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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zia Sun(zsun) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StockDung who wrote (7232)	4/1/2000 4:03:00 PM
From: Sir Auric Goldfinger	Respond to of 10354

"Obscene Profits- A Cold Rehash of a Hot Topic. Sex has always been big business, but it took the advent of technology and the Internet to start gathering the numbers on just how big. Indeed, the unsung role of sex in shaping the development of the Internet-from payment systems to video compression algorithms-has brought the financial side of sex to the forefront. Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age tackles a subject that Wall Street and most dot.com entrepreneurs would really rather not deal with. Assessing the subject would be far easier if good, well-researched market numbers were as explicitly exposed as the industry's subject matter. Author Frederick S. Lane III tells us the U.S. pornography market has annual revenues of roughly $15-$20 billion, making it approximately equal to the U.S. wine industry in size. Most of the revenues, the book tells us, are from Old Economy sectors such as videotapes, pay-per-view movies and magazines. And while the growth rate is coming from the World Wide Web and DVDs, yearly Internet sales of salacious content barely amount to $1 billion so far. Like all things dot.com, cyberporn has captured imaginations out of all proportion to its true financial impact, with even such staid bastions of journalism as The Wall Street Journal writing the rags-to-riches tales of people like Danni Ashe who lost her shirt (and the rest of her garments) and grosses more than $2 million per year with her Danni's Hard Drive Website. And therein lies the book's biggest flaw: Ashe is probably the world's most overexposed porn entrepreneur, having been written about time and again by every major international publication. Unfortunately, most of Obscene Profits is a rehash of previously printed materials. Lane's book is most helpful as a summary of how the sex industry arrived at its present circumstances, but offers much less insight into where it is heading and what lessons it may have for mainstream business. This latter issue is far more relevant than meets the eye, especially for the Internet. Because Web surfers were willing to pay for sexually oriented content (thus defying the notion that Web content should be free), adult Websites pioneered much of what is familiar in today's cyber payment systems. They also created the first affiliate programs (later popularized by Amazon.com), developed streaming video technology that has enabled outfits like CNN to put news clips on their Websites and, in general, have used the influx of cash to support a nascent cyber infrastructure, paving the way for non- porn sites. The book spends too much time tracing pornography from Neolithic dirty scribblings on cave walls to the present and explaining how the Web sprang forth from the forehead of Tim Berners-Lee. All this has been covered ad nauseam elsewhere and only helps make a sexy subject boring. We would like to have more details about the dozen or so public companies that deal in all things lurid and learn how they received their investment and went public. Details about how sex chat rooms helped sustain AOL, for example, would have added to the understanding of the market. While valuable as an historical reference, we wish the book had revealed as much about the industry as the industry reveals to its paying customers. -- Reviewed by Lewis Perdue"