I would hazzard a guess that it's because the adult business doesn't pay as far as design goes. I used to do corporate web design and I could get $5,000 for a fairly simple web design project. Why would I take on an adult job when people want to pay $100 for 20 banners or a few hundred for a paysite design when I could make several times that doing a corporate design?

Unfortunately, it's a matter of getting what you pay for. Generally speaking I find labouring in the adult business is cheap labour. Sites want you to write reviews for $10 or $20 or maybe $25 a review, but I could make several times that writing for mainstream.

So I would say that the good designers have either moved on to bigger and better things, or they're doing it for themselves. What's left behind are a couple of good designers willing to stick it out in adult because they make a decent living by pumping out quantity. But for me, it's just not worth my time to take on design work, I'd rather build a new site for myself.

I find it all rather interesting because a paysite has the potential of making the site owner thousands of dollars, so does good writing, but for some reason most of the people who work in the adult business are cheap and don't want to pay a good wage -- they want the moon for what they do pay, but they don't want to pay much. And then you get off-shore Asians willing to cut the price even further and a local designer just can't compete with that.

Cheers,
Michael