Recently, XBIZ World Magazine asked several industry players, "How do you think the industry should deal with the tube site phenomenon?" Here's what they had to say...

Piracy is one of the most vexing problems facing the adult entertainment industry today. More so even than governmental regulation and conservative outcry, the wholesale theft of copyrighted content threatens the very existence of an entire adult industry sector.

As we come to the end of the Bush administration, it appears that in the coming years intellectual property theft will likely pose a greater challenge to the survival of most adult entertainment companies than federal obscenity prosecutions. Recognizing this reality, the Free Speech Coalition, in association with the Global Anti-Piracy Agency, presented the adult industry's first antipiracy roundtable at the Phoenix Forum in March.

It's no secret to anyone operating in the online adult entertainment industry that we're a technology-driven community, and the impact that technology has on our operations extends well beyond the hardware and software that power our enterprises. It is a factor that affects our business plans as well.

Adult products have graced the shelves of big-name mainstream stores such as Macy's for years — in disguise. Often labeled "massagers," vibrators and other sex toys have been an open secret for years in the nonadult marketplace.

Utherverse Digital CEO Brian Shuster has a vision of adult entertainment's future, and that vision is decidedly three-dimensional. Utherverse is the company behind the adult virtual world RedLightCenter, an adult-specific virtual world similar in structure and function to Second Life. Shuster sees the expansion of virtual worlds and the subsuming of traditional adult entertainment into the virtual space as inevitable; the key, Shuster told XBIZ, is being positioned to capitalize on that inevitability.

On Jan. 1, Texas' new statewide sales tax on strip clubs officially went into effect; patrons must now pay a $5 surcharge whenever they enter a strip club anywhere in the Lone Star State, and similar "sin taxes" or "poll taxes" are being considered or discussed in Florida and New Mexico.

Spotting the next trend is no easy task. The nature of the adult business means many people aren't comfortable with a paper trail, let alone sharing any more personal data than absolutely essential to a transaction. Folks are understandably wary of phone "surveys" inquiring as to what they are wearing and their masturbation habits.

Innovation drives technology — hybrid cars, paper-thin laptops, robotic vacuum cleaners — and in the past few years, sex product manufacturers have been sharing the wheel with their mainstream counterparts.

The online adult entertainment industry is perceived to be a leader in technological and marketing innovation, but what exactly are these innovations? To help answer this question, XBIZ World Magazine presents the following roundup of significant examples of adult marketing innovations.