Obscene Losses: The porn business is in trouble (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Obscene Losses: The porn business is in trouble (2007)

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Tl;dr: porn DVD sales through floor. Big studios nervous. Youporn mysterious, huge, unprofitable, looking for a buyer. Big studios won't bite, due to obvious potential legal liability of hosting user generated content.

Heard a talk recently from Marc Bell, CEO of Friend Finder Networks. He ran a tech company previously called Globix. An interesting tidbit from his talk is that Friend Finder Networks (which runs over 30,000 sites) actually creates most of the amateur content themselves and lowers the production value so that people believe it is real.

They also run BigChurch.com, which is a christian dating site. You cant make this stuff up.

Judging from the dating site of theirs I once used (Nerve), "low production values" is their corporate mantra.

> They also run BigChurch.com, which is a christian dating site. You cant make this stuff up.

Someone should try to "cross the streams" and randomly move some rows from FFN database to BC and vice-versa.

It seems that if lowering your "production values" makes your product more appealing to consumers, you were using the wrong production values to begin with.

The article writes, "As this issue went to press, YouPorn's Alexa rank was 51 and rising".

Today it is 72, and falling since 2009. Still a damn big site though.

The falling may be due to the fact that other similar sites have popped up and started gaining traction.

At the risk of appearing too knowledgeable about this subject...

The cultural landscape of recorded sex is changing. The availability of sexual media is breaking old taboos about recording sex acts and amateur pornography is scaling up in every way. This is a new sexual revolution.

I look forward to the day when sex media holds all the taboo of personal vacation photos. I think eventually everyone with access to a recording device will record themselves in every aspect of life.

There have always been attempts to push in that direction:

http://sexinthepink.baywords.com/2010/10/24/free-culture-por...

If everyone will record themselves in every aspect of their life, that will be a lot of recordings. I assume people will watch at least some of them, meaning that people will be spending a good chunk of time viewing these videos. This also is an aspect of their lives, so that means we'll end up with a lot of recordings of people watching recordings. I believe this becomes a recursive loop, as well, so the future's going to be pretty meta. Though I suppose they'd probably choose not to watch those videos, even if they recorded them, so maybe not.

If we teach everyone how to read and write, they'll be able to read and write about every aspect of their life; that will be a lot of writing. I assume people will read at least some of them, meaning that people will be spending a good chunk of time writing those things. This also is an aspect of their lives, so we'll end up with many writings about people reading writings. I believe this becomes a recursive loop, so the future will be pretty meta! But maybe they'll choose not to read everything, even if they write about everything, so maybe not.

Doesn't work, because the original claim wasn't that they could record every aspect, but that they in fact would record every aspect of their lives. Which seems absurd to me, and that's what I was trying to point out.

Judging by the public facebook photos I've seen lately by my friends in their 20s, I think women are getting less, shall we say, "modest".

Perhaps in the US, but porn already had pretty close to zero taboo in most of Northern Europe.

You're right, I should have specified the U.S.

I think this effect will be felt worldwide to some degree.

I don't look forward to that. I think there's something to be said for privacy and intimacy.

Of course, I just want to see the taboo dissolve. It's all about user control.

Now that people have the ability to publish their sex lives, some will.

2007? How accurate was this prediction?

Disclosure: I skimmed the article.

But, basically, the gist is right. The middle of the porn market has fallen out. The only movement is in the super low end stuff (the kind that advertises 6+ hours and sells for $5), with a little bit of action at the top end. The top end is kind of dying out, although I wouldn't go so far as to write an obituary for it. The parody craze is still limping along, and while there hasn't been a movie to cross over as well as Pirates/Pirates 2, there are still a few studios that can regularly command $30-50 retail for a blockbuster and turn a profit doing so.

If you read nothing but Xbiz and AVN, you'll get the impression that it's tube sites and piracy killing the industry, but I think the truth is that quality porn is a luxury good, and it's just not going to do well in this economy. The smarter studios are leveraging their existing assets (semi-current footage that can be repackaged into cheaper compilation DVDs, contract girls that can still move expensive films) to make it through the recession, and wildly trying any sort of product diversification (you can find everything from condoms to vibrators branded by the big studios now, on a much greater scale than before.) The smaller firms are finding pretty quickly that porn isn't a one way ticket to profit, which at least allows the big guys access to cheaper talent and inventory as they fail.

