>>2901935no, it'll never be popular. At least not in a traditional hentai format.
The biggest chance yaoi hentai had was in the mid-to-late 90s when gay subtext was everywhere in mainstream shit like FAKE and saiyuki and x/1999. The reality is that mainstream manga is a lot less gay now than it was then and I don't see it getting any gayer. Probably tied to the death of shoujo, but it's hard to say. That's also the era when most yaoi hentai was made.
Hentai in general isn't as profitable anymore either. Which is why most of it that isn't in a few specific studios is degrading in quality, episodes are getting shorter, there are a lot more animation shortcuts being used.
Also. The biggest consumer of man/man stuff in japan is still women. And statistically women don't buy porn at anywhere near the rate that men do. Don't know why gay men don't drive the market in Japan the way they do in the US. It probably has more to do with culture than the crying prettyboy/bara divide. If there were a bunch of homos willing to pay enough money for a studio to make bara hentai, it would likely exist.
The rise of the gay VN and indie games, especially western ones, is probably the closest we'll get to a yaoi boom in the current era. Wouldn't surprise me if short animations created by one animator and posted with an accompanying prose story, like an animated light novel, also started to boom pretty soon. Cheap to make since one animator or a small studio can handle making a handful of animated scenes, but the prose can also satisfy a need for a story and characters.
So there will always be gay hentai-adjacent porn, but the full on yaoi hentai ship has sailed.
Sorry for the long post. Can't sleep.
