Obscene Losses: How YouPorn is Killing the Adult Entertainment Business

http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile

by jorgeortiz85 • 18 years ago

70 48 18 years ago

kqr22• 18 years ago

The article is actually more than a year old. Traffic seems to be declining at youporn. I wonder if that means dvd sales are up.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/youporn.co...

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

Nah, it means youporn has competitors.

sachinag• 18 years ago

I would make an interesting/funny/insightful comment here if I could leave anonymous comments.

Prrometheus• 18 years ago

redtube, for instance.

shamefacedly• 18 years ago

Porn addict here. Made new account to protect identity.

YouPorn does have competitors. Let's take a look (and see how many double entendres I inadvertently use)

RedTube - First totally free porn site I found.

Pro's - Dead simple UI. Blazing fast load times. You can scrub through videos quickly (to skip over boring parts, this is very important). Also, Looong videos.

Con's - Lots of repeat videos. Few ones that you don't see everywhere else. Not too many ways to drill down through the content. They sacrifice user control for simplicity.

Note: Arrington always mentions this one by name when writing about the porn industry.

Spankwire - Digg for porn. Hard to tell though, their UI is awful.

Pro's - Blazing fast load times. Loooong videos. Ability to scrub through them as they play quickly. Also, a really deep, varied selection of videos. User comments on videos are actually intelligent.

Con's - Doesn't update as frequently as other sites. UI is imprenetrable. I've never voted on anything. I wouldn't know what to click.

Xvideos - Big player.

Pro's - Adds about 30 videos each day. Crazy deep selection of videos. Decent tagging system. Related video algo is pretty good. UI is pretty ugly but serves its purpose.

Con's - Video's are slow to load. You can't skip through them without waiting for them to buffer all over again. Major performance issues here.

Megarotic - One of the big semi-pay sites.

Pro's - Incredible video selection. Really good performance and playback. Can scrub through the videos.

Con's - Costs money to watch more than 4 videos a day on their site. Their video player is getting more and more proprietary, adding popup ads, massive popup controls and branding.

Fantasti.cc - This site's incredible. Social network for porn and people looking for casual sex. Rather than power their own videos they simply scrap embed codes from Xvideos, Pornub and Megarotic and tack on a slick UI and social networking features. I think all this could be done with Drupal and a few modules.

Pro's - Well-designed. Really nicely designed. Enormous selection of videos by sucking in everything on other sites including xvideos, pornhub and youporn. There's also an actual user community of people making collections of videos (a great feature I've not seen anywhere else, letting humans organize and categorize them into weird subsections like "Chicks with flip - flops"). Users review videos. They also create user profiles where they post up amateur photos and video clips. The slick UI sets it all apart from other sites that do the same.

Cons - Because they steal from all the other free sites, videos disappear from the DB. Also, performance is only as good as the sites they steal from. I bet 60% of their content comes from XVideos...which means performance is often terrible.

Pornhub - Slick video site.

Pros - Well-organized. Fast playback. Good selection.

Cons - Has the same videos as everyone else. Front page features stuff that people just watched, so you end up seeing the same clips over and over on the front page.

Conclusion from my own observations: There are loads of competitors. The ability to scrub through videos is crucial but still not available on all sites. Offering a simple UI is important but without advanced search or other organizing features like Fantasti.cc's wonderful user collections one risks losing users (I rarely go to redtube. It's too basic and hard to find new stuff.)

jorgeortiz852• 18 years ago

It looks like pornhub and xvideos have been gaining some market share, but most of the decline is probably due to Alexa changing how it gathers data. Check out how correlated the traffic for all these sites is:

http://widgets.alexa.com/traffic/graph/?r=6m&y=r&z=1...

fallentimes• 18 years ago

Compete disagrees:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youporn.com/?metric=uv

The question is: which is crappier - alexis or compete?

parenthesis• 18 years ago

"The article is actually more than a year old", and has been submitted before:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75206

staunch• 18 years ago

FYI: YouPorn runs on the Perl-based Catalyst framework (supposedly -- not sure how it was verified).

kqr22• 18 years ago

http://catalystsites.org/sites/view_details/55

acangiano• 18 years ago

> Spread the joy!

Spread the joy, indeed.

jrockway• 18 years ago

This makes it awkward when clients or people in my training classes ask me about big Catalyst sites. "Uh, YouPorn..." "What's that?" "Uh..."

hangten• 18 years ago

Seems fairly obvious that you'd not mention it unless you're prepared to explain what exactly it is. Especially considering you have "students" inquiring about it.

mst• 18 years ago

So mention other sites instead - the BBC iPlayer website, vox.com, etc.

Or you just say "two sites in the alexa top 100 that we know about"

It's not rocket science.

krschultz• 18 years ago

YouPorn follows YouTube in pretty much every way. It became popular because it served copyright infringing content that others charged for, and it makes little money.

