[RawAlex]

Business rises and falls with the ability of the general public to pay for it. In that respect, porn isn't any different from movies, travel, restaurants, bars, and about 1000 other things that are discretionary spending rather than manditory / required spending (basic rent / heat / food deals).

However, porn is also at an additional cross roads, where things like tubes, torrents, and other forms of P2P style distribution have taken much of the content and put it into the wild, free as the birds. Very few programs / content companies seem willing to take steps with Google and other search engines to block these sites out (even though Google will gladly remove links to stolen content). As a result, porn has also suffered greatly from current product going stale at a much faster rate.

Finally, there is the use of porn as the "free" teaser to upsell people to dating sites, cam sites, and in many cases just to push viruses and rootkits onto end user's machines. The value of porn in the public eye I think is dropping pretty rapidly, and the guys laughing their way to the bank are guys like Legendary Liar and his group that basically profitted off of every possible method to abuse porn content to push their products.

The upsides?

A declining economy puts more girls (and guys) in the position to be willing to do porn for money. It will help to prime the pumps of new content, which hopefully should move things along again.

H.264 or whatever it is flash video is fucking awesome, delivering what could be a full screen TV resolution for many end users... which leads to the potential of people using TV to view videos from websites. The PPV video model is truly still in it's infancy as far as I can see.

As for Nick, honestly he wasn't psychic, just bored of what he was doing and trying to self justify getting out the door before it got slammed on his fingers.