Why is there so much free porn on the internet? (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Why is there so much free porn on the internet? (2016)

quora.com

129 pointsturrini41 comments

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The top linked answer blames lack of effective copyright enforcement, but I think that the availability of rivalrous homegrown porn is at least as significant. High quality video cameras are now built into millions of phones. The performers don't require scripts, crew, or payment to appear in videos. The product doesn't need localization for global consumption -- French movies are fine for US audiences even without dubbing or subtitles.

This is in contrast to theatrical movies, where Joe Rando's video clips of him and his girlfriend are very rarely an effective substitute for a scripted production with paid actors. Even with hypothetical perfect copyright enforcement on all pornography containing professional actors, the deluge of free amateur content would have dramatically eroded movie pricing by now.

Additionally, there are people who prefer "real sex" clips to scripted porn featuring professional porn stars.

Would that be because maybe sexual attraction to a person is based on the personality we project onto the looks and energy? And maybe within an industry you simply don't have every type of personality and that is actually really hard to fake?

Which is why some people like the amateur stuff much more.

Of course this suggests there are deep layers of emotional needs behind our sexual preferences. Which is obviously not true. It is all about the flesh. That is why porn sites only need three videos ;)

Also the condom law further fragmented the industry just when tube sites were hitting. DVD sales plunged from 150k average per release to 15k in sales no industry call handle a 90% plunge in income. The tube sites are run from Germany so you can't necessarily get content taken down even if you sue. Porn Valley is no more besides a handful of custom content businesses and the huge companies like Vivid porn as a small startup business is absolutely dead. Like music you have the old 70s dinosaurs still working but the path from startup to porn star business is blocked. The new content is amateur driven all the controls to prevent underage actors and HIV testing are gone so it's an utter mess and basically a dead industry.

Interesting that there's no mention of camming. Seems to me to have exploded in the past few years, possibly as a reaction to what's being described (you can't simply copy direct interaction, plus the production costs are much lower).

It's doubly curious, since his site (Abbywinters) has added camming to their offerings (calling them "Playdates").

All the more reason not to call attention to it and instead tell potential competitors the industry is dying.

Isn’t the answer obvious? The answer is the same as the answer to the question “Why is there so much free everything on the internet?”

The answer is that copying is cheap – in fact almost free – and products in markets with lots of competition tend to converge to its marginal cost, which in this case is zero.

Ok but consider, e.g., movies. Yes, there are free websites, but they're not exactly legal or mainstream in the way that free porn sites are.

MPAA is just a lot more powerful than the porn industry? They don't have any reliance on these streaming sites, so they have no issues suing and enforcing copyrights.

The MPAA also has a lot less content to defend. How many theatrical releases are there a year? Now how many porn videos are released a year? I'm pretty sure the difference is orders of magnitude. This is without taking into account how much budget is behind enforcing.

Finally, it seems like there is more money in free porn than there is in free movies. This then means more incentive to keep operations going and more means to achieve that.

Yes, but movies have a much higher barrier of entry than pornography. People actually care about the production value, plot, special effects, music, etc. For porn, on the other hand, that's not the case at all.

You should be comparing porn with short form, low production value content (e.g. youtube channels) and indeed, there's a lot of free content on that category available.

> For porn, on the other hand, that's not the case at all.

Oh, not really, you just never saw a more niche production. Well obviously priorities are still different, but its far from all porn being roughly the same, even within their categories.

Movies aren't as popular as porn.

With movies I am looking at watching "Dunkirk", or some other specific movie, which means there are at most a handful of movies that I want to watch at any given time, whereas with porn I typically want to watch a particular type, but there are lots of any given type of movie and it really doesn't matter if they are old or not.

I think pirate movie streaming sites are less profitable, they have much larger hosting bills and the MPAA is much more effective at getting them shut down. There's also more stigma about buying porn and we've made it pretty cheap and easy to stream normal movies these days.

Interesting take. I think Louis CK had a joke in his last special about how “We can stop making new porn now”. Sounds like that might be what’s happening. The idea that an industry might contract and die because it’s historic catalog and free competing content are eating its market share isn’t totally new, but the interesting moral ramifications for this particular industry are noteworthy.

Nah, VR porn is just getting started and that catalog is tiny. The Adult industry isn't going anywhere.

The porn industry is also often at the forefront of innovation. They've likely played a huge part in the recent advancements in VR/AR.

Back when I was doing my degree, the majority of the internet was still porn. This was approx 13 years ago. Porn will be OK.

Ran into an article right after Google released Cardboard, where some students had made their own VR porn using a pair of Gopros as an experiment. They claimed that even with such a simple setup the result made them find traditional porn boring.

I know a couple people who have VR setups. There is, supposedly, a game where you have to kill a cartoon character, then cut it up to get a key. My friends are both serious gamers and have killed thousands up close (and literally billions from a distance), but they said that act made them feel really bad.

Here is a gamer talking about VR Grand Theft Auto (http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2015/04/19/grand-theft-auto-v-i...), with the same point: the emotional level is way, way more intense in VR, even crappy VR, than in normal games.

If we assume the same is the case for VR porn, I can see why the porn they made was so much more intense.

Now that we're coming back up the other side of the uncanny valley, we might still see a diminishing of human actors. Given that VR/AR is supposed to be about immersion, it is going to be hard for human actors to provide this.

we're doing what now? So you're saying dead lea or dead grand moff tarkin were not creepy?

