One of the surprising things I have learned while writing about the pornography business is that it is not easy to make money in porn, which is one of the many things that industry has in common with political journalism.
That wasn’t always the case. Magazine publishers such as Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione grew vastly wealthy on the skin trade, and less glamorous film producers and videotape distributors made splendid fortunes in the heyday of the industry, which modern pornography entrepreneurs still wistfully describe as the “golden age.” The sweet spot was the years between the widespread availability of VCRs and the widespread availability of streaming video: Pornographers peddling VHS tapes might have lost some revenue to video piracy and the secondary market, but that was more than made up for by the spike in porn consumption the VCR made possible — it was no longer necessary to visit a seedy theater or bookstore, and porn boomed.
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