Of course you wouldn’t know this if you read the Reuters piece today which continues to quote unsubstantiated pie-in-the-sky stats about the adult industry. www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=43886

from www.minyanville.com which actually took parts of this article from one written by Scott Fayner without attribution:

Remember when we could all count on banking enough cash to make the rent, the Corvette payments, and keep your mustache perfectly groomed by doing five or so porn shoots every month?

Looks like it’s time to start moonlighting.

For someone like me–who transitioned “behind the camera” some time ago–things aren’t as dire as they are for those still living out their dreams onscreen. Travis Nestor, a former agent for adult entertainers, runs the numbers for the MIT Technology Review (seriously, this subject was covered by MIT. Not kidding):

GALS: A scene that paid $900 in 2004 now pays a mere $600.

GUYS: A scene that paid $500 in 2004 now nets a paltry $300.

So, you’ll have to work twice as hard for half the pay. But it gets worse.

The availability of free pornography on the Web has caused studios to cut their output by half–from approximately 400 titles a week to 200.

However, while technology may bear a certain amount of responsibility for lowering wages industry-wide, the industry actually had the effect of advancing the very technology which caused profits to slide.

Jonathan Coopersmith, a history professor at Texas A&M who has studied the porn industry for more than a decade, says, “Even without porn, we’d probably all have high-speed Internet, but it would have been adopted more slowly, in the same way that the spread of the VCR would have been delayed if porn weren’t around, because the early adopters wouldn’t be there.”

Porn will never go away. It just won’t be the cash cow many of us rode for so long, financing down payments on ranch houses in Van Nuys, California and keeping our mullets professionally permed.

However, there is one job title in porn that’s deader than John Holmes–and it has nothing to do with the Internet.

The fluffer.

And who killed it? None other than Pfizer, maker of Viagra.