1. See what is new and working in other industries. And replicate them for your industry. Youtube's success gave rise to all the xtubes. The first few people to ride that bandwagon made it big.
2. Select a niche and focus on it. Dominate it. Then use the cash flow from one niche to venture into other niches. Then earn even more cashflow and start buying people out. This picture is an awesome example of parlaying to domination:
http://images.nymag.com/news/features/sextube110207_2_560.jp...
3. When faced with a threat - brainstorm on what dilutes that threat value. "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy..." (But live cams can't be scaled up either. You can only have so many people watching you live.)
4. Being a platform is always better than being a player. People doing live cam shows earn $1200 or so a month. The website where these live cam shows are streamed earn that much too - per person. But they have thousands of such people participating... so $1200*thousands. (Apple will always make more money than a single developer. Facebook will make more money than Zynga.)
Like many, I'm puzzled why one would pay for porn on the internet when so much is given away for free. I don't just mean the amateur stuff--the pay sites give away a ton of their stuff as samples.
I did an experiment once. I picked a particular model, and would follow links to that model whenever they showed up thumb nail sites, trying to get to the sample photo sets for that model--the ones that give you a dozen good photos and then say the full set is available at some particular paid site.
After my collection for that particular model had stopped growing, so I figured I had most or all of the free stuff, I bought a one month membership at the pay site, and grabbed all of that model's material and compared.
There was nothing there I had not acquired already from the sample sets via the thumb nail sites.
It seems to me one should be able to automate this. That is, make an application that you seed with a list of a several free porn sites, such as thumb nail sites. The application would crawl those sites, and follow the links to other such sites, looking for sample photo sets. It would use face recognition to build up sets of photos classified by model. You could pick specific targets from those sets, or point it at targets you identify in your own browsing, and it would seek to find as much free material involving those targets as it can.
> Like many, I'm puzzled why one would pay for porn on the internet when so much is given away for free. I don't just mean the amateur stuff--the pay sites give away a ton of their stuff as samples.
This didn't make any sense until I got to this
> looking for sample photo sets.
People don't pay for pictures. They pay for 2000+ HD quality videos, carefully and accurately categorised by various topic, by scene. They pay for getting exactly what they want now. They pay to stream in HD, and download HD quality video. They pay for updates. The pay for the exact niche they want.
I work in the industry. Piracy does hurt. We are looking to fight this through quality. Simply put, you can't get the same level of quality from us that you can from free sites. For some people, this doesn't matter. For some, it's the difference between VHS and BluRay.
Our focus is about quality. Quality in the content. Quality in the customer support we offer. Quality in the offers we provide. It's a business, and those that are successful treat it like such. It's actually sad that their is a negative perception around the business. Granted, I just assume that anyone with a negative outlook on the industry is ignorant. Anyone that lets that ignorance affect their judgement is a fool, and is fairly worthless.
Yes, quality customer service. Obviously being in a high risk industry means we have to jump through hoops to keep customers happy, especially when people make the assumption that porn sites are run by crooks.
You're paying for convience in the form of a large corpus of classified content right at your finger tips.
Yes, you can weed through spam and find everything yourself. You can deal with low quality versions vs high quality versions, and slowly build your collection to the point that its a mirror of the paysite but if that time and effort is better spent doing anything else (like say putting in a little overtime at $50+ per hour or spending it with your friends and family) then you will likely choose to pay for porn.
It's not that expensive anyways. At 35$ per month maximum, its barely the cost of a dinner downtown.
Much like we do with github or basecamp, you can do it all yourself but it costs time, if your time is valuable (monetarily or personally) you can just pay the small fees and get it given to you on a plate. Sure you can get most porn for free, but you have to find it.
I am a little surprised, but so glad that someone posted this article. As a matter of fact, the prime reason I joined Y-Combinator and Hacker News is because the business I am developing is a solution to this very problem that the adult industry's experiencing. As I write this I am busy with my application for the Summer funding round.
The article is really thorough and provides a great summary of the overall state of the industry. The most important point raised is that while the traditional avenues of generating revenue from porn are dwindling rapidly, there are still many new (and also undiscovered) methods of generating revenue, and lots of it.
In my opinion, the only way to go about this, is to work with the content producers, not against them. Tube sites all work against the industry, but surfers go there because they have what they want. Isn't it obvious that if there was a solution that worked WITH the industry that the benefits would be much greater for both the producers and surfers?
