Gadgetopia

Online Competition Hurts Adult Magazines: Horrors! Can the world survive without Screw magazine? Well, yeah, probably.

“After 35 years in the business of titillating and offending, pornographer Al Goldstein says his magazine can’t compete anymore. The audience is just as large, he says, but the Internet has transformed the product and its delivery.

Just over a month ago, Goldstein stopped publishing Screw magazine and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, giving him a chance to cut costs, relaunch the magazine and refocus attention on his Web site.”

I’ve always wondered about this: with the astounding proliferation of porn on the Net, how can print magazines compete? Much more importantly, how closely will this map to publishers of other content? Is porn a bellweather for the rest of the content industry, or does it have some quality that makes it different? Since it’s been such a huge part of the Internet since the beginning, is it just the first sector to encounter the effect?