Pornography is everywhere, despite what many people would like to believe. It’s on people’s hard drives, computers, cell phones, and the internet. For centuries, it has been mankind’s silent partner in crime, fueling your voyeuristic tendencies. Humans would only wish that porn of naked girls was kept private and never spoken about publicly due to the shame and taboo surrounding it. To comprehend the inner details of this astutely guileful profession, Business Insider takes a critical look at its dynamics during a time when the nation is divided by the porn scandal.

Data about pornography is notoriously hard to come by.

It is okay to assume that they make a lot of money, as many of them receive more than 5 million.

But when you go to a HDPorn.Video site, most of the ads on there are for other porn sites, and the content is free. Furthermore, most adult filmmakers confirmed that their revenues fell by 30 to 50 per cent as internet pornography was badly hit by piracy and the recession bit harder in 2009. How did they bounce back, and through which channels are they profitable now? Let us take a closer look at the financial model of the porn industry.

How big is it?

Pornography of naked girls is valued at over $100 billion worldwide, more than a few of the largest companies in the world. 10% of the total comes from the US alone, though the number is drifting downwards due to free porn. There are approximately 25 million porn sites worldwide, which constitute 12% of all websites and over 30% of all web traffic. Every year, about 11,000 hardcore porn films are produced in different parts of the world, you know it. However, the economic crisis in 2009 rendered this industry powerless due to piracy and a decline in DVD sales; before the recession, a mid-sized adult entertainment company would make around 350,000 dollars a month in DVD sales. The figures went down by as much as 50%. The statistics have started to get better, though, and the HDPorn.Video industry has had to evolve. There is more varied media on offer.

You can get a sense of the size of this industry when you think about how broadly it has spread across categories and how many millions of unsigned artists operate websites of their own. But the thing that is tearing this growing sector apart is people’s reluctance to spend money to have fun. Many for-profit pornographic companies criticize the tube sites for earning money from page views. For the free porn that billions of people see, these websites at least pay royalties. In a nutshell, though the adult industry is no longer a license to print money, loyalty always leads to money, and human passion will never die during a downturn.