The Porn Business Isn’t Anything Like You Think It Is

Annie Marie Musselman in Wired:

ScreenHunter_1460 Oct. 26 10.20In the popular imagination, the eternal trope is that the porn industry drives the adoption of new technology; that it accounts for some astronomically large portion of all Internet traffic; and, yes, that it generates equally enormous sums of money for all the faceless people who run its operations. We picture these people as sleazy Southern Californians wearing pinkie rings and polyester. Or, if we’ve come to realize that the pinkie-ring caricature makes absolutely no sense in the age of the Internet, we see them as ruthlessly clever businesspeoplewith a sixth sense for where the big money lies. That’s the stereotype Silicon Valley embraces. Later in the episode, when Hendricks turns up at an adult industry conference, we encounter an army of porn execs dressed like bankers.

But it isn’t like that at all.

More here.