Television companies are complaining they just can’t sell porn like thy use to. Fans are headed to the web instead. Why pay for something you can get for free?

Turns out TV providers made big bucks on the “adult” market. According to the Wall Street Journal, DirecTV cited ‘lower adult buys’ as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. Last week Time Warner Cable Inc.’s said a smaller adult category was responsible for more than a third of the drop in video-on-demand revenue.

But this is not just a story about porn. At least according to an unnamed source in the Journal: > This should be a cautionary tale for the larger content community,” one cable-TV executive said of the porn declines. “This content is devalued to our customers because of the alternative models.