Apple charges peanuts for a track in their iTunes store, but they generate massive revenue because of the sheer volume of content sold. And it's not just because their content is cheap, but because its convenient and easy for the users, so people keep going back and back again. If you had a solution delivering porn on similar principles, you would be generating revenue and supporting the industry.
Just like with music, you will always get those that download illegally and those that pay. Same principle for porn. Just make sure its on terms the user is happy with and you may even convert non-payers into payers when they realize how much more convenient the new service is that trawling through the net searching for their stuff.
> “Fans don’t understand that if they don’t pay for porn, we can’t make a living. They’ll have to watch crazy European porn.”
I'll just leave this here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gonewild (If you don't notice that this link is NSFW... then you didn't read it.)
(To spell it out a bit more explicitly: there will always be amateur porn. People claim to like it more in the same way that they claim to like unsigned bands. The industry faces more threats than just piracy...)
I think the "reddit gone wild" site is a clear example of what's a much bigger threat to commercial porn than piracy. Why would anyone pay for porn with bored looking actors/actresses, fake boobs, etc. when there is tons of high quality free naked real people on sites like gonewild? I assume that the only reason commercial porn sites still exist is because most people suck at searching on the internet and porn companies are so good at stuffing the search engine results?
Consider this: pornography can be an escape into fantasy land. Some many not want 'real girls,' specifically because they're fantasizing about some sort of ideal. Which may be different than your ideal.
Also, porn can still make money from the long tail. Yes, if you're into blue eyed, blonde haired girls, you may have it easy, but what if your tastes are more specific?
If there's anything I've learned from /b/, it's that human sexuality is incredibly varied and complex.
To take the topic a bit more seriously, it seems to me that having to watch crazy European porn is, perhaps, not such a big deal. The music industry often likes to say that without big money coming in, no one will make music. I don't think that's true, but I especially don't think it's true when it comes to porn. Somehow, I have a feeling porn will survive even the coming of the internet...
Information wants to be free! So does porn, it seems.
The fact remains, they'll find a new way to monetize or the industry will die. And we all know, porn is here to stay.
Edit: I particularly like the line, "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy...". That seems mildly delusional. I'm no expert, but I'm certain that a few minutes of searching would uncover numerous guides on how to circumvent any number of 'cam' sites.
I never did understand why anyone paid for internet porn in the last 15 years, given there was such a fecund variety of the free stuff floating around.
Then there was that thing which was prevalent 5-10 years ago where sites would pretend to be legit, but then trick you into clicking a link that would take you to a free porn site. How pointless is that?
The funniest thing though, is when the pron people get preachy about how piracy is bad. Yeah, about that 'moral high ground'? Sorry guys, you kind of conceded that a long time ago.
> 'moral high ground' [..] you kind of conceded that a long time ago
I hope you realise that that is simply your opinion you're stating as fact. Many people, including myself, have no moral problem whatsoever with porn, and would consider their piracy concerns as legitimate as anyone else's.
There's no question that smut peddlers basically slimed their way around local obsenity laws throughout their industry's history. It's your opinion whether this is good or not, but the fact is that those laws were, and are, perpetually being violated, just as copyright laws are.
> I never did understand why anyone paid for internet porn in the last 15 years
Stop trying to understand people. Just assume most people are stupid and lazy - then you'll understand why many things on the net actually are profitable.
Suppose that the porn industry somehow manages to curb piracy, then they still have a problem: there is 50 years of porn out there that the internet can unlock at a cost that is surely much less than creating "fresh" porn. (I'm not a connoisseur but I assume porn from 2011 looks pretty much the same as porn from 1990)
Never read up on it, and this obviously ignores the sheer volume already out there, but I'd guess that some males may have an evolutionary tendency to favour 'new talent.'
1. See what is new and working in other industries. And replicate them for your industry. Youtube's success gave rise to all the xtubes. The first few people to ride that bandwagon made it big.
2. Select a niche and focus on it. Dominate it. Then use the cash flow from one niche to venture into other niches. Then earn even more cashflow and start buying people out. This picture is an awesome example of parlaying to domination: http://images.nymag.com/news/features/sextube110207_2_560.jp...
3. When faced with a threat - brainstorm on what dilutes that threat value. "Unlike recorded porn, live cams are immune to piracy..." (But live cams can't be scaled up either. You can only have so many people watching you live.)
4. Being a platform is always better than being a player. People doing live cam shows earn $1200 or so a month. The website where these live cam shows are streamed earn that much too - per person. But they have thousands of such people participating... so $1200*thousands. (Apple will always make more money than a single developer. Facebook will make more money than Zynga.)