Porn and journalism actually have different problems
Porn used to be the unsinkable Titanic of content. People used to say, “No one will pay for anything on the Internet, except porn.” Now porn is taking on water. Today, being handed around on Twitter feeds and media navel-gazing web sites is Jordan Weismann’s Atlantic post about why journalism and porn are suffering from the same problem:
In other words, convincing people to pay for to watch sex is a much taller task these days than getting them to pay for a song.
In fact, it’s a bit like getting them to pay for a newspaper. Like the porn studios, big media companies have seen their own profits plummet in the face of free aggregators, amateur bloggers, and the nearly limitless competition supplied by the web.
Actually, big media companies have seen their profits plummet because Craigslist ate their lunch, not because of aggregators, bloggers or “limitless competition.” Fans of free aggregators and “limitless competition” from the start were not the sort of people who could be relied upon to subscribe to your print publication in the filmy past of newspapers.
Meanwhile, a decade-and-a-half’s worth of Internet porn, much with uncertain copyright, is building up on popular aggregating sites, or being traded on file-sharing networks, and it’s unclear that there are many users who care much for whether their adult entertainment is fresh and new or something that someone managed to make a few bucks off of in 2003. Porn’s inventory builds up, and prevents subsequent filmmakers from monetizing their contemporary product. Porn companies can chase after copyright violators like the music industry used to chase after MP3-swapping teens. But not many would care to.
In contrast, there are many consumers of news who favor fresh content that comes with higher production values. There is a real audience that is waiting around for authoritative storytellers to explain what’s happening in the world every day, and a sizable chunk of that audience will pay for a good product. There is no nearly-limitless inventory of old news stories building up that this audience will prefer over what’s published on tomorrow’s news web sites.
That’s why the paywalls that long made porn profitable are breaking down for the adult industry, but helping to buoy up the news business (in some, not all cases). Porn’s product can be substituted by most of its real audience with things that are free. The real news audience will accept no substitute for what real news organizations are capable of producing. In journalism, our problem isn’t inventory; it’s aligning our production process with our realistic near- and medium-term revenue streams.
