Rebate bucks boosting porn biz?

The White House has happily noted the ripple the economic stimulus checks are making as they move from the Treasury to consumers and on to stores across the nation. That, after all, was the idea behind the package President Bush announced in January: To boost spending and thus stimulate lagging economic growth.

But little attention has been given to one offshoot of a package that Bush defended as "the right size" to do the job but not cost the government more than it could afford.

thinkprogress.org managed to find one area of consumer spending in which growth has paralleled the increase in available cash: Pornography.

Citing a press release from AIMRCo (Adult Internet Market Research Company), it reported that "many websites focused on adult or erotic material have experienced an upswing in sales in the recent weeks since checks have appeared in millions of Americans' mailboxes across the country."

--James Gerstenzang

Photo: Eric Risberg / Associated Press

Comments

[anonymous]

Are you desperate for news today? Prove a correlation before you make it. I can't believe you actually printed this!

[InsiderXXX]

Baloney. While porn Web sites (some of the better-known ones, anyway) may be seeing an uptick, the industry as a whole is in a gigantic downward spiral. Adam Film World, the largest publisher of magazines dedicated to straight pornographic films and the publisher of the only magazine dedicated to gay pornographic film, closed its doors June 27 because it was losing so much money. (The only magazines making money for Adam? Its lone gay porn mag.)

Meanwhile, most major studios -- straight and gay -- are hemorraghing cash. No one is manufacturing VHS tapes any more. DVD sales have plunged, as piracy and online pornography have skyrocketed. Few straight films sell more than 25,000 units today; just five years ago, 100,000 was the norm. On the gay side, best-selling films sell 2,000 units compared to 10,000 seven years ago. Major consolidation has already occurred on the gay side, with Channel One Releasing having bought up long-standing studios like Catalina, All Worlds Video, and others. Many gay studios are in deep financial trouble: Falcon Studios has bounced checks, Colt Studios is nearly bankrupt and may be sold, and Prague-based Bel Ami (the world's largest gay adult film company) has ceased production (they have enough scenes filmed to keep producing Web content for three more years, but then they will stop with new content).

Keep talking about how everything in adult filmland is hunky-dory. Wishing might make it come true.

[anonymous]

i'm glad you're all bankrupt in porno lalaland. Please, Lord in Heaven, put them more in the red.

[Tom Johansmeyer]

Have you guys thought about fact-checking? Mishkin's phone number (in the press release) goes to a personal voicemail. If you think an industry that can't gauge the basics (like market size) can track revenue from stimulus checks to porn websites, you're out of your mind.

[Reader]

The web site was created on June 18. The director is listed on the Web site as one of the people who helped found the one Web site named in the release. And the company doesn't show up in news coverage before this release.

So let's put one and one and one together. A "research company" that appears out of think air and puts out a release quoting a "spokeswoman" for a porn site the "research company's" supposed director help found, and this all comes out at the start of the supposedly slow summer porn season (I didn't know porn had an off-season, but OK).

Seems like a clever way of manipulating the press to me. Good on him for drumming up business for himself, bad on the media for falling for it.