The Geek-Kings of Smut
After once being the best thing that ever happened to porn, the Internet is now wreaking havoc: destroying some fortunes, making bigger ones, and serving as a stimulus plan, in more ways than one. — For one brief moment here at the 2011 Adult Video Awards in Las Vegas …
Context & Ripple Effects
New York Magazine arrives at the 2011 Adult Video Awards at the tail end of an arc the trade press has been tracing since 2007, when the Times reported that the internet had turned from pornographers' greatest asset into their biggest liability. That same year, analysts noted social networking overtaking adult sites in online traffic — the first sign that general-purpose platforms, not smut, would command the web's attention economy.
The magazine's framing sharpens that earlier diagnosis into a split verdict: the same network that once made adult fortunes is now destroying some of them while minting bigger ones elsewhere in the business. The story's value is that it treats the industry not as a victim of technology but as a market being re-sorted by it — winners and losers determined by who controls distribution rather than who produces the content.
First-order effects
- Established studios built on paid, packaged content see their pricing power erode immediately, as free online distribution lets audiences consume without paying the producers.
- Operators who own the pipes — aggregation sites, hosting, and traffic-routing infrastructure — capture the displaced spending, which is where the 'bigger fortunes' the piece describes are being made.
Second-order effects
- Talent and production companies are pushed to treat performers as direct-to-audience brands, because the middleman margin that funded glossy production is collapsing.
- Adult sites must now compete for attention against mainstream social networks — a fight the 2007 traffic data suggested they were already losing — raising their customer-acquisition costs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry structurally consolidates around whoever controls distribution and payments rather than content creators, echoing what happened to music and news on the same timeline.
- The bifurcation sets up a likely wave of tech entrepreneurs entering the space to rebuild paywalls and rights enforcement — the 'geek kings' of the title becoming the new gatekeepers of adult media.
The trend: Adult entertainment is being re-sorted from a production-led business into a distribution-led one, with the winners being whoever owns the platform rather than the content.