Paul Fishbein
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|
| Categories | Trade Journal |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Monthly |
| Total circulation (2006) |
40,000 |
| Year founded | 1983 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | http://www.avn.com |
| ISSN | 0883-7090 |
Adult Video News (also called AVN or AVN Magazine) is an American trade journal that covers the adult video industry. The New York Times notes that AVN is to pornographic films what Billboard is to records. AVN sponsors an annual convention, called the Adult Entertainment Expo or AEE, in Las Vegas, Nevada along with an award show for the adult industry modeled after the Oscars.
AVN rates adult films and tracks news developments in the industry. An AVN issue can feature over 500 movie reviews. The magazine is about 80% ads and is targeted at adult-video retailers. Author David Foster Wallace has described AVN articles to be more like infomercials than articles, but he also described the AVN magazine as "sort of the Variety of the US porn industry."
Paul Fishbein, Irv Slifkin, and Barry Rosenblatt founded AVN in 1983 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Slifkin left in 1984; having lost interest in reviewing adult movies due to the industry's transition from to videos. Rosenblatt and Fishbein had a falling out in 1987. Eventually, Fishbein moved the magazine to the San Fernando Valley where it operates to this day. Fishbein sold the company in 2010.
AVN is widely quoted for various figures about the adult industry and its revenues.AVN estimated that the sales and rentals of adult videos topped four billion dollars in 2000 and 2002.Forbes has called this figure "baseless and wildly inflated". When Forbes asked AVN how it arrived at this figure, the managing editor responded, "I don't know the exact methodology... It's a pie chart." When asked to separate the figures for sales versus rentals, a standard practice among those who cover the video industry, the editor did not think those figures were available. Adams Media Research noted that no one tracked the adult video business with rigor or precision and that the most generous estimate of sales and rentals combined was $1.8 billion.AVN estimated that adult industry revenue in 2005 was $12.6 billion with $2.5 billion of that coming from the Internet. However, ABC News reported that this figure could not be independently verified. According to Michael Goodman of the Yankee Group, it is difficult to estimate for an industry where few companies are public and new providers continually appear.
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