Short answer: No.

Long answer: NNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, assholes.

I’ll elaborate.  It’s the contention of Larry Flynt, the guy from Girls Gone Wild and several others that Americans are depressed about their current financial woes.  Because of this depression, we’re thinking less about sex and, thus, spending less money on sex in the form of pornography.

Pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry in the U.S., employing thousands of people and providing a safe work environment for countless whores, and all those are good things.  I have always been and will continue to be Pro-Whore.

The issue here is that the current argument and request for government assistance are complete bullshit.  Major porn producers are not struggling because Americans are suddenly too depressed and broke to be interested in barely legal girl-on-girl action.  These companies have been seeing declining sales for several years and the reason for that is most of them have not figured out how to take advantage of something that is both their greatest ally and their greatest enemy: widely available high speed internet access.  A decade ago, when the vast majority of porn-hunters were using a dial-up connection, just downloading pictures could take over a minute; trying to download a 60 second video required an entire afternoon.  At that point, online options simply couldn’t compete with the quality of video and DVD’s.

Fast forward to 2009.  Broadband and DSL are fairly cheap and available almost everywhere.  Laptop computers are fairly cheap and available almost everywhere.  A Google search for “free porn” returns 69,700,000 results in .07 seconds.  The problem isn’t that people are less interested in sex, it’s that now it’s freely available and exceptionally convenient.  Major porn companies requesting a bailout because people are consuming free porn is like bottled water companies asking for a bailout because people are drinking tap water.  There’s simply not a good case in their favor.

Instead of just telling these people to fuck off, I’ll offer a few helpful tips.
1.  Free Samples – As drug dealers and direct response marketers already know, it’s much easier to take huge piles of money from people after you’ve got them hooked on your product with a “Free Trial.”  After those first 10 days of FREE solo sorority girl videos, it’s very hard to get the 11th day started without them.
2.  Adsense – Here’s an easy equation that even most illiterate whores can understand: Traffic = Money.
3.  Stop Letting Larry Flynt Appear in Public – There aren’t many things that can kill an erection faster than that horrific jackass.  Just keep him away from cameras, it will help.

Aside from that, just accept and embrace that the internet is a good thing and that it’s time to start hiring people to help you monetize your shit.  Keep up the good work.