JAV Studio President says ‘The Industry is Dying’

Published : September 19th, 2025 Written by Fried Chikan

Hearing insight about the JAV industry is always interesting, especially when it’s from people within the industry. This was the case when the president of the studio Celeb no Tomo, known online as Hakusuiriki, spoke out about his dinner conversations with other fellow heads of studios. And he walked away from that conversation with grim tidings.

“The current AV industry… is in its worst state ever.”

Hakusuiriki had a very dire outlook for the health of the industry, saying that 10 years from now the number of studios and production companies will “probably shrink to less than half what we have now”. Lamenting how it will affect rank-and-file workers and actors in the business. How the industry's output will “likely fall to less than one-fifth of today’s”. Very inflammatory language if a bit hyperbolic.

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DASS-377

This poor prognosis is mirrored by many within the industry. There’s been a wave of exits from well-known actresses, while those lower on the totem pole lament the lack of work. Support staff are scrambling for jobs while producers complain they can’t push out as many films. Hakusuiriki lays the blame at a few culprits, so let’s walk through them and, more importantly, try to dissect what’s wrong with the AV industry and the paths to success it can take in the future.

Piracy

Hakusuiriki lays a big slice of the blame pie on piracy, and for good reason. The idea of free and easy-to-access porn is ingrained in people to the point where they even question the act of buying smut. He places the blame on the East Asian region, and without naming names, though it’s most likely referring to China, given its notorious piracy scene.

“Using someone else’s intellectual property without permission is stealing. I’ll say it again—it’s theft. And especially rampant are pirated copies from East Asia.”

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SSIS-495 The Man Who Ruined My Life Yura Kano

This is an issue that plagues not just JAV or porn but also the Film, TV, Music, and Video Game industries. It’s an issue they have all long tried to fight against, to middling results. Earlier this year, the JAV industry celebrated a big win after taking down a very well-known JAV piracy tube site. However, it was promptly brought back up and replaced with another site. All it really caused was a headache for Mio Ishikawa, a mascot for JAV’s anti-piracy push and the cover image for their takedown page. To add insult to injury, the newly reloaded pirate site made it so that all of Mio’s videos were Ad-free.

Piracy is a losing battle. If film, music, and video games can’t beat it, how can porn, which has less financial and political backing, do any better? Steam co-founder Gabe Newell is infamously quoted for saying that “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”. I don’t know if I entirely agree with that statement, nor if it can apply to porn. What I do know is that some studies and reports saw a decline in piracy for TV, Film, and Music in the 2010s. This was also the time of the rise of subscription-based services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, Pandora, Video-on-Demand, and the like. When people have access to low-cost, easy-to-use services with high-quality sources, they will prefer that over piracy.

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Me hearing that JAV's future is bleak (IPX-849)

The Paying Fans

I think rather than focusing on fighting pirates, JAV should focus on servicing its paying user base. Yes, there are people out there willing to pay for their smut. Paying for something you enjoy, what a crazy idea. However, paying fans and the fans who would be willing to pay are sorely underserved. After the abandonment of R18, there haven’t been any good alternative storefronts for international fans. Who else lost their entire R18 library when the site went down?

The biggest barriers to entry to JAV are, in my opinion, language, mosaics, and access, in that order. People would love to understand what the performers are saying, especially for the more plot-heavy JAV, which is what ZENRA is built on. While mosaics are a clear turnoff when uncensored alternatives exist, the talent and videos are unique to JAV and will draw in people. However, of the three, I think the biggest barrier is the lack of access outside of Japan. Hakusuiriki mentions another reason for sounding the alarm bells on JAV's future: the future population of Japan. If the population of Japan stagnates, so does the total viewership of JAV. So, how can the market be expected to grow if it’s mostly contained to Japan?

"Japan's population is rapidly declining. In other words... the number of people watching AV is steadily decreasing."

As an international fan, I can’t tell you all the hurdles I have to go through if I want to buy a legal piece of JAV from official storefronts. Payment processor issues, IP Region bans, VPN blocks, language barriers, or DRM restrictions. That’s not even getting into physical media and merchandise, which is a whole other pricey ballgame. There will always be people who want to pirate and steal stuff, but if you give users an attractive option over piracy. Something affordable, easy to use, convenient, and the users will come. Literally.

Netflix for Porn

One of the best things that has come from AV platforms in recent years has been their subscription services. Both FANZA, SOD, and MGStage offer low-cost streaming video plans. Something closer to Western porn site models, a Netflix of porn basically. The selection is unfortunately limited, and videos are removed from the catalog for whatever reason. But if they expanded the videos with more recent entries, made it more accessible, and marketed it, it could be a very attractive option for JAV fans.

JAV on Netflix?? (Kiss or Die)

Make a Better Product

We’ve gone this far without talking about the product itself, JAV, and the product can be a lot better. Many fans call the time around the early 2000s to mid-2010s, the Golden Ages of JAV. Part of it is nostalgia, but there were tons of things to like about that past era. It was a time when we had thinner mosaics, videos with real raw sex and creampies, a more 'Wild West' time for JAV with crazier themes. And in the early to mid 2010s we saw a boom for Freelancers, whose popularity eclipsed the traditional exclusives at the top for a time. Freelancers that worked on tons of videos and stretched themselves with different genres. Meanwhile, the modern era of JAV has been criticized by people in and out of the industry as being too buttoned up. An era where actresses are sheltered and don’t push themselves with safe videos. Where everything in a video has to be rubber stamped before a shoot, taking out a lot of improvisation and experimentation.

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The future of JAV is itemized (SDDE-727)

To the modern era's credit, I have noticed an uptick in special titles from massive orgies, like with the return of Bako Bus or special team-ups with actresses from across different studios. It’s also an era with the best overall talent pool, in my opinion, and the video quality and productions are top-notch when they want to be. If we brought back the looser, chaotic, and free energy of the past, then we could be looking at a new golden age.

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Less Movies, More Scenes, Less Porn?

Now this is my hottest take of the evening, but maybe movies shouldn’t be the standard? JAV is unique from Western porn in that it doesn’t favor a scene-based format but a full-length feature format, and that might be unsustainable. Actors are already underpaid and vastly outnumbered by women, and are also being overworked to top it all off. It’s no surprise we are seeing so much fake cum being used. How are guys supposed to recover when doing multiple shoots in a day?

MIDV-294 I Was Broken by A Regular Machine Piston... Nozomi Ishihara

That guy is holding on for dear life

Not to say that I want the movie format to go away, it’s part of what I really like about JAV. However, maybe not every title needs to be a full movie? Maybe more studios could switch over to a scene-based model and save the full-length feature titles to the others. Madonna or S1 making full-length films makes sense, Hunter or Switch not as much.

ANG-010 Minami Kozue x Usui Saryu, Private Photoshoot, Godly Lesbian Swimsuit

Do we need these cheap and easy videos as full movies??

Another hot take I have is that maybe there’s too much porn? Perhaps the industry is oversaturating the market and flooding it with too much shovelware of porn. It dilutes the quality of videos, buries others in a sea of smut that piles up, and lowers the value of a video. Japan is one of the biggest makers of porn in the world. When you compare its output to that of America relative to its size, it’s staggering.

Change must happen, whatever it be

There’s been a lot said today. Hakusuiriki’s post really brought up stuff that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. All in all, I know the industry will survive. The future won’t be as dire as he says; however, it is clear the industry is in a poor place, and something needs to change for it to adapt for the future. Whatever that looks like, I'm rooting for them. Not just because I'm a fan of the videos, for the people, not just the actresses, who work in it. People make these videos and try to make a living off of it and deserve better than what they get.