Check out some of these statistics on the porn industry. They're staggering.

At $13.3 billion, the 2006 revenues of the sex and porn industry in the United States are bigger than the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball combined. Worldwide sex industry sales for 2006 are reported to be $97 billion. To put this in perspective, Microsoft, who sells the operating system used on most of the computers in the world (in addition to other software) reported sales of $44.8 billion in 2006.

Obviously, porn is insanely big business. The same page reports that the industry cranks out about 11,000 movies per year. Non-porn American studios do about 400-500 (although that number itself has been creeping steadily upwards as technology decreases filmmaking costs and the distribution system flattens.)

The obvious question: Why do we need 11,000 new porn movies a year? Shouldn't there be some porn event horizon, beyond which we simply don't need any more movies? Is there really a ravening fan base out there, desperately awaiting the arrival of Booty Talk 67? Who would the industry alienate if they said, "Hey, you know what? There're enough dirty movies out there already. Here's a catalog, go order some old ones."

Especially when so many of them are just one in an on- (and on- and on-) going series. Who's going to notice if they slip in some footage from a previous entry? Are there porn mavens familiar with every frame of Screw My Wife Please #24 who are going to raise holy hell if they notice a repeat 15 titles down the road?

These are the questions that keep me up at night. Well, that and my breathless anticipation of Thick-n-Chunky Fat Freakz 2.