidden economy is full of users and money.
In the 1980s it was the adult industry who jumped right in and were putting movies on both VHS and Beta. Steve Hirsch, who founded Vivid Entertainment in 1984, said: “We pushed the actual technology more than anyone else.” Furthermore, in the 1980s, the internet was frequented by three types of people: government officials, university scholars, and porn seekers. “The earliest porn sites on the net were FTP sites run for free from college campuses, especially MIT for some reason,” said one early watcher of the web who asked to remain anonymous.
In the 2000s, the adult film industry helped HD DVD to take an early lead over Blu-ray Disc in the battle to become the next-generation DVD format. Wicked Pictures, one of the leading names in adult films, released 2007 the first HD-DVD adult video at a trade show in Las Vegas. Jake Richter, analyst at Jon Peddie Research, said the HD-DVD name will ultimately help it win the format war because it’s an easier connection for consumers.
3D and VR: New trends
One of the first 3D adult films was the 1969 soft-core movie “The Stewardesses”. In 2010 some adult filmmakers are dabbling in 3D video. 3D glasses were 2010 also an issue. Currently the second generation of VR is on its way.
Passive content consumption is a thing of the past. The next technical revolution will be virtual reality. What Wicked Picture have done for HD DVD could do me.mento 3D for VR with an adult VR content. One reason is that VR allow us to escape our homes and bodies.
The german company me.mento 3D is taking it one step further and are developing their own VR platform vrXcity. vrXcity will be the world‘s first interactive VR erotic platform for adults. In the future, vrXcity users will be able to interact with fully animated, naturally moving and AI-powered avatars of professional adult-stars: “You can talk to them, touch them and do anything you want with them.”
Cash cow of the 1980s and 1990s
Business was at its best after videotapes and then DVDs made it cheap to shoot and distribute films. In the 1990s dozens of producers, many of them based in California, churned out hundreds of X-rated films each month to buy or rent. Today, the adult entertainment industry has an annual turnover of $97 billion. While Hollywood produces around 600 films each year and generates $8.8 billion in profits, the adult film industry produces 13,000 films with profits exceeding $13 billion.
In 1999 internet industry research firm Forrester Research says the online porn industry will reach $366m by 2001. By the early 2000s there were more than 3,000 porn sites, most of them tiny, subscription-based outfits. Making money was simple: set up a website with some pictures, control access using billing software and see the bank account fill up.
$1 billion industry: VR adult content
After adult content helped popularize new media formats like VHS and HD DVD, the idea that porn drives digital innovation became a widely accepted truth.
Since 2007 the number of adult sites, and traffic to them, have exploded. The web boasts an estimated 700m-800m individual porn pages, three-fifths in America. In 2017 Pornhub, which is the world’s most-visited pornographic website, had 64 million visitors per day in 2017.
Last year nearly 30,000 users watch pornography on the internet worldwide, spending $3,075 — every second. What’s more, 25 percent of all search engine queries are related to pornography. That’s about 68 million search queries a day. Revenue growth among adult and pornographic websites increased at an annualized rate of just 0.3 percent to $3.3 billion over the five-year period ending in 2015.
We can say, the porn industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world. And after introduction of Virtual Reality it is estimated that the porn industry will double its pace in future. VR-adult content is the next big money maker. VR adult content will grow into a $1 billion industry by 2025, the third-biggest virtual-reality sector, after videogames ($1.4 billion) and NFL-related content ($1.23 billion), according to estimates from Piper Jaffray.
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