The major difference however, is that YouPorn followed many pay porn sites and a huge volume of content, as opposed to YouTube which preluded TV really coming onto the web. Often you hear that the TV and movie industries have squandered their opportunity to make money off the web. YouPorn makes a case that no matter what the TV execs or movie execs had done before YouTube, the proliferation of free content would have happened anyway. People like free, even if it is inferior. DVDs have better quality than streaming, even downloading is better than streaming, but free beats 1 cent any day.

unalone3• 18 years ago

I think there's also a difference in the type of content. TV shows offer the possibility of mental stimulation. People will pay for quality. If I was able to, I'd get HBO for the level of programming. There's money to be made from quality.

Porn? Sure, it's wonderful when it's well-produced, but people don't care first and foremost about production value. They watch porn to masturbate in nearly all cases. That means that porn films benefit from shorter, more manageable scenes, and that quality doesn't matter whatsoever. The film industry has a subsection that operates based on quality. Porn profits almost exclusively from access: the easier access is, the more attention.

So TV still has some fight in it. So does the music industry, though I think in both cases there will be changes. Porn? I think that the professional industry is going to be gutted through-and-through. The porn industry can't compete with amateurs.

marvin2• 18 years ago

I agree with your sentiment that there is money to be made from quality, but you're underestimating the unrealized potential of the pornographic industry. The porn industry can't compete with amateurs if it keeps doing what it's always been doing. But that's just because the amateurs make an equivalent product at a lower price.

Most porn sucks (and blows), but one day pornography will be recognized as a proper art form and attract people who actually care about exploring the genre. Yes; porn is used exclusively for masturbation. But it's better to masturbate to a better product.

90% of mainstream pornography consists of dicks going really fast in and out of vaginas, punctuated by some guy blowing his load in the girl's face. It's hard to think of something involving sex that is less exciting and creative than this. The real fun comes from subtle emotional interactions, power play, fantasy and a million other things I haven't thought of. High budgets and production values are worthless if you're only recording cumshots, but there are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and power isn't put to better use.

Assuming that parts of the HN crowd, in fact, watches porn: have any of you, for instance, ever seen a believable reenactment of a sexual fantasy? I sure as hell haven't. There is so much that could be done here. Sex is one of our deepest drives. Pornography has the potential to be one of the most profound art forms we have.

Consider what the advertising industry (clothing, underwear, perfume) is doing. They usually get blamed for destroying the woman's role, setting unrealistic expectations for people's looks, etc. But some of the things these guys/gals make actually has some emotional impact, on a sexual level deeper than what I see in most erotica and pornography. Although a randy ad never conveys any meaning or realism, the writing and acting is so much better. Fine art nudes are rarely effective at getting its viewers horny...advertising is. The highbrow crowd is obviously doing something wrong. Shouldn't artists put their effort where the impact is largest?

The porn industry will, happily, never get bailout money from the government. I'm hopeful that some competition will set the commercial porn studios thinking, or at least drag them down far enough that they can be attacked by teams with less financial clout. YouPorn is good for us, because of its equalizing potential.

netcan• 18 years ago

Actually, from the article, the industry sounds impressive compared to TV/Music. No sign of whining or lobbying. They already heavily diversified. Jumped on ringtones or whatnot. Social networking sites. & all the rest.

Sure the end of copyright is hurting them. But they seem better off the say music studios. At least they're not acting like the world owes them a new business model.

ChaitanyaSai• 18 years ago

Free IS better than 1 cent

http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf

stcredzero• 18 years ago

So instead of just being an industry, porn has firmly entrenched itself as part of our culture -- to the point that everyone is not just a consumer, but also a participant, and it will get harder and harder to make money at it?

Parallels with the music industry as well as movies and video?

lpgauth• 18 years ago

Not really bringing anything to the conversation but 7 page article, really? Way to try to milk those ads...

jorgeortiz852• 18 years ago

There's a link to "View All On One Page"

brandnewlow2• 18 years ago

It was a good article. I clicked my way through. I'm happy to generate ad revenue while consuming an article I liked.

Make something people want.

markessien2• 18 years ago

You "consume" articles?

steveplace• 18 years ago

The implications behind this research are benign, I swear.

The one company I see coming out of this is Brazzers. They seem to have partnered up with YP and a lot of clones to generate traffic and more leads through short "review" videos. And there the only real brand that has been embracing the new shift, including the social aspects.

sireat• 18 years ago

Vivid and others do have a valid point that Youporn could eventually get into a LOT of legal trouble because of age issues.

nihilocrat• 18 years ago

He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a "very cool brand, perhaps the Virgin of adult entertainment."

Did anyone else find this use of words a little amusingly oxymoronic?

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

Soon we will see Twitter for Porn. "@exgrilfriend Having fun with your best friend."

ivey• 18 years ago

http://hotwitter.com/ ... not particularly work-safe, powered by Yonkly

Dilpil• 18 years ago

The major difference between hollywood vs youtube and san fernando vs porntube: $500 million movie may actually be better than some guy in his garage with a video camera. A $50,000 porn movie however, is almost certainly less interesting than a video of two people having real sex.

nazgulnarsil• 18 years ago

when anyone is willing to make regular sex videos and upload them for free the future is in sites like kink. find highly specialized niches and serve the people willing to pay for them. I envision a website where people can request videos of certain themes. pornstars could choose to make certain themed videos and then offer them to customers.