This was a comment on my then and now post and its so well said I promoted it to a full post because it’s so true. In two paragraphs it sums up what happened to porn. Thanks RawAlex, well said man.
The hardest thing for most people to understand is that porn is no longer a product that you really sell. Now it’s a marketing tool for selling something else: dating, cams, escorts, t-shirts, binary options, get rich quick books, and the like. The big companies have gutted porn as a business, literally stepping over the porn dollars to get at the pennies offered by other things.
The only reason it happened was simple: They were willing to rip off the porn producers, use their content for free, and use it to sell other stuff. Now porn is “free”, and few people are willing to pay. The overall business is much smaller, but these few big companies think they did it right because they make more money. Their millions don’t compare well to the hundreds of millions they killed off on the way by, but that doesn’t bother them.
7 Responses
Now porn is “free”, and few people are willing to pay http://t.co/UW66Ov5Tpb
Porn is free and I steal and post porn on my pirate boards all the time.
I’ve been doing it for years. I don’t care if I get sued. I gots no money and no honey. So BS.
I keep going against the flow (i’m paying for it since years, but sleeping good at night) and calling things with their name: affiliates. The affiliation/franchise system in porn is the dumbest in the world. The biggest “misunderstanding” in this industry is that traffic equals sales. Instead of letting people “pay” to have the privilege of promoting your brand, you devalue your brand allowing its use at a cost which is entirely on you in the name of traffic. That’s what happened. Held by the balls by a bunch of lazy hackers who sold you the traffic dream for your main commodity: content. Try to apply the porn affiliate system to any other industry and you get dark ages. Yep, i know this is not going to be popular, but bring facts against it, if you can. Stop the whole affiliate system the way it is right now and free content on legit channels is gone. And that’s gonna be a LOT of free content gone. You have delegated the traffic aspect of the biz to third parties and that’s why now you are not in control of the biz anymore. As usual, my 2 cents.
You have to think that somebody in the govt. or someone up real high has a plan for the future of the Internet which prevents porn, movies, books, music, video games, tv shows, and so on from being stolen.
I know one Hollywood director was complaining loudly recently saying other countries have turned off access to torrents so why doesn’t the U.S? He said it can be done, it just isn’t. The Expendables 3 was available for free before it was even released.
Of course, we’re paying for all this stolen content with our sky high cable and Internet bills.
In a nutshell, the Internet is broke. It can’t be like this 5 or 10 years from now.
RT @MikeSouth1226: Now porn is “free”, and few people are willing to pay http://t.co/UW66Ov5Tpb
Schlermy, the internet isn’t really broken – but it has done some serious damage to the world economy. It’s sort of interesting because the internet is the “big thing” that drives many of the biggest companies out there, yet what it has really created is an even bigger wealth gap between the haves and have nots. Companies like Google are piling up billions of dollars with almost nothing to do with them, they aren’t returning that money to investors and instead pay a compartively small number of people that work for them way more than they should.
It wouldn’t be particularly wrong to suggest that a good part of the current long, drawn out economic malaise is do to the way the internet cannibalizes business. Amazon as an example has pretty much laid waste to the book market, and have continued to expand and dominate in other areas, driving local retailers out of business. Showrooming is the step just before death for many of them. Every time that a store closed, those people lose jobs and are replaced by the serious automation that drives Amazon. It’s not trading jobs for jobs on an equal basis. Retail closes, and only a small fraction of a percent of those jobs ever re-appear in the mega glom online sellers.
Piracy and the “undocuments” reuse of content of all sorts drives the internet, drives the demand, but in turn it removes demand from the other side. The music industry is a perfect example: At a time when almost everyone has in their hands something that can store and play back a ton of recorded music, the retail industry for that recorded music is at it’s lowest income point in more than 2 decades. Everyone has the product, fewer and fewer are actually paying for it.
Something has to give. Porn is sort of like a canary in the coal mine when you think about it. Porn has already been through a number of “rationalizations” and right now is reaching a point where there are very few players at the table any more. The industry has shrunk to a wisp of it’s former self, yet those who remain think they have it all covered because they are making more money than they were – they don’t realize that they killed the golden goose along the way, and selling goose sandwiches isn’t the most profitable thing they could be doing. They have a very big slice of a pie that is so much smaller than it was, that most people are not longer interested.
Put it another way: Porn was always a higher margin business. You pay the girls (and guys) well, you charge the public a high rate for well produced and relatively rare content, and you make money. Porn killed itself first by ramping up production to the point that supply overwhelmed demand, got raped by the internet webcams and home made stuff, and finally are getting buried by the people who will use the content on the cheap (or for free) to sell other things. When you realize that more and more of the girls (and guys) involved in porn are using it only as a marketing tool for the escorting work, you start to understand that the money has been greatly removed from the concept.
So now we sit at the table, looking at the scraps of the spoiled feast… and no matter what we do, we will never be able to put it back. New laws won’t change it, the genie is out of the bottle.
I believe some other high tech countries like S. Korea and some Scandanavian countries have done a lot to curb piracy. I lived in S. Korea from 2006-2011 and by the time I left they were blocking some things but not others. I think they’ve done a lot more since I left, as has several European countries.
The point is a lot more can be done. I think the U.S. Govt thought that by shutting down MEGA they had sent out a good enough message. If they would have kept going and worked on the bittorrent piracy we’d be in a much better position right now.