RN
Trend pieces age worse than almost any other kind of writing, which makes them unusually useful later. The predictions are date-stamped, the reasoning is on the page, and four years on you can simply check.
This is the second half of a list written in February 2022, when the pandemic was still shaping most of what the industry did. Rather than restate it, here is what happened to each thing on it.
The one that turned out to be permanent: audio
Audio erotica was the entry most likely to read as filler in 2022 — a novelty format someone had noticed. It was the only one that became infrastructure.
Quinn is the clearest case. Caroline Spiegel launched it as a website in 2019, took it to a mobile app in 2021, and then did the thing that separates a product from a moment: she changed the model when the first one did not work. The site began as free user-submitted writing and audio with tipping, and ended up a paid subscription service carrying audio only, paying its stronger creators up front. It raised $3.2 million in 2022. Dipsea, Emjoy and Coral occupy adjacent positions, with Dipsea having raised roughly $5.5 million.
Two details explain the survival. First, audio has a production floor low enough for individual creators and a ceiling high enough for scripted studio work, so the same format supports both ends of a market. Second — and this is the part the original list missed entirely — the audience skews heavily female, in a sector where nearly every other format's economics assume it does not. That was not a kink trend. It was a demographic the industry had been failing to serve, finding a format that suited it.
If ASMR-adjacent material is what you are after specifically, ASMR sites are a separate category with their own conventions.
The one that died with the lockdowns: group video
Video-call group sex was the most 2020 thing on the list, and it did not outlive the conditions that produced it.
The obvious reason is that the conditions ended. The less obvious one is that the platform hosting it never wanted it. Zoom's Acceptable Use Guidelines — first published under that name in October 2020, right in the middle of the phenomenon — prohibit adult content and most nudity, with permanent account suspension available as an enforcement outcome. People were not building on a platform that tolerated them; they were using a business tool until it noticed.
What replaced it is instructive. The functionality did not vanish, it migrated to services designed for it, where the group-video feature sits inside a cam site rather than a conferencing app. That is the normal end state for improvised behaviour on a general-purpose platform: it either gets absorbed by a purpose-built product or it stops. Here it was absorbed, and the live cam sites category is where it ended up.
The one that was never a trend: state-by-state kink
The original list ran through American states and assigned each a signature fetish based on top search terms. It is a fun format and it is not evidence of anything.
The source for that kind of claim is a tube site's own annual review — a marketing document, published by a company with a direct interest in being written about, drawn from its own logged searches and not audited by anyone. Those reports are still being published; there have been editions right through to last year. They are perfectly real as a description of what was typed into one search box. They are not a portrait of a state's sexual character, and treating a single-year search ranking as one is the specific error the format encourages.
Search rankings are also dominated by whatever was in the news, and by the way autocomplete steers people into typing the same phrase. That is why these lists so often surface a term with no plausible erotic content at all — a fast-food chain, a television show — and the honest read is that a search box collects everything, not that a state has a fetish.
The one that stopped being a trend by becoming normal
Trans performers were on the 2022 list as a rising category. The framing has aged badly, and not only because of the language it was written in — the terms that piece used are slurs, and there is no reason to carry them forward.
The substantive point is that "rising trend" was the wrong description then and is a stranger one now. Trans performers have been working in the industry for decades. What changed over the last several years was distribution and self-determination: creator platforms let performers set their own terms rather than work exclusively within a category defined by studios for a presumed cisgender male viewer. That is a structural shift in who controls the work, and it is genuinely more interesting than a popularity ranking. It is also why the trans category now looks less like one genre and more like a distribution channel.
The crossover story, which turned out to be a real one
The list flagged mainstream performers moving into adult work, using Maitland Ward as the example. That one holds up, though not in the shape it was predicted.
Ward left mainstream acting in 2007 and began adult work in 2019. What made her case notable was not a strong year — it was that she treated the move as a career with a narrative rather than an ending, and then wrote the book. She has published a memoir about the transition and has been developing a television adaptation of it, which is not the trajectory the older version of this story assumed was available.
The prediction underneath the 2022 entry was that the stigma was weakening. Four years of evidence say: partially, and asymmetrically. A performer with existing name recognition and a story about autonomy can convert the move into mainstream press. That is not the same as the stigma lifting for performers without one, and the difference matters more than the headline.
What the exercise is actually good for
Four entries, four different fates: one built a business, one was a temporary use of the wrong tool, one was never real, and one was misdescribed. None of that was knowable in 2022, which is the point.
The tell, in hindsight, is whether a trend had economics behind it or only attention. Audio had a cost structure and an underserved audience. Group video had a moment and a hostile host. If you want a general rule for reading the next one of these lists, that is the one worth having — ask what would have to be true for the thing to still exist in three years, and whether anyone is being paid for it now.