We will see different human actors: movies where you can put your (or, heaven forbid, that of your ex; people won’t even need to have any explicit imagery for revenge porn.) face, birth marks, tattoos, etc. on an actor of your choice.

The business model has changed, it's much more like the mobile games market now; a handful of "whales" support the whole thing. You don't pay for the video anymore. Copying content is cheap and easy and there's no burden on delivery. Instead, people who are really into it are getting closer to the models and paying them directly.

There's a whole range of ways you can support your favourite model now, from $5/month snapchat "access" all the way to $4000/hr "meetups" in Nevada. The purpose of the free video is just to draw you in - maybe it will turn you into a subscriber, maybe you'll send them a gift, or maybe you're just window shopping.

The only people hurting are the skeezy producers, middlemen, and digital pimps. The porn industry is dying and is being replaced with this new model of "para-prostitution".

Jon Ronson recently did an excellent podcast series about this: http://www.jonronson.com/butterfly.html

I think the future or porn (i.e. The money) is in personalization. Porn for you, by your favorite performers, customized to your liking. The cam sites are the best positioned to capitalize on this but only if they start bringing order to the Wild West of cams.

> personalization

Apparently it's already a widespread business and The Guardian published this article about it. It's an amazing, at times heart-breaking story about what people need, and in a way it's only tangentially about porn:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jul/29/jon-ronson-b...

(It's not at all a catalog of fetishes, in case that's what you expect/want/fear.)

The story about the mother leaving her two children is too sad. Sometimes I wonder if the quickest way to end humankind's pain is to just stop existing as a whole... No matter how well-off you are, there are N humans in great pain somewhere else, and you can never be sure your descendants wouldn't have to experience great pain in the future.

That reasoning is a pretty substantial part of why i don't want children. Then there's this lot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...

Except people with worse mindsets are not following your footsteps. People conscious of this problem should have many kids, raise them well to improve civilization, if you want to minimise suffering.

Of course if a physical solution to ending existence without introducing a lot of suffering can be found, even better.

That's quite naive. You are just a pawn in this world, chaos is the dominant factor, and you'll be drawn to wherever the tide takes you. Just be happy you were born in this particular time and place because history shows peace is the exception, not the rule.

What you are saying is one of the two only noble options we really should consider though.

It's the only intelligent choice, although I wouldn't blame anybody who chooses to have children. Having children made me feel more empathy for others. Once you have experienced love for your own children, you feel more pity for those parents whose children live in pain, and for the children because you can feel their pain more intensely. Besides all the "small" human issues, such as mental issues as in this case, consider that human history is essentially a history of war and pain. I don't see any reason the future will be any different.

Oddly my comment is being downvoted. Most HNers act like a quasi religious group.

There are other choices. Adopting a child doesn't make the world any worse, most likely improves the life of that child, and grows your own sense of a purpose in life.

> Most HNers act like a quasi religious group.

That is a pretty broad brush.

Maybe it grows your sense of anything, but for that child, life will never be quite right. Children who are adopted have a higher chance of developing mental disorders, alcoholism, major depression and so forth. [1] A portion of them go through a bumpy road before being adopted by the "right" parents, most are never adopted. About 140m children worldwide are orphans. [2] The event of being abandoned is already a very painful one with long-term consequences. If anything, this goes to prove my point.

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-paradox-of-adoption/

[2] https://www.sos-usa.org/our-impact/childrens-statistics

That reasoning is a pretty substantial part of why adoption should be pushed much more than procreation.

Presumably the link is really to the first answer (https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-so-much-free-porn-on-the-...), which points out that the porn Tube sites got their site by distributing stolen content, and then leveraging their high traffic into closer-to-legal business strategy:

Then, the pay sites whose content had been stolen and was now being given away for free, took notice (slower than they should have), and pressured the Tube sites to remove content they did not have the right to use.

Because the industry has always been fragmented (that is, lots of small players, owner-operators), it was impossible for there to be a consensus - should we get together and sue the tube sites? Should we start our own tube sites? Everyone was in it for themselves, and could not agree on how to work with Tube sites.

Tube sites said, "Gosh, sorry, we did not realize this was stolen!" (ie, bullshit), "how about we let you place an ad above it for free for your site, and you let us keep the video?". Some pay site operators were okay with this, got 5,000 clicks and a few joins each day. Other pay site operators arranged for the Tube sites to become affiliates: Tube sites get 50% of each sale made from clicking on the ad, so long as there were prominent ads around the video for the pay site. Other pay site operators requested all their content be removed, and the tube sites complied... slowly.

Now, in 2016, most pay sites feel they have to put some of their content on Tube sites to get customers (the theory being, a prospective customer will see their free video on a tube site, like the model / production style, and pay to join the pay site). It works to a small degree, but tube sites have so much traffic seeking porn, that there's virtually no other way to find customers.

It's interesting the degree to which this parallels the (mostly) non-porn Youtube foundation story. For those who've forgotten (or weren't around for it) a large proportion of the high-traffic content on Youtube was copyright infringing. Youtube would take down individual videos upon complaint, but it didn't really matter since another user would quickly repost the same content.

Youtube was then acquired by Google (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube), who used a similar strategy to convince the major copyright holders that it was better to go with the flow rather than making a fuss. So far as I can tell, this strategy has been wildly successful, and I see very few articles warning about Youtube being sued out of existence.

From my rather limited understanding, it's basically how crunchyroll also got started.

Amusingly, even YouTube wants you to forget about this part of its past now, and instead pretend it is and always has been the haven of content creating indies.

The first fix is always free.

Because ads make people money.

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