Durban - Durban’s once lucrative porn industry has gone limp as more people go online for free content – forcing 70 percent of the city’s sex shops to close in five years.
Peter van der Merwe, a second-generation porn distributor who owns the Fantasy sex shop in Anton Lembede (Smith) Street, said there were only three sex shops in the city compared to 10 five years ago.
Two months ago, one of the oldest sex shops in Durban - and South Africa for that matter - Score was forced to close its doors as sales of DVDs and magazines plummeted.
Fantasy, Adultworld and Cine-X are the last remaining adult shops in Durban and have been forced to shift their business to adult toys in the face of the stiff onslaught posed by the internet.
Van der Merwe said the industry, which was once said to be a R300 million-a-year business, began its steady decline in 2008 as internet penetration grew along with the rise of smartphones.
“It is just not worth importing movies any more,” he said.
“Every X-rated DVD that is imported into South Africa has to go through the Film and Publication Board (FPB) for classification.
“For this you pay a fee of R2 500 and assigning a classification number makes it legal to sell the movie in South Africa.
“This is the case for every movie, from those shown by NuMetro cinemas to the Harry Potter movies people keep at home. The difference is that ours would be given a Sex R18 rating,” he said.
Van der Merwe said that in 2007 there were probably 3 500 porn movies classified by the board.
“This year, I would be surprised if we were up to 100. That is how big the drop has been in movies.”
He said distributors were not able to sell enough of one title to get their money back for the classification fees alone.
He said that there were too many costs for the local porn business to make money.
Explaining the intricacies, he said: “Let’s say I pay $10 per movie and I bring in 100. Converted to rand, that means I paid R100 a movie. Now I still have to pay R2 500 to the Film and Publication Board to get that movie classified.
“So now my cost per movie has gone to R125 per movie and that excludes the shipping and other fees – which means the costs start rising to between R160 and R200 a movie.
“Now I need to make a profit so that I can pay my rent and staff. So when I put on my mark-up, the movie will need to sell for more than R300.
“And, as is a well-known fact, even if you are not watching for free on the internet and are paying to watch a (porn) movie, you will pay much less than R300 for a movie.”
And it’s not just the DVD sales that have gone soft as the local porn industry has been gutted by piracy and the boom in online content.
Over the past decade, sales of DVDs have dropped by as much as 90 percent, distributors say.
And while there is a huge demand for local content, nobody wants to take the risk of bankrolling expensive films that will only have a few thousand sales because most of the buyers are picking up pirate copies.
The future no longer lies with the industry but with thousands of people who are shooting their own content at home and uploading it to the internet, say experts.
It’s a harsh reality for Durban and the rest of the country, which was on the cusp of breaking through in 2011.
At the time, film-makers were quoted as saying the local pornographic industry was generating as much as R300 million a year.
One of these directors was Tau Morena, who said that although porn was still a lucrative investment, the focus had changed.
“I have 1 000 actors, actresses and models who are willing to participate,” he said.
“But the challenge is that we have not found an innovative way to bring the product to market in a sustainable way so that everyone involved can make a decent income.”
“So-called porn king Joe Theron, head of JT Publishing, the country's biggest distributor of adult films, said there was still a demand for locally made porn.
“People want to see the local girl - there is a certain novelty to it, and there will always be a market.
“I don't think that consumption has died. It has actually increased. But it has increased in another direction.”
He likens the adult film industry to the music industry, in which all the attention has turned to the internet.
In this way, he said porn was in a “transitional” phase, in which producers were still trying to come up with a way to monetise content that was freely available on the web.
“That said, a local porn film would sell. There’s a niche market, and I’d be able to move around 5 000 copies,” said Morena. “It’s not much, but it is something.”
Daily News