I am going to write smut

[Jamminrabbit]

The only issue with your comparison is you’re effectively comparing a smaller niche in writing to everything else out there rather than another niche of writing itself. You’re comparing apples and oranges. I’m not arguing or anything it’s just that your scientific process and statistical analysis is flawed here.

If you want to use this method of analysis you’d need to have a scaling factor. You’d figure out what percentage of adult writing is with respect to all writing. With that you can correct for the difference in sizes.

I’m just genuinely curious about the scaling in this case is all. If the two bases were in a theoretical situation to be equal, what would be the actual result?

You're thinking with the false equivalency that non-adult vs adult writing is a comparison between fiction, sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, etc against porn. That is incorrect, because you disregard that those very same genres have adult counterparts.

It is adult <insert genre here> vs non adult <insert same genre here>. To say "effectively comparing smaller niche" would be like describing a comparison between (all) non-adult writing vs futanari (niche) which is wrong.

Here, however, we are actually comparing non-adult writing (all niches included because nothing was filtered out) vs adult writing (all niches included because nothing was filtered out). Now say we're talking about isekai vs just plain smut? There is no competition, even something as niche as LITRPG and gamelit, both which have only just been gaining traction in the past few years whereas erotica has been around for centuries, currently blows any other genres out of the water in competition.

Additionally, erotic romance is a gargantuan titan on the field. You can see the evidence on Amazon where the genre has completely dominated the writing field.

You would be hard pressed to find a porn writer approach anything near someone like Shirtaloon's He Who Fights With Monsters

 

[Deeprotsorcerer]

When I spoke earlier, I was talking about how easy it is to carve out a piece of the NSFW market due to the work currently occupying the top. Not the maximum earning potential of the niche itself. I agree with @Jamminrabbit that writing good erotic content is hard, and that it isn't a path to easy money. All writing is hard. I've been doing it for seven years and it still feels like I have to plunge an acid doused thumb wrist deep into a necrotizing ulcer to get a single sentence out sometimes.

But. But... look at some of the titans of smut and compare them to the titans of cleaner genres. The latter tends to be of higher quality (the reason why is sort of a chicken or egg problem) so the former should prove easier to dethrone. Easy being relative.