Why pornographers no longer love the web

http://www.economist.com/node/17046637

by gamble • 16 years ago

67 54 16 years ago

pigbucket• 16 years ago

I see a big national campaign here.

On blogs and t-shirts and billboards. And in the movies themselves: Tattooed onto the butt of every pornstar. Worked elegantly into the already finely wrought dialogue. Exclaimed with uncontainable despair on the brink of orgasm:

"Home Uploading is Killing Porn! And it's Illegal!"

(In less colorful times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music )

Wicked funny last line by the way, not so much for the silly pun as for the jaded supercilious tone of the delivery.

waitingforgodel3• 16 years ago

The reporter seems confused.

1. Craigslist is NOT a pornographer, so talking about the voluntary (and not for lack of users) removal of their adult section doesn't make sense.

2. I think we all understand that at any time some websites will be shrinking, if we're going to talk about pornographers as a whole let's see some statistics about pornographers as a whole.

3. I would be very interested to know which sites are growing and which are shrinking. My guess is that themed sites are loving all the piracy, because some percentage of customers will want to see more of the same. Random porn scrapyards are probably getting it the worst, because that's exactly what's being offered for free.

-wfg

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

In regards to #1, I think you read the article wrong.

These are tough times for peddlers of e-sex. Craigslist, a huge online marketplace, closed the “adult services” area of its website last week, under pressure from the attorney-general of Connecticut, a crusader against prostitution. That will mildly inconvenience internet pimps, but they will soon move to new websites. Pornographers are in bigger trouble, thanks to technology

waitingforgodel3• 16 years ago

Fair enough. Craigslist posters aren't pornographers either (even according to the article they're engaged in prostitution, not pornography).

The writer shouldn't have spent 87 out of 312 words talking about an only tangentially related topic (do we really think that Pornographers No Longer Love The Web because craigslist stopped letting local prostitutes post ads?)

sown• 16 years ago

I think the industry is ripe for change.

Consider the price for a 2 hour video. It used to be the typical price can be $20 - $40, even more for higher-end material and this was a quite a several years ago. That's kind of steep.

People would rent videos, though, sometimes half a dozen at a time. They didn't watch all 12 hours; they just fast-forwarded to the parts they wanted to see.

So, it seems the price people are willing to pay is much, much lower and the industry will have to adapt to it, I guess.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

I would love to (assuming it was any good, and the price reasonable) but I don't want my credit company to this.

So no, I won't be paying for porn.

points• 16 years ago

These days you can call a premium rate number, send a premium SMS message, etc (So I'm told)...

yason• 16 years ago

This is interesting. Why do you think it matters? If I cared at all, I'd be more concerned about all the other entries on the credit card bill that probably personify myself better than some random xxx site. By now, I think they already know that some non-marginal percentage (I would assume) of male credit cards have been used to buy porn.

jarin7• 16 years ago

I used to work at a large porn company, and the porn industry has been hurting for a long time. They're completely reliant on affiliate traffic (usually paying 60-70% revenue share), because the online porn industry is so competitive that it's extremely difficult or impossible to generate your own traffic.

It's gotten so bad that porn sites are now giving content to the tube sites with affiliate links, in hopes of mitigating losses.

When I worked at that company, I made an "iTunes Store for porn" that did very well on launch, selling full non-DRM scenes for $1.99 each [1]. We even had companies like Hustler, Vivid, and Playboy desperately wanting to get their content into it (they're great at selling DVDs but never quite got the hang of online porn). Unfortunately, I never got the marketing support or budget I needed to keep it going, and the management wanted to keep it exclusive to our brand, so it died off pretty quickly.

It's a shame, I think it could have completely revitalized a struggling industry ("The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it"). I would love to build something like it again, but unfortunately it would be pretty difficult without the resources or industry connections I had while working there.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame...

kmfrk• 16 years ago

>I used to work at a large porn company, and the porn industry has been hurting for a long time.

That had to be intentional.

