US porn industry seeks multi-billion dollar bailout
Porn baron Larry Flynt is seeking a $5 billion bailout from Washington to rejuvenate the industry, which he says is suffering because of the economic downturn.

By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
Last Updated: 9:23AM GMT 08 Jan 2009

According to Flynt, with all this economic misery sex is the farthest thing from people's mind Photo: GETTY
The Hustler magazine founder has teamed up with fellow adult entertainment mogul Joe Francis, creator of the Girls Gone Wild video series, to approach Congress for the same kind of financial assistance recently approved for car manufacturers.

The pair have asked the 111th Congress, which convened on Tuesday with the economy at the top of its agenda, "to rejuvenate the sexual appetite of America" with a bailout.

"Congress seems willing to help shore up our nation's most important businesses, (and) we feel we deserve the same consideration," Francis said in a statement.

"In difficult economic times, Americans turn to entertainment for relief. More and more, the kind of entertainment they turn to is adult entertainment."

"The take here is that everyone and their mother want to be bailed out from the banks to the big three," Owen Moogan, a spokesman for Flynt, told CNN.

"The porn industry has been hurt by the downturn like everyone else and they are going to ask for the $5 billion. Is it the most serious thing in the world? Is it going to make the lives of Americans better if it happens? It is not for them to determine."

In an interview with entertainment news website TMZ, Francis admitted the move was more of a "precautionary measure" than an emergency rescue, "but as long as the government is handing out money, we want to be there to take it."

The pair acknowledge that although DVD sales and rentals have dropped 22 per cent over the past year, online traffic has continued to grow.

"The 13-billion-dollar industry is in no fear of collapse," they say. "But why take chances?" Francis, who was last year freed from almost a year in jail after pleading no contest to child abuse and prostitution charges in a plea deal, told CNN they planned to deliver the request "to our congressmen and (Secretary of the Treasury Henry) Paulson" by the end of Wednesday.

"With all this economic misery and people losing all that money, sex is the farthest thing from their mind," Flynt said in a statement. People were "too depressed to be sexually active", which was "very unhealthy as a nation. Americans can do without cars and such, but they cannot do without sex." He said the only way Congress could "rejuvenate" America's sexual appetite was "by supporting the adult industry and doing it quickly." There was no response from Congress to the request.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4165049/US-porn-industry-seeks-multi-billion-dollar-bailout.html

I saw that in the paper today. I knew this bailout crap would only get more stupid!!! Poor little porn peddlers, boo hoo!!!

Ummm..... Congress better not bail out any entertainment industry...... The reason being that we barely have enough money to support music, drama and other extracurricular activities in our schools. I think it would do us good for the porn industry to go down anyway. Too many men are starting to discover their prostrate is a G-spot.. But they are not gay.. This does not bode well for females that have to put up with it. sex is getting to damn freaky due to the desensitization of the internet based porn industry and the men who can't find the end of the internet. where are the days when teen males had to look at a national geographic to see boobs, and men had to hide their magazines in the bathroom somewhere. Also men were too embarrassed to ask for the real dirty mags at the counter of a store and now women have to keep up the pace with what the latest porn star is doing. As humans we all like sex so the porn industry is not going away, let's just not be sick about it... I don't think congress is going to bail out the industry... If they do then we need to get a new congress..

ummm its larry flynt..im pretty sure hes just being a smartazz....but i betchu he'll fight for his share of the bailout money for as long as he can..

i find his brand of ironic sarcasm amusing...maybe i go buy an issue of hustler today...

seems it would help my state of mind a little bit more than signing my name on some slip of paper that puts me further in debt

To bail out the porn industry, makes about as much common sense as bailing out the auto industry, or any other industry that didn't have enough foresight to plan for this situation that the economy is in now! Boils down to 2 things(in my opinion)greed, and mis-management! JMO

He may just be doing a "smart ass" thing, but it does bring up the whole issue of where do bailouts end.
And, mentalpausal brings up an excellent few points there, with regard to THIS or anyone trying for a real handout... I mean bailout. More money needs to be infused in productive areas of our citizenship.

I dont think we should bailout anyone because its unfair. If a company didnt have enough buisness sense to stay on top of things....

then let them go bankrupt and start again at 0.

and it does raise an excellent point....what exactly are the requirments for receiving bailout funds from the federal government???
because I bet in the last 5 years many many small buisnesses have failed.

housing is important.
education is important..millions in debt due to this.
healthcare is important...(again another debt}
transportation is important.
food is important.
and durnit so is sex.

Larry Flynt has enjoyed being a burr in the saddle of religious and political leaders for many years.

My money is on him doing this just because he can.

That said here is some info on porn from Forbes. It's abit dated from 2001 but it does give you an idea of the money involved.

Management & Trends
How Big Is Porn?
Dan Ackman

According to Adult Video News (AVN), an industry trade magazine, Americans spent just over $4 billion to buy and rent adult videos last year. This figure is baseless and wildly inflated. From there, the numbers get even more obscure.

Tossing in the Internet will add less than $1 billion to the total porn pie. The 1998 Forrester report pegs the online adult content market at $750 million to $1 billion, which was an increase from its initial estimate of $150 million. When a study admits that its initial result was off by at least 80%, it's hard to be confident in the new result. In any event, Tom Rhinelander, a Forrester research director, says they have given up trying to put a price on porn--either on the Internet or otherwise.

