Is creativity fucked? Just ask the porn industry…

Is creativity f*cked?
Just ask the porn industry…

Porn had always been an early predictor of business.
First to adopt new tech, first to show where the money goes.

Take the videotape wars of the ’70s: VHS vs Sony Betamax. Betamax had the sharper picture, but it kept its tapes clean. VHS didn’t. It welcomed adult content with open arms (and legs). By 1987, VHS owned 90% of the market. Betamax was dead in the water. Porn, it turned out, was what the world pressed play on.

Decades later, porn faced its own reckoning. With sites like YouPorn making it free and infinite. The industry panicked. Surely this was the end of porn stars. Instead, kinks levelled up. In a sea of identical content, people started paying for the rarer, juicier, more curated stuff.

Then came the curveball no one saw coming: OnlyFans. In a market where sex was free, endless, and disposable, it became the place where some creators made $50M+ a year, commanding the highest prices the industry had ever seen for content you could technically find anywhere.

The difference? Taste. Curation. A singular point of view. In a market drowning in ‘porn slop,’ the value shifted from output to input.

So what can the creative industry learn from porn?

When distribution is democratised and the market floods with free content, value doesn’t disappear, it moves. From output to input. From what’s made to who makes it. In the AI age, the product is free. The creator is what costs.