On another note, what insight did your market research yield with regards to the store? I would assume that a lot of people would be turned away at the prospect of porn-related services showing up in their credit card statement, just to name one assumption.

The online porn business actually makes for an interesting study, come to think of it.

wizard_2• 16 years ago

Who sees your credit card statement? You get it mailed, you see it online, its fairly private.

jdietrich• 16 years ago

For the record, almost every business of a sensitive nature uses a bland, nondescript name for the credit card statement and mentions it in big print in their checkout. This obviously increases chargebacks substantially, but it's standard practice so I would imagine is well worth the cost.

kiba4• 16 years ago

It's a shame, I think it could have completely revitalized a struggling industry ("The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it"). I would love to build something like it again, but unfortunately it would be pretty difficult without the resources or industry connections I had while working there.

Why would it be a "struggling" industry if in fact porn are getting more free and easier to access? It's a thriving industry even if players are hurting.

jarin7• 16 years ago

It's almost exactly like the music industry. We all want our music and our porn for free.

Only thing is it costs money to make new content (unlike music, there isn't a big 'indie' porn scene), and someone has to pay for it. That's why I thought following the iTunes Store model was so great, because it's a proven business model and the one market where Apple will never, ever compete with you :)

al05• 16 years ago

Yep, I've seen affiliate traffic go for stupid prices, were they could not possibly be making money on it.

I've seen websites set up, just for the purpose of earning money of affiliates.

jarin7• 16 years ago

They're called TGPs (thumbnail gallery posts, although most of them include video now), and they have been around forever. They're the primary type of affiliate site.

jrockway• 16 years ago

I think the problem is that it's too difficult to pay for the porn compared to torrenting it. Nobody wants their credit card company to know they're looking at porn (as though they care), and nobody wants to deal with the shady auto-renew-every-month business model.

99c-per-video paid for with some generic account (paypal or google checkout -like) would make everyone's lives much easier. No strange charges for your bank to see, no remembering-to-cancel hassle, and cheap enough that you don't worry too much about the price. (And, nobody will pay the $30 for a one-month subscription, rip all 10 years of archives from your site, and post it to Usenet. If you want all 8000 back episodes, you pay $8000.)

They're still doing a lot better than Hollywood, though; at least there is no DRM.

barrkel2• 16 years ago

I think paying for porn is easier than torrenting it if you have any discrimination at all in what you're after.

How would a generic account be any better than a credit card? How about a pre-paid credit card? Unless the account is usable for purchases other than porn, it will look just as odd on a credit card statement / bank transfer etc. Paypal is a mess as it is, and even still Checkout is doing a poor job of competing with it.

I also suspect 99c videos wouldn't be competitive with current products. If we're talking impulse purchases here, such that free porn clip sites aren't doing it, I think there's something else going on. Porn vendors have to walk a tightrope: show enough of what's available to encourage the purchase, but not so much that the customer gets satisfaction too early. I think the way they prod the customer over the line is by promising a lot in return for the commitment. And of course, they're betting that the commitment lasts longer than is in the customer's best interests.

jarin7• 16 years ago

Most porn companies are registered (and listed on credit card statements) under innocuous-sounding names anyway, partly to prevent wives/girlfriends from finding out and partly so you don't remember to cancel your subscription.

WilliamLP• 16 years ago

> I think paying for porn is easier than torrenting it if you have any discrimination at all in what you're after.

You sound like someone who has never used BitTorrent effectively!

elblanco• 16 years ago

People pay for porn? If there's one thing you can get terrabytes of for free on the internet with only the most rudimentary search skills, it's porn...of all flavors.

Right-click and save-as is the easiest way to get it. FLV extractors get the rest, and if anything is even slightly harder it's not like there aren't hundreds of thousands of other sites.

kragen• 16 years ago

> Nobody wants their credit card company to know they're looking at porn (as though they care),

There's an interesting and testable hypothesis hiding behind that offhand remark: is there a legal market for information about who buys porn? Are people who buy porn differently creditworthy than people who don't? For example, maybe they have more money (more creditworthy), or poorer impulse control (less creditworthy), or less intelligence (makes it harder for them to pay but also harder to declare bankruptcy, dispute collections, etc.). Maybe there are other customers who would be interested in this data as well: health insurers, or auto insurers, or private investigators, or political or religious opponents. Or, obviously, competing porn merchants, who would love to have a list of leads who are already known to be willing to spend money on porn.

