With thanks to Jakez, for making me think of this.
Some argue that putting porn online gave millions access to porn who were previously denied. Not completely true because few places banned Playboy or Penthouse, if the country banned Max Hardcore, it didn't ban Hugh Hefner from selling his porn and the sales reflected this. Except in a few places this is true.
It did give millions access to hardcore porn and eventually hardcore video. Access to view was easy. The problem was even though they could access it, they couldn't buy. In a country where their CC's were blocked, income was so low $30 a month wasn't a possibility and under age viewers. Still online porn gave millions more access to porn.
It also gave the same access to people who wanted to put up sites and satisfy the demand. 1995 there were probably 1/10 of the people in the porn industry there was a few years later. 2005 who knows what that fraction had shrunk to.
So yes there were 100 million now viewing porn online. Where previously there was only 10 million buying. Yet of that 100 million how many were buying?
And how many were selling?
In 1995 maybe a few 100 companies were in the business. 2000 it was 1,000s 2005 10,000s The growth of people feeding from the same trough far out weighed the the growth in the number of people putting the food into the trough. So each pig got less.
Of course I'm just using the figures as an illustration because no one knows, it's too fragmented an industry to have reliable stats on this. We don't even know what the leading companies are making.
The UK had about 200 porn shops after they were legalised to sell R18 videos. In the same year the Internet probably had 10,000 sites to download porn from.
All this resulted in a lot of small companies and people on lower wages scrambling for money. A few big ones, but no where near the giants of the past, when publishing porn wasn't as easy as putting up a website. No matter how hard you say it is. Try publishing a magazine, in any field and making a profit.