Adapt and Adjust: The Adult Industry’s Response to the Pandemic

With businesses of all sorts shuttered all around the globe – temporarily, one hopes – in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies, individual entrepreneurs and performers in the adult entertainment industry have worked quickly to adapt to the enormous challenges presented by the worldwide outbreak.

Despite an industry-wide voluntary production hold being in place with respect to “traditional” content production, cam shows have continued to occur on schedule and many performers have continued self-producing content in a safe and responsible way. Unsurprisingly, traffic has been up to many sites and networks as a function of the widespread “stay at home” orders under which much of the world’s population has found itself in the last few months.

This is not to say the adult industry has been untouched by the pandemic, or that all is smooth sailing for adult businesses, particularly among brick and mortar businesses that have shut down along with a litany of other businesses deemed “nonessential.” Even companies that have continued to do brisk business through the pandemic have been forced to make major adjustments, including having some or all of their employees work from home, cancelling and postponing business trips, delaying trade events and product launches.

YNOT has reached out to a variety of companies and individuals to find out what they’ve done in response to the pandemic, their plans for the immediate future and their thoughts on the pandemic’s impact on the adult entertainment industry. Over the next few weeks, YNOT will publish a special series of posts with interviews and feature articles relating their feedback on what they’ve done to keep their operations running as smoothly as possible through this difficult time.

From directors and performers to advertising networks and payment service providers, no sector of the industry has remained untouched by the ongoing public health crisis and it’s both instructive and reassuring to hear the nimble, proactive steps people are taking to protect and maintain their businesses, even as they prioritize their own health, as well as that of their employees, coworkers, business partners and customers.

As countries around the world and states around the U.S. begin to slowly ‘reopen’ their economies and broader societies, it’s becoming clear a return even to relative normalcy is going to take time. In the meantime, what are these people and companies doing to sustain themselves in the immediate term, while planning for a brighter future?

It’s also true not everyone is in the same position when it comes to their financial ability to ride out a work stoppage. Even if a subscription adult site with a large existing content archive is continuing to make sales and turn a profit, that doesn’t mean the people who normally provide new content and updates to that site are sitting pretty. How does it feel to be a director who is eager to get back to work, but faces shaming and vitriol for even voicing that desire, for example?

In the months ahead, whatever lies between where we stand now and a return to a relatively normal life is bound to be fraught with complications and uncertainty. There’s still a great deal more about this virus that remains unknown than there is definitive knowledge about it, even among experts who research and study viruses and diseases for a living.

What we do know is it’s liable to be months before there are effective antiviral drugs readily available to combat the virus – and likely more months before there’s a vaccine. Given those likelihoods, the adult industry’s challenge in navigating the pandemic has probably just begun. Our collective success in sustaining our businesses will rely in part in what we learn from the adjustments that have already been made.

Naturally, along they way there will be disagreements about how the industry should and could respond. There will be those who want the voluntary production hold to remain in place long after others would like to see it lifted. Both in the U.S. and outside it, there will be those who passionately want to see President Donald Trump re-elected and others who just as fervently want to see him out of the White House. Come this November, there will be the election which decides which of those things happens.

Here’s hoping that even as we in the industry may disagree on and bicker about the particulars, public policies, corporate best practices and general how-to of dealing with the pandemic, we can find it in our hearts to do what we can to help each other emerge on the other side not just with our health intact, but poised for our businesses to thrive, as well. In any case, hearing how industry leaders have responded so far could help light the path in terms of where we go from here.

‘Pandemic’ photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels.