How MindGeek transformed the economics of porn | Hacker News Reader

How MindGeek transformed the economics of porn

fusion.net

56 pointsfraqed26 comments

Open articleView on HN

>As a result, there’s little obvious reason to produce new porn: everything has already been done, probably better, by somebody else, and is already freely available online.

Where does the author watch porn? Maybe it is just a curation problem, but I find the quality of most porn to be insufferable bad. Even the "good" stuff would be bad by the standards set by the mainstream film industry.

Technology shifts may change things as well. I imagine wide spread adoption of VR viewers is going to create a new market for instance that might be 'premium'. Or some integration with internet of things devices (tele-dildonics anyone?)...

I suspect that we will see porn take advantage of these new technologies (in fact, I have seen internet controlled vibes). However, I doubt that the quality will be substantially higher.

The one way I can see this technology leading to higher quality is by centralizing capital in a much smaller number of producers, who then have the resources to produce higher quality porn. However, they also would have much more of a monopoly, so I am not sure how well this will work out; and eventually production of new style porn will become more democratized.

The bigger change we need to make is social/economic. Porn simply does not have the monitization avenues that film does. Mainstream advertisers don't want to touch it, and consumers are reluctant to pay for it. This puts us in a situation where, as the author describes, most porn is itself produced as an ad for other sex services.

The next phase of democratisation of porn could be a proliferation of portable VR recorders that will be invented later this century.

The problem with a portable VR recorder is that VR ideally records the whole volume of a space in 3 dimensions. People are developing camera arrays that do a decent approximation of 360-degree, 3d video through multiple wide angle lenses and software stitching and interpolation.

But I think that the real "wow" moment will come when you can plug in 3 or more affordable, high-definition video and depth cameras around a room. The way I envision it, you have a power outlet on each of the four walls in a room, but higher up instead of near the ground. Into each outlet you plug in something that looks like a webcam but acts like a high def version of a Kinect or similar. Each cameras records both depth info and video. The cameras communicate wirelessly with a computer or other base unit that's running the "brains" of the operation. It receives the video and depth info and composites it into a live 3d model of the room with the video info used to create texture maps.

I've done some really basic experiments with a single Kinect and the Oculus dev kit and they look about as good as you'd imagine. Blocky, flickery shapes, only viewable from one angle, with jagged edges and funky video. Still, it's already pretty cool looking. It already feels like something where incremental improvements in capture hardware and processing can make this very usable.

Then once you've got these sorts of live 3d environments, it's just a matter of encoding, compressing, and transmitting the data over networks before you've got a decent semblance of live telepresence.

I know this is a tangent from the porn discussion but as with a lot of tech, porn could easily be the industry to push development. I can imagine that live sex shows with real performers would be seen as premium services that companies can charge for (and *Tube sites couldn't immediately duplicate).

I've seen some porn created for the Oculus Rift which is high quality. Once VR is accessible and the media is out there, it will dominate. Even with the DK1, it's a step up.

VR seems mainly for providing an environment ("celestial sphere"). To use it to examine a target (such as a human performer) you'd gave to walk around in a ring, which seems a weird movement while watching porn. Unless you were watching a scene with many performers?

I've also got an Oculus dev unit (dk2) and must admit to checking out some of the porn content out there for it. Right now it seems to fall into two main categories: wide angle 3d movies and virtual scenes/environments.

In the former, you're looking at mostly paid/premium content that is ideally played in the company's player application. Still, it works in some other more general VR players. These are shot with cameras that, while not 3d/360 due to current tech limitations, give the illusion of sitting in front of performer(s) doing your typical sexy stuff. It generally mirrors the viewer's assumed seated position so it gives the illusion of watching a live sex show. You can turn your head and look around to some extent but doing 3d/360 is still difficult due to the way dual-camera 3d works. There are several non-porn examples of this as well.

The latter is more like CG porn since the tools for creating and viewing 3d graphics in VR are a lot more established. The flip side is that you're basically watching video game porn. Some of the stuff that can be done in Unity or Unreal Engine is pretty realistic, just like your average modern AAA video game but in the end, it's still cartoon porn so it will appeal to some but not others. On the viewing side, it's more flexible since you can turn around in a full 360 degrees and change your viewpoint just like any other CG virtual environment.

Basically the live stuff is like the evolution of 3D movies while the CG stuff is an evolution of video games.

Even at this stage, it's more immersive and convincing, regardless of whether you can walk around or not.

Outside of changing positions, people tend not to 'walk around in a ring examining their partner' during the real thing either. As with a video, it's position-transition-position-transition, etc.

I think we'll see real performers developing celestial sphere content, and motion capture/CGI handling anything beyond that which isn't on rails. Just saying, don't write off the former once more people have the hardware.

>>As a result, there’s little obvious reason to produce new porn: everything has already been done, probably better, by somebody else, and is already freely available online.

sounds like situation ripe for disruption. I mean you probably could say the same about taxi business before Uber. From some point of view one can see how Snapchat and Chatroulette can probably be considered among such a distruptors, bringing in the similar peer-to-peer sharing aspect to it.

Relevant: Stoya on MindGeek (Text with SFW banner image): http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethi...

It's worth remembering that the behavior of the market is essentially influenced by the stigma, and subsequent banning of porn (and sexually explicit material in general, art or otherwise) in many TOSs. For that matter, I wonder how iTunes-type availability of porn would even affect spam.

DMM provides an iTunes like commerce market for porn in Japan. They are doing quite well and exploring ways to go public.

This article seemed to have a deceptively shifting focus, often conflating or confusing the incentives for studios with the incentives for performers. The ability to sell side services has limited impact on studios, for instance.

Also, in a very simple answer to the opening question of why new porn continues to be made, it is important to understand how much novelty impacts the porn industry. There are lots of types of novelty, even the improvement from SD to HD productions can effectively obsolete older productions. And there are production style novelties such as the rise of gonzo type productions. But the biggest novelty that customers pay for is the novelty of the latest young woman that enters the industry. The entire genre of so-called amateur porn is built on that.

Here's Stoya's epic rant against Manwin/MindGeek, including her plan to compete against them: http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethi...

That's a pretty impressive monopoly, for some reason I always thought those "YouTube-like" sites were competing against each other. MindGeek may well turn out to be the Google of porn.

It's a bit like how all the casinos in Vegas are owned by something like 3 companies, or how all the detergents are owned by Unilever.

I wonder if MindGeek will move to a more legal revenue split/share model as it grows the same way Youtube did.

That seems like a distinct possibility. If Mindgeek can aggregate the majority of adult entertainment eyeballs on the internet, then studios basically become Mindgeek MCNs. In some ways that may be an easier transition than it would be for Hollywood studios, in so far as production costs are probably cheaper by several orders of magnitude.

Can you tell me what MCN stands for?

Multi-channel network. It's a term YouTube originally coined. Basically, a content publisher on someone else's platform who operates multiple channels within that platform. In the YouTube world, this is someone bigger than a one-channel YouTube star and perhaps smaller than, say, a premium content provider like NBC or CBS.

The article makes it sound like all company revenue comes from tubes sites. The company also owns hundreds of pay-to-access original content sites (ever hear of Brazzers?). This company was not the first to do tubes; they had to adopt the format because competitors did so first and their revenue suffered. Once again, a large part of the problem is users opting to not pay if someone else will illegally put it up for free. You want free tubes to go away? Stop watching tubes and go pay for a monthly Brazzers subscription.

Not really, Pornhub was launched in 2007, at that time they were not that many other prominent tube sites, Youporn had been around for a bit longer but Brazzers was pretty much printing cash at that point and growing insanely fast.

They did not do it to reply to the competition and revenue was sure as hell not suffering, they did it because it was the future and they saw it as such as well as a great way for them to funnel sign ups to Brazzers and other paysites such as Moviebox.

By then they were already a dominant force in the market and moved on to acquire most other tube sites to apply the same model as they did on Pornhub.

Also last time I heard advertisement on tube site were still the main revenue stream for them, might have changed now as I've been out for a few years.

Source: Was Lead Developer on Pornhub and Back end dev on Brazzers before that.

All I see is a full page pop-up ads for their email list, with no escape control in view.

Am I the only one here that see the pornification of the culture as so very very sad.

NO.

Wait, I changed my mind.

Yes.

> pornification of the culture

What does this mean? Which culture and what is pornification?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com