But at the end of the decade, just about everything changed. Colin Rowntree, a porn producer, director, distributor, and member of the Adult Video News Hall of Fame, was a just mid-level player, and in those days, he and his wife, Angie, earned millions each year. In the early aughts, online porn was ridiculously lucrative. McEwen means economic obstacles, business obstacles, technical obstacles. There's an enormous audience for porn, and whatever it signifies, whatever emotions it stirs in critics, this audience isn’t going away. But many others just see it as a part of life-a big part of life. Yes, many people frown on porn, calling it exploitative and debasing. She doesn’t mean obstacles of morality or law. "The thing about the adult industry today is that. "That's obviously a fictional adult company-because I don't know a single one that would pay $15 million for compression software," quips Chris O'Connell, who helps run a real adult company called Mikandi. Mobile and social media platforms have pulled us away from the openness of the worldwide web and into walled gardens, squeezing the avenues of distribution for porn, co-opting its audience (at least in part), and forcing outfits like Playboy to become more "mainstream." The larger porn industry is headed in the same direction, careening away from the stereotypes held by journalists and pundits and pop culture like Silicon Valley. It's a world where Playboy is going PG-13-in print and online-because it can't compete with the Internet at large. Its very identity is being stolen as the world evolves both technologically and culturally. Money is hard to come by, and as the industry struggles to find new revenue streams, it's facing extra competition from mainstream social media.
With the rise of mobile devices and platforms from the likes of Apple and Google, not to mention the proliferation of free videos on YouTube-like porn sites, the adult industry is in a bind. A colleague of mine calls this a meso-idea, an idea that has ceased to be true but that people continue to repeat, ad infinitum, as if it still was.
Some of it may have been true in years past. Later in the episode, when Hendricks turns up at an adult industry conference, we encounter an army of porn execs dressed like bankers. That's the stereotype Silicon Valley embraces. Or, if we've come to realize that the pinkie-ring caricature makes absolutely no sense in the age of the Internet, we see them as ruthlessly clever businesspeople with a sixth sense for where the big money lies.
We picture these people as sleazy Southern Californians wearing pinkie rings and polyester.
In the popular imagination, the eternal trope is that the porn industry drives the adoption of new technology that it accounts for some astronomically large portion of all Internet traffic and, yes, that it generates equally enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who run its operations. 'The thing about the adult industry today is that.