Money Shot -- Why the Porn Industry is Still a Niche Player

As popular culture continues with its campaign of porn-norming, with adult film stars appearing on talk shows and pornography supposedly influencing fashion, one figure continually gets trotted out in an attempt to convince us skeptics that pornography has finally gone mainstream, and why only Mormons and cultural retrogrades should bother fighting it -- $10 billion. That represents the figure the pornography industry takes in each year with its videos, live appearances and websites, a figure they breathlessly tell us exceeds that of the legitimate film industry. Before Mormons and cultural retrogrades cave and buy their mothers Jenna Jamison's biography for Christmas, let's look at this number.

$10 billion does indeed represent the approximate domestic theatrical take for films shown in the U.S. and Canada -- it does not, however, represent international grosses which can double that of domestic grosses. This number also does not include DVD sales which are once again double that of domestic box office. Even with these larger revenue roll-ups, these film studios, in turn, are often the smallest divisions of the multinationals they are a part of (Universal is a tiny part of GE, Columbia is dwarfed by its parent Sony). The point here is that comparing yourself to the film industry in order tout your economic clout and cultural significance is a little like bragging that you're the tallest building in Tulsa. To put it in perspective -- $10 billion is about what Wal-mart generates in revenue every two weeks.