Tuesday, Jul 17, 2012    Text size: 

NEW YORK — Forbes is once again spotlighting the porn industry, but this time with a snide eye toward what mainstream can learn from adult’s business mistakes.

Columnist Susannah Breslin, a long time-porn observer provided three tips to avoid what she considers the pitfalls of porn.

She said that technical innovation — once porn’s strong suit — raced past the industry and bitch-slapped it with the proliferation of content piracy and mass distribution.

She advises businesses to rethink whether they’re really being innovative and not be left behind as is the case with today’s porn industry. “When it [porn] could have been innovating, the porn industry languished,” she wrote.

Tip 2 positions porn as the poster child for risky business with Breslin coaching other businesses to evaluate all of their inherent risks and not take unnecessary chances.

She said porn’s very existence hinges on using young talent with short careers, having sex — a business model fraught with health risks, calling it a “messy sausage factory.”

“There’s a difference between making bold business decisions and doing stupid shit. Know it,” she wrote.

Her last bit of wisdom, albeit a bit naïve considering the many very successful porn businesses is to "know thy consumer" and not get stuck in old production and manufacturing models.

Breslin maintained that many porn companies “went from boom to bust” when hard goods video was replaced with short Internet VOD clips. She said producers who didn’t make the transition missed the boat, which may be true. However, like any industry, the old guard’s replaced with the young turks. Successful examples abound. Look at porn giant Brazzers' rise, Pink Visual's pioneering adoption of cloud computing, the ever-increasing novelty industry, mobile porn — the list goes on and on.

These and a host of others are solid examples of an industry that may have had bumps along the way, but continues to adapt, innovate, and remain strong — even with a few mistakes, and even in catastrophic financial times.