Government intervention is a persistent worry as well. Stagliano's trial and especially its vague ending have the edgier gonzo guys worried. Different groups in California are clamoring for more regulation re: HIV testing, and in a market where many of the producers just don't have breathing room in their budgets, that could have a serious effect.

On top of all that, Blu-Ray never took off like anyone hoped it would, and really none of the traditional studios made a big dent in streaming (except maybe Evil Angel.)

The people with the most sustainable business models seem to be those who embraced online from the beginning of their existence (guys like Brazzers, Kink, Reality Kings.) Which really follows the basic premise: if you can offer people lots of porn for cheap, be it hundreds of gigs of content for $20 a month or 6 hours for $5, you'll still do OK in this market. People are treating porn like a consumable now--the online guys follow the Costco model of giving you a ton of stuff cheaper than anyone else does, and the compilation guys are hoping you'll settle for single ply.

Surely the problem here is emblematic of the entire motion-picture industry. Streaming, attention competition, piracy - all these things are hurting the major mainstream studios. With porn, you can add to that the fact that there is still a social stigma with the physical purchase and (seemingly) a willing set of amateurs who are happy to produce for free.

I've certainly wondered how any porn company can stream content at youtube-like levels and become profitable. Surely the conversion rates to a paid alternative are pretty meagre once the 'job' is done?

> The revolution began with VHS, which moved porn out of the theater and into the home. This made watching pornography private, an advance that created millions of new customers overnight. But to buy the stuff, you still had to venture out to the store, and who knew who you might run into?

But when you buy something online, doesn't the credit card company (or PayPal) know that you went to the store?

Sure, but their point is that paying for non-theater porn was still a public act. Nobody's going to see you walking out of a website.

That's right, but you still don't have enough privacy.

You're describing a value judgement ("enough" privacy) that is different for everybody where the story is describing a transformation in access methods that are the same for everybody.

What rhizome said and most people don’t care whether their credit card company knows which porn they enjoy. As long as said company doesn’t write a letter to their boss or spouse or friends or parents detailing recently bought porn the knowledge of the company is inconsequential for the one who bought porn.

Most people don't care if a corporation "knows" they did something; they care if their neighbor knows.

In many cases people simply don't understand or think about what data is collected and out there. One of my friends at work was shocked when I informed him that our IT department might theoretically be able to check what websites we visited, and probably does. This friend was a software engineer.

It's always possible to use a prepaid credit card to pay for those things, especially if you don't want your SO to find out...

I thought about this too, but is there a site offering this option? Besides that, I doubt that an US based company would be able to sell them in Europe or in Asia.

Anyone else find it . . . interesting that the article totally outs the guy's identity?

(I almost put "troubling," but I guess I'm not all that troubled by it)

Maybe Jones is not his real name after all?

Please please when articles are this long can someone provide a tl;dr?

ah reasonable enough request, the beginning of the article talked about the acquisition of youporn.com by vivid entertainment (a large porn company) however they were experiencing problems with labor unions who represent plumbers (a key component to many a porn film) apparently they feel these films poorly broker an image of the life in an every day plumber, additionally it is creating a dangerous workplace by increasing the expectations of lonely cougars. To counter act this they are asking youporn.com to be shut down as it is most commonly reached by middle aged housewives typically looking for youtube.com in an effort to find videos about knitting.

However this article was from 2007, and obviously no court would uphold the labor unions case.

Do you have a relevant link with the plumber story?

What's next, postmen's union suing too?

tl;dr OP would like a tl;dr.

Oh come on, this is at least somewhat funny or approaching neutral. No need for all the downvotes.

It was funny, but no one likes jokes here. I've tried.

There's a certain kind of jokes that's enjoyed around here. You have to be careful. But the best advise is: Don't joke.

Jokes can go over well, but stupid jokes generally don't. Similarly, I've even seen humor in legal documents, but a legal document that was just a joke with no purpose or substance probably wouldn't be met with anything but annoyance.

I went into with my eyes open :-) For whatever reason, HN is "serious" whereas e.g. Reddit is "funny". Not sure why, but there you have it.

Anyways, every once in a while I make the decision to burn a few karma and say something stupid. Sorry if it stood in the way of somebody's sale to Google.

That's so fucking lazy it's pathetic.

Learn to skim, it's not hard.

Can I do your homework for you and clean your room while I'm at it?

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