I have this vague memory of an article about how it turned out that people who bought "responsible" products like, I forget, in-wall house insulation or vinyl siding, were much more likely to pay their debts than people who spent money in strip clubs --- even when they were matched for income, age, and gender. Unfortunately my vague memory is not enough to retrieve this from a search engine.

dmoney• 16 years ago

There's also the concern of just how securely these sites treat your credit card data. I know of one that ignores your "forget my card after this transaction" preference, and has you type your password in normal text field, and may possibly have led to fraudulent charges. Maybe this experience isn't typical but cough the user in question was hesitant to pay on other sites after that, even when the price would be totally reasonable.

kiba4• 16 years ago

You don't torrent porns but you go to porn version of youtube to watch it.

RBr• 16 years ago

1) Piracy is a very difficult problem to solve and like always, porn is on the forefront of this emerging technology. If there is a solution to it, the internet porn folks are going to find it soon. If they don't find the solution, there is going to be a major change to the way that media is distributed online.

2) The online porn industry is cannibalizing itself. Those tube sites must cost a lot of money (in bandwidth costs) to run. Other online porn companies are buying ads on those sites and some content companies are paying to have their content featured. Why? Seriously? Why would advertisers pay for something they know will continue to degrade the industry as a whole? I understand that organizing something like this would be tough, but if all of the people stopped buying ads on the tube sites, they would be gone in a month.

3) Advertising income is down all over the web and no one (porn or not) is breaking new ground. We're looking at the same ads at the same times in the same places. Traditionally, advertising has evolved and changed so that people don't become desensitized to it. I don't think that we're being creative enough with the way we create and place our advertising online. Naked or not, refining the way that we present and consume ads will be an important evolution of the web.

jasonlotito• 16 years ago

1. Piracy and free stuff are hurting. Do you know what we are doing to combat it? The goal this year has been to offer increased quality and enhanced services. We can't stop pirates or free content. We can, however, offer a better service. This means catering to a wide variety of wants. You'd be surprised, not everyone is looking for a quick fix. We have customers that have been around for years.

2. Advertising via this method brings in customers. There are things being done this way. Don't assume all free content is "free."

3. See 1. By building in new features, and giving existing customers better, quality choices, and new ways to access that content, is helping. You'd be surprised at the numerous things that are done to bring in the customers. All legit, all above board, and all surprisingly effective.

It's what I love about this industry.

jakevoytko• 16 years ago

This reminded me of the pre-Google days, when pornographers really loved the web. Porn sites were extremely effective at gaming search engines, so several of the top-10 results for most search engines were usually porn. That sounds harmless, but popup blockers didn't exist yet (or they were unknown), and IE4 and IE5 had no problems letting popups spawn. Landing on one of these pages led to a potentially irreversible sea of porn popups, and a chance that your computer would be infected with a virus. Since this was pre-Google, odds are good that every popup window was profitable via ad platforms that paid per impression. Those were the days.

joe_the_user• 16 years ago

Just because there are lots of ads for Viagra in your in-box doesn't mean the pharmaceutical industry loves the Internet.

alexl2• 16 years ago

Well, tube sites have ads going to dating sites. Dump the porn, click here to find someone and screw each other's brains out. Tube sites will always have someone buying ad space. The solution, if you ask me, is interactivity. Wanna know what it's like to do it with pornstar X? Buy the interactive DVD. That's impossible to rip on tube sites. Even a dvdrip torrent is useless because it destroys the interactivity.

