Obscene Profits Indeed

We have a fascinating article in this week's Forbes on Vivid Entertainment, which is one of the Southern California pr0n making giants. While Vivid makes a pretty penny on its products, it's the distribution of pr0n that's really a license to print money:

{...}Vivid's distributors played no role in making Sunny but will reap much of the upside: sales of, say, 20,000 DVDs at $12 to $15 a pop wholesale (distributed by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt's network) and sold for $30 to $40 at retail; up to $1.5 million in revenue for pay-per-view on cable systems and on DirecTV (each of which typically pockets up to a 90% cut); and several hundred thousand dollars more from viewings in hotel rooms (which is why, on the Sunny set the other day, a second, soft-core camera simultaneously shot the same nude scenes from the waist up).

At some point the new film will air on a Playboy-owned channel. Hugh Hefner's company paid Vivid $70 million in 2001 to acquire the Spice networks, hard-core pay channels that Playboy now programs with Vivid's explicit movies. Also, Vivid will resell Sunny in compilation DVDs as her library of performances builds. It also sells phone-sex ads that appear at the start of each DVD (spots that, it turns out, are impossible to skip). And it will add Sunny to the offerings on its Web site, vivid.com, with tens of thousands of subscribers paying $30 a month for access and unlimited streaming video, Hirsch says.

Vivid also hopes to begin beaming out cell phone videos in the U.S. in the next few months and to keep a much bigger share of the loot than the meager 10% it gets from the cable industry.

"The numbers on our cell phone business are just phenomenal,"Asher says--already at $10 million (in retail) a year in Europe. {...}

You always knew there was money to be made in pr0n, didn't you,you just didn't know how much?

Go read the whole thing.