The truth about in-room adult entertainment

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It’s tough to report on the adult entertainment business. Data’s hard to find, and ranges are substituted for exact numbers. Because of this, the smallest anecdote can be stretched and prodded for years, ultimately taking on a life of its own. Adult-oriented in-room entertainment – porn, dirty movies, the stuff that’s pretty hard to order by mistake – falls into this category. Only when you appreciate how large this piece of the hospitality business is can you see why many properties may not rush to void those “accidental” charges.

There is no doubt that in-room adult entertainment is good business … some would say crucial. A coalition of 13 conservative groups (including the Family Research Council) that opposes the production and sale of porn (as if you couldn’t tell guess), estimates that adult fare accounts for 60 percent to 80 percent of all in-room entertainment revenue. Of course, it pays to be careful with this estimate, as these groups have a lot at stake in reporting high. More money from porn, from their perspective, translates to a proof of a larger societal problem, which helps advance their agenda. Given my research in this space, I’m inclined to accept the lower end of the spectrum, largely because of the management problems that have plagued the entire porn industry over the past few years.

Even the low end of the range is far from trivial. That’s a lot of cash every year in a very tough business. In fact, it’s enough that the hotel industry relies on it to remain profitable. According to JW Marriott, Jr. – yeah, that Marriott — “If we were to eliminate R and non-rated offerings, the systems would not be economic [sic].”

So, how much money is this?

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Adult industry trade publication Adult Video News (NSFW) put the revenue from hotel porn at $550 million in 2006, the last year for which data is available. At around $15 a movie, that’s almost 37 million purchases, to which nobody will admit. But, you can see Marriott’s point. Hotels need every last dime from porn to keep their shareholders happy.

So, let’s take this a step further. Assume that you claim to have been charged wrongly. How can the hotel know? A source, who used to be the night auditor at a major Manhattan luxury hotel, told me that the majority of purchases were viewed for less than a minute.

Several other sources have chimed in – including a former Ritz-Carlton general manager – that the average run time ranges from seven to 10 minutes. Steven Silbar, who served as Director of Sales and Business Development of NXTV (which sells in-room entertainment), recalls that the average time an adult film was viewed through his employer’s system was 7.5 minutes (in 2001 and 2002). Even if a handful go from start to finish, this suggests many viewings of less than a minute.

Buying behavior could imply a case of buyer’s remorse, an unfortunate slip of the thumb or the remote, the absence of continued need (you know what I mean) or a technical glitch. Only two of these situations would call for a refund (the technical glitch and maybe the accident).

The choice to refund is made harder by the hotel’s obligations to the porn provider. Every time a movie is purchased, the cash you pay is split between the property and the supplier. The supplier then has to pay some of its share to the production company. And, none of these businesses is doing well in this economy. Porn has been in something of a recession since 2005.

Put simply, you’re more likely to get a comp’ed drink than a free movie, even if the drink is more expensive.

Hotels need porn. There’s no way around it. So, when you browse the adult listings – just to see what’s out there, of course – know where your finger is. If you slip, you could wind up paying the price.

Big in Japan: Japanese worker logs 780,000 porno hits at office

by Matthew Firestone on

The Japanese are anything but prudish, especially when it comes to pornography or AV (adult video). Here in Japan, the AV industry pumps out literally hundreds of new videos each day, featuring pretty much everything that your sick little mind can imagine. I would expand more here on some of the more unusual varieties of Japanese adult entertainment, but for the sake of our sponsors at AOL – and out of respect for my dear mother! – I’ll let you discover them in your own free time.

With that said, if you’re going to scour the web for the latest and greatest in Japanese porno, it’s probably best not do it while you’re in an office cubicle. In fact, that is precisely what happened this week in the city of Kinokawa in southern Japan ,where a council employee was discovered looking at almost 10,000 pages containing explicit content per day! Over a nine month period, it is estimated that the 57-year old man logged more than 780,000 hits on porno websites.

And who says Japanese bureaucracy is efficient – in my opinion, it takes some serious dedication to log in that many hours of porn viewing in one day!

According to sources in the city council, the man was allowed to keep his job in public service, though he was demoted, and his wages were cut by about 20,000 yen ($200) per month. In porno terms, that’s about ten new-issue DVDs, or about a fifteen month online subscription to your favorite fetish site.

Mind you, not that I watch porno, or anything of the sort! (^_^)

The report goes on to describe how the man would turn up for work every day, though failed to maintain the same level of productivity as his fellow co-workers. Apparently, his incessant porno habit peaked last July when he is estimated to have logged 177,000 hits in a singly month!

In the end, the man was only discovered after his computer was infected with a virus, which prompted the IT team to access his web history. Foolish – he should have just deleted his web history like the rest of us!

Mind you, not that I watch or porno, or anything of the sort! (^_^)

As you would imagine, the city council was highly embarrassed by the incident, and was forced to comment on national television as to why it took several months to catch and reprimand the distracted worker. According to one official, employees’ desks were separated from one another, so it was impossible to monitor everyone’s web behaviors.

Of course, this seeming bit of nonsense has to make you wonder. If the guy has a healthy enough sexual appetite to spend all of his working hours searching for porno, he probably needed to, well, relieve himself at some point – perhaps the first clue that the guy had a porno habit should have been the frequent line outside the men’s restroom!

On that note, I think I’ll go back to doing something more productive instead of blogging about porno…

** All images are of the famous Anna Ohura, the half-Japanese, half-French AV sensation who is regarded as having the largest natural breasts (metric I-cup, 100cm) in the Japanese adult film industry **