What If Sex Doesn't Sell? Adult Expo Faces Hard Time Without Silicon Valley Support

The AVN Media Network says its Adult Entertainment Expo will be pushed to late January -- meaning it will no longer overlap with the usually parallel Consumer Electronics Show in early January. It's not exactly clear whether AVN fell or was pushed, but one thing is certain: The porn convention stands to lose big time by ending its informal association with the CES geek-fest.

You'd think AVN would know that, too. The organization's stated reasons for the change makes zero sense -- AVN claims that switching from the plush Venetian Hotel to the plainer Palms will somehow "minimize travel expenses and maximize networking opportunities for exhibitors." Uh-huh. Presumably the move saves money, but also necessitated changing the date away from CES.

Maybe some of tech's more conservative companies -- though not Apple (AAPL), which doesn't officially attend CES -- were just tired of being next door to porn stars and sex toys, even in less-than-conservative Las Vegas. It's sort of hard to come up with any other explanation short of AVN management losing its collective mind. (To the extent that such a thing is even possible for porn moguls, that is.)

Some welcome spillover
Holding CES and AEE in parallel created some welcome spillover for AEE. While this year's CES had about 150,000 attendees, AEE had "a few thousand", according to XBiz magazine (link not safe for work). With an attendance two orders of magnitude greater than the pornsters, CES undoubtedly drove a fair amount of traffic to AEE, even if some of it consisted of lookie-loos from more sheltered parts of the country.

It didn't hurt that technology is an integral part of the adult show. Pornography is the forerunner of tech development: the adoption of VHS tapes, pop-up ads, and even the Internet itself is traditionally attributed to the adult industry. Indeed, pornography stands to make Microsoft's (MSFT) Kinect motion controller more popular than ever.
There's also the fact that the adult industry is already in an economic slump. With money tighter than ever, it's the wrong time for the representative organization to make attendees come to Vegas solely for its three-day conference -- and without the added value of CES. Which raises an existential question no one in the porn industry wants to address: What if sex by itself, minus the gadgets, just doesn't sell any more? Tune in next January to see.

Photo courtesy of Come As You Are Co-Operative // CC 2.0
Related:

• Adult Entertainment Expo: Biz Lessons from Vivid's Steven Hirsch
• Kinect-able Porn: Microsoft Pays the Inevitable Price for Open Source
• Do You Use Google, Yahoo!, or AOL? You're Part of the World's Largest Sex Survey

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