The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music, people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.
I've been banging on about this point for years. Filesharing doesn't hurt megacorps, who have vast marketing departments that reliably shepherd people through the fare gates or monetize them in other ways, but indie and niche performers and creators suffer terribly because they don't have a big capital pile in addition to their labor and natural assets (whatever those happen to be).
Filehsaring has a great deal to recommend it, but ultimately it comes down to wanting something for nothing (and often whining about the very people whose performances it desires to devalue).
I tend to think that the economic value of porn would have plummeted in the past decade or so even if there were no copyright infringement. Good cameras keep getting more affordable. Today's smartphones have better video capabilities than professional video gear had at the end of the 1990s. It only takes a tiny percentage of people with exhibitionist tendencies to produce and share more new porn than anybody can watch. Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. And in this niche, true professionals have little if any quality advantage over enthusiastic amateurs.
Most of these performers don't care about getting paid.
Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. Gonzo and amateur porn are categories but most porn is made to make a buck. Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street - it's an excuse to ignore their problems, though I appreciate you may not have meant it that way.
Btw I base my views on over a decade in the indie film (not porn) industry, and from having a lot of friends and acquaintances who are sex workers, and who are already having a tough time dealing with FOSTA/SESTA.
> Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true.
He suggested no such thing, you should try reading more carefully.
> Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals.
He also never claimed that.
What he did say was that there's enough amateur exhibitionists who would do it for free and don't care about getting paid to more than satisfy the demand for porn and that's why professionals are going to continue having a hard time being paid.
Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not. The market demonstrates a clear preference for professionally produced material.
> Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not.
That's not a logical conclusion, so no. The market demonstrates a clear preferences for free content, that's what tube sites show; that professional content is popular when free does not demonstrate that professional content matters more than free content. That professional are having such a hard time making money in fact demonstrates the opposite, the market cares more about free than about quality. As long as people are willing to make free porn, which they are, professionals will always struggle to make money. The same is true of much art, music is another example of exactly this phenomenon.
By volume, the vast, vast majority of gay porn on the major sites (pornhub, xtube, xhamster, etc) is amateur. Similarly, if you look at the "most watched" and "top rated categories" only about 1/5 are non-amateur. Straight porn I have no idea.
> That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street
While hard to show real data, I have 14 years of experience in the EMS field were a LOT of our "customers" are homeless. I can say unequivocally that greater than 50% of the homeless in my jurisdiction have no desire to live a "normal" life. That is... life with a job, mortgage/rent and/or insurance... and TAXES. We (tax payers) literally pay for everything and they know it. They abuse the living shit out of the 911 system and emergency rooms because they know they will be treated regardless of the ability to pay.
Do most viewers really care at all about the “script” and instead click on the first video that has someone they find attractive doing the sexual act they want to see?
If I’m right in my assumption about most “tube viewers”, I wonder how much of the “conclusions” made from the data set provide false conclusions due to confirmation bias. If they think folks want to see [insert script narrative] and so they make more videos of that, just because it had lots of views doesn’t mean that more folks wanted to see that specific narrative IMHO.
To the extent analytics are used, I think search analytics are probably influential (certainly, the press releases pornhub regularly puts out about what people are searching for advertises that they have this data available, so I'd be very surprised if it wasn't for sale and used by content creators/distributors). And is suspect that search data provides a lot more information about why people watch particular videos than just view data and assumptions.
I always wonder what is considered NSFW in those offices.
But it's interesting what types of specific UX is created for adult tube sites. For example, on pornhub, it shows which times of the video are viewed by more people using a flame graph type visual above the video timeline. Example of getting the user to value as quick as possible (skip the 'boring' parts).
I suppose the flame graph feature developer could then write on their resume:
“reduced bandwidth costs by $X millions per year by implementing a ‘content of interest’ data visualization. Users’ time-to-success improved 5%”
That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field. Lotta good engineering going on within this, uh, unique, high volume traffic situation.
> That kind of thing makes me wonder what sort of high caliber developers go into this field.
I read long ago that having a porn site on your resume was a pretty strong black mark with non-porn companies, even if you were a developer. Since there's so little crossover an experience sharing between mainstream developers and porn site developers, porn site engineering tended to be relatively sub par. My guess is few high caliber developers go into porn site engineering.
Surely it depends which site - the big sites have serious scale and engineering challenges which will outweigh the seediness aspect while the vast majority of sites are just a CMS paired with a payment processor integration.
Definitely not true. I think every developer understands that porn is pushing the limits of technology. If I saw someone coming from any of the big sites I'd definitely be interested in what they worked on.
Every hiring manager I know only cares about what you worked on, not who you worked for.
If these devs are high caliber, they don't mind the paltry pay. Mindgeek (the Canadian company that owns most NSFW tube sites) is notorious for low engineering pay.
Sometimes I'm thinking about working for decent porn site like pornhub or anything else from their network. It seems in this day and age it is the last thing that brings pure joy and happiness to its customers. If you know what I mean ;-)
Man pornography will die in its own fire. It's quest for optimization and hyperinflation (sic) is sick. That's most probably how brains get addicted short/intense/void.
Maybe. But then again, the "viewership density graph" mentioned by GP, as well as animated previews when hovering over a movie thumbnail, or image previews when you hover over the timeline, or labels on the timeline that tell you what's happening at which point - those are all AFAIK innovations of the porn industry, that are still rarely seen elsewhere, and yet I'd classify them as purely delivering value to the user. In fact, I believe that a streaming service that doesn't implement these features is subpar and is not really designing a user-empowering interface.
Yeah I know that porn streaming videos websites were extremely ~progressists in terms of tech use. Things like youtube got previews years after the fact. But it saddens me twice that only porn websites are doing this u_u;
It does say something about social energy.. (and ~free market in a way). When people just want something, they can happen real fast and real cheap.
I'm a bit dubious about that article, because it spends a lot of time spinning the prevalence of kosher and halal food into an elaborate analogy and presuming future resistance to its existence without even considering "it's something that most people just don't care about either way" as an explanation.
I’d love to sit in a meeting at one of these companies. It has to be surreal discussing trending data in regards to sex, kinks, and quirks objectively in a business setting. The setup is almost something out of a Monty Python skit.