Making sure everyone buys and does not pirate? Simple, offer some sort of hardware enhancing interactivity. Without it it's not fun anymore. There you go - torrents, tube sites, anything is down the toilet. Maybe there will be a new problem, people who clone the equipments and sell them cheaper, but that's already a different story.

jarin7• 16 years ago

Designing, manufacturing and selling computerized sex toys is the simple solution?

alexl2• 16 years ago

Yes, simple as in "sureshot" :) Also, keep in mind that you only have to design the hardware once and only the content you sell is different. Debugging the hardware isn't something you do with every DVD/BluRay release.

c00p3r• 16 years ago

Let me guess - free user-generated-content sites everyone knows and a ban from an iPhone? ^_^

w1ntermute• 16 years ago

The YouTube video referred to in the article (SFW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xNzsTHA1nI

p01nd3xt3r• 16 years ago

I have and currently work for adult companies (AFF / Stockroom / AEBN etc...) and this problem is even bigger then this article explains. Several companies have closed their doors. One interesting thing I have found is that niche / fetish sites are immune to this because their content is so unique (and sometimes disturbing) that tube sites wont run it and cam sites are doing better than ever. The sites bitching about their content being pirated need to innovate and do so in a way that can not be stolen. AEBN attempted to do this w/ the real-touch but failed miserably because the thought of having sex w/ a machine does not appeal to men and it was far to expensive ($299.00 a unit & 1 dollar a minute).

mkramlich• 16 years ago

The biggest problem the online porn industry has was not specifically said in the OA. It is the fact that once an image, video or story is released anywhere on the net in non-DRM form, it can be saved and shared effectively forever out in the bits-are-free ecosystem. And a good work of art (even where the art is porn) is timeless. The world could stop producing any new porn/erotica today, permanently, and the existing supply of free stuff out there should make the vast majority of porn consumers satisfied for the rest of their lives.

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

This Levitt/Dubner article about prostitution argues that the increased availability of premarital sex hurt the prostitution "industry":

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertai...

Perhaps societal changes are decreasing the stigmatization associated with on-camera participation in the porn industry, and the result is increased availability of actresses? Supply up, price down? Is Reddit's Gonewild the equivalent of the Levitt/Dubner "premarital sex as a substitute good" argument? What about Girls Gone Wild? Aren't the "actresses" trading their time for free publicity?

Hasn't the porn industry relied for years on the illicit nature of its product as a means of avoiding consumer price comparison and the free exchange of information? Are online porn reviews preventing second-rate products from being profitable? I recall reading that, as an experiment, one city made on-site ticket scalping legal as long as it happened in some particular place (a roped-off area in a park across from the stadium or something similar), and the free flow of information led to lower prices. As porn actresses achieve mainstream fame (Sasha Grey, etc.), is it becoming more socially acceptable for men to talk to each other about porn and give recommendations? As with car prices, are better educated consumers becoming more powerful relative to the producers?

Fundamentally, if there were no social repercussions from participation in the porn industry, wouldn't more women choose to "go on cam" between classes or after the kids go to bed as a means of income? What if a short-lived "career" as a porn actress or stripper no longer carried a lifelong stigma? I believe we are seeing the economic impact on the porn industry as these societal barriers to industry participation begin to decrease.

Yes, the OP's linked article is about piracy, but this problem seems like the tip of the iceberg for an industry which is likely experiencing more fundamental structural change.

[Note that I've entirely ignored male participation in the porn industry as I've read that the availability of men is not a rate-limiting factor for straight porn. And, I've ignored gay porn entirely.]

ryanpetrich• 16 years ago

Don't copy that floppy!

Charuru• 16 years ago

Porn is suffering from the same circumstances as other media, movie and music industries, except they don't have the fall backs those other industries do, concerts and theaters, so they're on the front lines.

But the solution is the same though, the industry will indubitably compress, it's currently way oversized for what it is, there is such a plethora of porn produced with very little difference in quality, it's a commodity product that deserves commodity pricing.

The ones who'll survive this contraction are the ones focusing on niche or high quality works that premium users will pay for. The low quality porn market will probably just be completely swallowed up by amateurs... in other words, power in that market will shift from content creators to aggregators.