A bona-fide research firm has made the astonishing prediction that VR porn growth will explode over the next five years, and reach a point where it constitutes a staggering 22% of all spending on adult entertainment online by 2026. Juniper Research base their claim on an expected huge growth in the number of VR headsets sold and an increased ability and willingness to access VR porn with them. The company already estimates the current (2021) virtual reality porn market at an impressive $719 million, but that is relative peanuts compared to the projection of its value of $19 billion by 2026.
Could their figures be accurate, or are these impressive numbers just click bait speculation? As somebody who has promoted virtual reality porn for over 6 years (and before that 3D stereo TV porn for a further 7 years or more) I think that their current numbers are in the right ball park. As a small affiliate I have seen my sales more than double in the last year from 2 or 3 a day to averaging closer to 10. This is largely due to the wildly successful launch of the Oculus Quest 2 in October of last year, although the VR headset market had been growing for a number of months before that. I find it hard to believe that my sales consitute even half of one percent of the total daily sales of VR porn. So if we guesstimate that 2,000 sales are made daily, that would be 730,000 a year. With a boost in sales expected during the Black Friday and holiday season, it seems fairly plausible to me that there may be a million adult VR sales in total during 2021. The average sale is probably over $75 (at least over the course of a subscription), so $719 million spent on VR porn in 2021 may even be an underestimate.
The astonishing growth predicted by Juniper for the next five years is something of a more bold claim, but not at all unlikely. As I mentioned above, sales for myself have increased by over 100% in the last year, and I believe that this is likely with a similer market share as I had in 2020. Looking at stats such as Google Trends and reported sales of VR headsets, I think it’s probable that the VR porn market has doubled since the launch of the Oculus Quest 2 almost a year ago. If it continued doubling for the next five years, we would indeed arrive at a figure close to $19 billion. Consider that the doubling of the last year has been due almost entirely to the sucessful launch of the Oculus Quest 2 headset. Next year, the Oculus Quest 3 is expected to be released. But just as excitingly, PlayStation will release their much anticipated new version of their VR headset, and perhaps most game changingly of all, Apple are expected to finally enter the VR market with their own headset capable of both virtual and augmented reality. And of course, we haven’t even mentioned AR porn yet… (although the full Juniper research report does appear to contain adult AR market predictions as well).
The other main points of the Juniper report are that 97% of the total VR adult content market will be derived from subscriptions, and that the US will be the biggest market for VR porn, contributing 33% of global share (see the diagram below).
The full title of the report is DIGITAL ADULT CONTENT: KEY MONETISATION MODELS, EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES & MARKET FORECASTS 2021-2026. You can get a summary of highlights for free by registering at the Juniper website, but the full report will cost you around $4,000.
