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There's no doubt that times are tough ... but then you don't really need me to tell you that. Everywhere you look you'll get that message and even if you don't read the newspapers or watch the news on TV you still can't escape it. Businesses are closing down, houses are being abandoned and even here in adult you're probably noticing that the checks from your sponsors aren't as fat as they once were.

So at times like this it's wise to protect your income ... do the right thing and don't try and cheat to make extra money because, if you're caught cheating then those slim sponsor checks are going to disappear altogether. If you earn part of your income in this industry by working for someone else then now is definitely not the time to try and cheat your employer either because there may be no other jobs on offer.

Now is the time to work even harder to ensure that you and the business you work for stay afloat.

There's an old saying here in Australia that 'you don't bite the hand that feeds you' because it's obvious that if you do then it's not going to feed you anymore. Someone who worked for me learned that lesson yesterday.

Before all that unpleasantness happened yesterday Steve and I were having a pretty good weekend and one of the interesting parts of it was a discussion with another adult webmaster about what might come next for this industry.

When we first hit the web the adult content was all of a rather generalized nature and it was selling well. When sales began to slow we moved on to some of the more well-known niches as sites like Mike's Apartment began to appear and once again sales were good.

They stayed that way for quite some time ... probably helped by the fact that even more people were coming online so that, as some people began to find the porn offerings repetitive and maybe even boring, new people were just discovering porn.

In the last few years we've seen a move into even more narrow niches as the industry started producing bisexual sites and sites that explored kinky things like feet, sleep and even real spanking. But once again, even before the economy started to go south, sales began to slow because there is just so many ways you can depict even the kinkiest sex and after a while people become bored with seeing the same old same old.

At the same time that we here in adult were beginning to see that decline, over in mainstream they were starting to explore all sorts of new and innovative ways for people to communicate and use the Internet and perhaps it's time that we started to look at what's happening there. Perhaps it's time to start adapting what mainstream is doing and including it in our adult sites.

The guy we were chatting with yesterday even went so far as to suggest that if adult websites don't adapt to the change in the way people are using the Net then many of the well-known adult sites, that currently give their members nothing but images and movies, won't survive much longer.

His view is that the sites that will survive are those that will give their members some form of direct contact with the performers. The 'talent', that many webmasters so easily dismiss now as nothing but sluts to use and discard, will have to become even more talented and spend time actually chatting with the members of the paysite where they appear.

And here you should not be thinking of providing something like a live sex webcam show ... in many ways that business model is just as old as the one the industry is working with right now.

He suggested that sites like Playboy who are already providing that added attraction for members will be the ones that really do well in the years ahead and the sites that don't provide something similar for their members will fail.

It's an interesting view of what is ahead for our industry and there is no doubt that we do need to do something different. Any business that wants to survive needs to continue growing and evolving and I think that the industry has just about reached the limit with its current business model of providing images and video.

But is the next step to put the models in front of a webcam to talk and interact with the site's members? That's something that only time will tell but now is definitely the time to be looking at how and where you will fit in whatever is coming next.