Typically targeting business travelers or other guests simply looking for a way to unwind at the end of the day, these premium adult video services, though historically profitable, may be facing increasingly hard times — and an increasingly uncertain future.
Indeed, many of the same market forces that are impacting both the physical and virtual distribution channels are also affecting the consumption of in-room erotica, much to the detriment of profits and the chagrin of corporate defenders, who may no longer have a very compelling reason to ignore the cries of the enemies of free speech and consumer choice.
While accurate figures are hard tocome by — as adult PPV figures are rarely broken out of overall “guest services” on publically available financial reports — anecdotal evidence of a downward usage trend can be found in a question recently posed by technology website Gizmodo, which asked its readers “Hotel Porn or Bring-It-Yourself Porn?” According to the Gizmodo website, “In this day and age, with iPods and portable media players and laptops and portable hard drives, what kind of person still orders hotel porn? It’s expensive, slightly embarrassing (“Ma’am, I have never even heard of ‘Dirt Pipe Milkshakes!’”) and unhygienic (think of who touched that remote before you). So we pose the question to you, our faithful readers: Do you enjoy hotel porn, or do you bring a sack lunch?
At the time of this writing, 407 respondents (10.6 percent) stated that they preferred to view hotel erotica, while 3440 respondents (89.4 percent) preferred to bring their own porn on the road with them.
There were also more than 85 comments expressing similar sentiments, such as this one posted by AZTriGuy” who is not a fan of the hotel’s watered-down fare: “First off, in the age of YouPorn and others, who even needs to pay for porn these days? That, and the hotel stuff is always somewhat censored — and expensive as hell.”
The widespread availability of in-room Wi-Fi or wired broadband access and the resultant doorway to the mountains of free porn on the Internet were frequently cited as a reason why hotel services were being eschewed.
While certainly not a scientific survey, there were a decent number of responses, with this data being compiled within around 24 hours of the poll going live.
The bottom line is simple: Fewer people are seeing the need to pay for porn, whether it’s at home or on the road — and it’s no longer just “the little guys” that are being hurt.
