Pornography: How big is the Industry of lust?

Porn is everywhere. It’s in people’s mobile phones, laptops, hard disks, and of course on the internet. The taboo and stigma attached to porn, and the revenue it generates, defy logic. Let’s see how big it is and related facts.

How big is the Industry?

According to various reports published before 2017, the porn industry’s net worth is about $97 billion. This money is enough to feed at-least 4.8 billion people a day. The figures are astonishing. Every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. On the other hand, porn industry makes around 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combined. 

PornHub, one of the industry’s biggest providers, claim their site streamed 75 GB of data a second last year . The site garnered a total of 87.8 billion views, up ten billion from 2014, another 15 billion over 2013. Porn Sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. In fact, XVideo, on its own, is bigger than Dropbox, CNN and New York Times combined. Mind Geek, who owns PornHub, Brazzers, YouPorn and Reality Kings, is one of the top 3 bandwidth-consuming companies in the world, the other two being Google and Netflix. 

Free porn is more widely available than paid. Beyond the ‘free’, and there is ‘premium content’. These include HD videos, no ad/pop-up promises, unlimited downloads, online Live Cam streaming, and so on. Paid users can ask the website to deliver content to their email, or physical addresses. While you may never know, many do sign up for it as they like the convenience it offers.

How do they make money?

Subscriptions, personalized sex toys, chat rooms and dating sites form the major chunk of lust revenue. Since porn-sites know that lust is short-lived and knows no commitment, they offer a wide range of payment options to choose from daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and even yearly. These subscriptions cost anywhere from $1-15 a day. While it might be too much for you for a mini bathroom session, there are millions who sign up for it.

While a website may earn primary from subscriptions, it also cashes on man’s primitive lust for flesh. It makes money off traffic from other similar websites which it redirects. That explains why you only have porn ads on porn sites. These ‘similar services’ refer to adult dating sites, online adult stores, enhancement drug stores, adult gaming sites and so on. This forms a intricate and complex nexus of websites, all making money off each other, and cashing on your instincts, and that is what funds the ‘free mini clips’ you get to see. What to see the full video? Pay up.

The industry is growing and blooming. Pornography would inflate further with Virtual-Reality devices become more popular. Though it suffered a lot during 2009 recession but now the site owners have become more smarter. The human lust knows no recession. So, we can see a perpetual increase in the revenue forever.