AVN (magazine)

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AVN (magazine)

Adult Video News (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 in Las Vegas, Nevada along with an award show for the adult industry modeled after the Oscars.^[1]^[2]

AVN rates adult films and track news developments in the industry. An AVN issue can feature over 500 movie reviews.^[3]^[4] The magazine is about 80 percent ads and is targeted at adult-video retailers. David Foster Wallace has described AVN articles to be more like infomercials than articles.^[5]

History

Notable alumni

Adult Entertainment Expo
Award Shows

AVN Adult Movie Awards
GayVN Awards

References
External links

History

Paul Fishbein, Irv Slifkin, and Barry Rosenblatt founded AVN in 1983 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Slifkin left in 1984; having become disinterested in reviewing adult movies due to the industry's transition from film to videos. Rosenblatt and Fishbein had a falling out in 1987. Eventually, Fishbein moved the magazine to San Fernando Valley.^[6]

AVN was widely quoted for various figures about the adult industry and its revenues.^[7]^[8]^[9] AVN estimated that the sales and rentals of adult videos topped four billion dollars in 2000^[7] and 2002^[8]. Forbes has called this figure "baseless and wildly inflated". When Forbes asked AVN on 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 any rigor or precision and that the most generous estimate is that sales and rentals combined were no higher than $1.8 billion.^[7] AVN estimated that adult industry revenue in 2005 was 12.6 billion dollars with 2.5 billion of that coming from the internet. However, ABC News reported that this figure could not be independently verified.^[9]

Notable alumni

Mark Kulkis, CEO of Kick Ass Pictures: former managing editor^[10]
Eli Cross (as Mark Logan): former managing editor^[11]
Gram Ponante: former managing editor, AVN.com^[12]

Adult Entertainment Expo

AVN sponsors an annual convention, the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE), held each January in Las Vegas. Nevada. The Expo is the largest pornography industry trade show in the United States.^[13]

Award Shows

AVN Adult Movie Awards

AVN also hosts an award show for the adult industry modeled after the Oscars.^[14]^[15]^[16] The awards feature over 100 categories and has an attendance of over 3500 people.^[17] David Foster Wallace skeptically noted that AVN, in 1997, reviewed over 4,000 new release in every category in comparison to the 375 films that the Academy Awards were required to see for the Oscars.^[5] This number increased to 8,000 for the 2008 Awards and Paul Fishbein comments that it is "a very long, horrible process".^[18] The New York Times describe the "precise criteria for winning an AVN are not, well, explicit".^[19]

Sports columnist Bill Simmons commented that the Awards were "the most secretly captivating telecasts on TV" alongside the National Spelling Bee and Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.^[20] Violet Blue, the sex writer, describes the Awards as "big backslapping event where the same companies and same names win year after year... To think of the "porn Oscars" as a true representation of porn's very best is like having sex with a Jenna Jameson love doll and telling your friends you had sex with the porn star".^[21] Even Tyla Winn, an award winner, had trouble remembering one of her sex scenes that was nominated.^[19]

GayVN Awards

AVN also sponsors the GAYVN Awards which are presented annually to honor work done in the gay pornography industry. Awards for gay adult video were a part of the AVN awards from 1988?1998. In 1999, AVN decided to separately host the GayVN Awards.