Its rival research outfit, Net Ratings, tracks the number of visitors to porn Web sites. It says that in April 2001, there were 22.9 million unique visitors to porn sites. This says nothing about how long each visitor stayed or whether they spent a dime. In any event, the number of visitors is less than the number who visited news sites (41.1 million), finance sites (34.2 million) or greeting card sites (25.5 million). When was the last time you heard anyone talk about how greeting card sites dominate the Net?

The Business Of Smut: What Is It Worth?
Adult Video $500 million to $1.8 billion
Internet $1 billion
Pay-Per-View $128 million
Magazines $1 billion
Total $2.6 billion to $3.9 billion
Sources: Adams Media Research, Forrester Research, Veronis Suhler Communications Industry Report, IVD
It is often said that pornographers are the only ones making money on the Internet. Certainly, there are a lot of porn sites and many assume that they wouldn't be there if they weren't profitable. But that assumption is baseless.

Playboy (nyse: PLA - news - people ), which calls itself a men's magazine rather than an adult magazine, lost money last year, as did New Frontier Media (nasdaq: NOOF - news - people ). There are thousands of e-commerce sites that still exist despite never having made a profit. There are millions of personal sites and fan sites whose publishers have no intention of ever profiting. Why are porn sites, of which there are an untold number competing fiercely with each other, necessarily any different?

What about pay-per-view? The entire legitimate "a la carte" movie business, including satellite and cable pay-per-view, was just $642 million last year, says Tom Adams, president of Adams Media Research, which tracks video sales for the industry. If sex movies get 20% of the legitimate movies, that adds $128 million to pornography's gross.

Adding pay-per-view to the Internet and video sales and rentals, the sum total is about $2.9 billion. Is it possible that adult magazines add another $7 billion--which would have to come in sales since they have minimal advertising? Hardly, when you consider that the entire consumer magazine market in 1999 grossed $7.8 billion (sales plus advertising), according to the Veronis Suhler Communications Industry Report.

The Times Magazine concludes there may be no other product in the entire cultural marketplace that is more explicitly American, going so far as to call it "mainstream." We have no idea how "explicitly American" it is, though we suspect men in other countries like to look at naked women, too.

What pornography lacks is cultural resonance, it also lacks in financial clout. The industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion).

When one really examines the numbers, the porn industry--while a subject of fascination--is every bit as marginal as it seems at first glance.

Does the adult video market have $4 billion in sales? Not even half that.

This figure comes from Adult Video News, an industry trade paper--not from Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, which Rich cites. How Adult Video News gets this number is not clear. We asked Adult Video News' managing editor, Mike Ramone. "I don't know the exact methodology," he said, "It's a pie chart." Asked to break the figure down into sales versus rentals, a standard practice among those who cover the video industry, he said he didn't think it was available and suggested we call the editor-in-chief, who didn't return our calls.

In fact, there is no chance that the adult video business has revenues of even $2 billion. This hardly compares to the sales and rentals of legitimate videos, which were roughly $20 billion last year, both according to Adams Media Research and Variety. (Neither Adams nor Variety track porn sales.)

No one tracks the adult video business with any rigor or precision, Adams says. But his "most generous" estimate is that sales and rentals combined are no higher than $1.8 billion. Adams starts with the mainstream video business, which he says had rental income of $10.3 billion and sales of $10.8 billion (both of which far exceed box office grosses, which amounted to $7.67 billion last year, according go the National Association of Theater Owners).

On the rental side, at least half the video stores nationally, including industry leaders Blockbuster (nyse: BBI - news - people ) and Hollywood Video (nasdaq: HLYW - news - people ), carry no porn titles. Of the 50% (at most) of the stores that do, retailer surveys report that no more than 20% of revenue is from porn. Thus, porn rentals amount to no more than $1 billion.

As for video sales, much of the trade is through outlets like Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT - news - people ) and Kmart (nyse: KM - news - people ), who stock no porn titles. There are, of course, the traditional adult video and bookstores mostly in big cities, but this is a fringe distribution channel at best. Internet and mail order may add to the total, but these channels account for just 10% of legitimate sales. Overall, "There's no way it could be 10% of the legitimate market," Adams says. His top estimate for adult video sales is $800 million.

Adams calls his $1.8 billion aggregate generous. Some of the industry's own numbers suggest a much lower figure. IVD, based in Hightstown, N.J., the nation's largest distributor, said that there are as many as 13,000 video releases per year. (There are many niche markets--boy-boy, fat people, transvestites, freak shows--which add to the total, according to an IVD spokesman.)

A typical release may sell 1,000 to 2,000 units. Using the high-end figure, the industry sells about 26 million units. If the average unit sells either directly or through rentals for $20--a high-end estimate given the fact that the number of titles makes the product a commodity--that means the adult video business grosses at best $520 million, not $4 billion.

All told, the adult video business takes in anywhere from one-tenth to one-half the figure proffered by Adult Video News. Certainly, self-interested statements by pornographers merit a second look.

ya i dont tihnk the sex entertainment industry is anywhere near collapse. neither is the alcohol industry. and probably not the sale of firearms.

This is what I thought! Larry Flint's sarcasm!!

How ridiculous.

Maybe it's about time people started spending less money on porn and more money on dating real people who aren't part of a fantasy world.

Wall street, banks.. Bailouts = Obscene

Haven't we already entertained and carried out a version of porn?

Yes.

I concur.

Why pay? There's tons of free porn available haha

I never understood why folks would be so obsessed with porn, have we lost all sense of imagination?

Instead we make shady people filthy rich.