Wednesday, January 3, 2007

The Economics of the Sex Entertainment Industry


"The sex-related entertainment business grew in 2006 by just 2.4 percent, roughly the rate of inflation, to just under $13 billion, according to Paul Fishbein, president of the AVN Media Network, which publishes five trade magazines and runs industry conferences...

Mr. Fishbein’s estimates indicate that for every dollar Americans spent buying tickets to Hollywood movies last year, they spent about 90 cents viewing sex movies in various formats...

JupiterKagan Inc., a media and technology market research company, said it expected that sex movies sold either as pay-per-view or on-demand would grow over the next decade at only half the pace of overall paid-for programming on cable.

George Niesen, managing editor of Kagan Research in Monterey, Calif., said that $1.6 billion was spent on cable pay-per-view, video-on-demand and similar services in 2006, with $515 million, or roughly a third of that, going to sex-related entertainment.

Over the next 10 years, Kagan Research projects, overall paid-for programming on cable will grow at 12.9 percent a year, while the sex-related segment’s growth will be half that, at 6.4 percen...

The idea that revenue growth has slowed for the sex-related entertainment industry was disputed by Steven Hirsch, one of three owners of the Vivid Entertainment Group, a major producer of both soft- and hard-core movies. He and other industry executives said the ways that Americans get pornography are changing, with sales of videos and magazines in decline, while sex-related entertainment over cable television and Internet streaming is growing quickly...

The Census Bureau estimates that the average age of Americans last year was 36, up from 30 in 1980, when the industry was growing rapidly in the wake of favorable Supreme Court decisions, fewer police raids and easy access to movies through the technology of videocassettes, which were new then.

Mr. Fishbein and others said “the one area of huge growth” was hard-core movies featuring women in their 30s into their 70s, a trend that has brought new work for some of the industry’s stars.

“The flashpoint for this in our culture was the teen movie ‘American Pie,’ where there is a famous sequence involving one of the kids and his friend’s mother,” Mr. Fishbein said.

Mr. Fishbein and others also said that there was big growth in sales of sex toys to women.

- ‘Indications of a Slowdown in Sex Entertainment Trade

Related;
Premarital Sex Is Nearly Universal Among Americans, And Has Been For Decades
The vast majority of Americans have sex before marriage, including those who abstained from sex during their teenage years, according to “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports. Further, contrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.

The new study uses data from several rounds of the federal National Survey of Family Growth to examine sexual behavior before marriage, and how it has changed over time. According to the analysis, by age 44, 99% of respondents had had sex, and 95% had done so before marriage. Even among those who abstained from sex until age 20 or older, 81% had had premarital sex by age 44.

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