The UX of Porn Tube Sites Are Designed for the Ultimate Money Shot
eyeondesign.aiga.org
eyeondesign.aiga.org
With porn, it's usually a fetish that is only moderately popular, but broadly unoffensive. Because the average person who isn't specifically interested in the fetish isn't turned off by it either, that fetish gets more positive engagement relative to other fetishes; which drives studios to make more of it, and tube sites to advertise it more.
This pattern likely started with foot fetish, but really took off over the last few years with "step sibling" porn.
No one I've talked to is actually interested in the step-sibling fetish, yet the overwhelming majority of content being made and advertised - especially by mainstream studios and well-known actors - is step-sibling themed. Why? Because these studios are deciding what to make based on what's popular on pornhub, and what's popular on pornhub is literally anything these studios make. I sincerely doubt that they would see a drop in engagement if they diversified, but trends in data will never drive diversity faster than they drive convergence, because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
It's also worth noting that the near-monopoly status of Mindgeek in the casual porn streaming industry has amplified this pattern. Their recent decision to stop hosting unverified content - good or bad - has had a pretty serious side-effect on the singular greatest driving factor of internet porn: piracy.
If a porn studio or independent actor doesn't want their content floating around pornhub, they can simply refuse to post it. Anyone who wants to upload a copy without their consent will fail verification.
So now, the only content being shared on pornhub is what creators hope will be interesting, and never what consumers want to share.
Most new competitive content creators are more concerned about getting paid than getting advertised because they don't have the financial buffer that established studios have; so they are less likely to put their content on pornhub, and less likely to by found by the casual consumer.
I think your analysis is incorrect... it's likely extremely profitable for the porn studios because: 1. It's an easy plot to make up. 2. requires absolutely no extra props fancy locations or anything beyond the basic porn shoot. 3. it's extremely taboo so for whoever is actually into that they get to rope in and for the rest of the porn consumers they can just skip the part where they have all that verbalized and it's basically normal porn for some version of normal.
As opposed to what? Having literally no plot at all? Like 99% of porn? The entire basis of my contention is that people are watching step-sibling porn despite the plot, not because of it. I stand by that assertion.
yeah, they get to capture whatever market there is for that taboo plotline (which probably isn't insignificant considering it's in the top most searched list[0][1]) without any real downsides for them since people can generally just ignore that and pretend otherwise.
0. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/yir-2021#Most-Searched-for-... 1. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2019-year-in-review#searche...
> because convergence is essentially the goal of data driven production in the first place.
But what comes after an ultimate convergence - let's say, a 3:45 minutes long .mp4 file of an incomprehensible psychedelic rainbow mosaic that cause a strong euphoria to any singular entity of a primate species born in or before 2022 - will audiences not adapt to it? And when they consume the stimuli, how does the convergence sustain? There will have to be a change of trend, and a novel oddity to be normalized will have to be brought in from outside the industry, I think.
I can’t tell if you’re saying people have foot fetishes because their fetishes moved “downwards” here. Like does it start with hair?
Even one of the Mortys in R&M made a wish that "inc*st porn have more a mainstream appeal." My partner both winced at that and said to each other, "Did he just say what I think he said?" So maybe I'm just too old and traditional (despite being queer)?
It's a joke. However, if you've seen Dan Harmon's early work, it does make you wonder.
Why are you staring this out?
Isn't it bizarre to self censor your words in this way? Being overly sensitive to causing offence isn't healthy.
Why would anyone admit it publicly :P
And I have no doubt that there are people who get excited about step-sibling fetish. I just figure that if it was as common to want step-sibling porn as it is to find it, then I would have met (or heard from) someone by now who does.
I derive much enjoyment of the lewd but not pornographic memes and other humor it generates as a byproduct of being widespread.
So I guess that supports your theory that nobody actually wants that in their porn.
When we did a complete rebuild of it (because it was in horrible PHP code), we tried to do a redesign and the CEO of the company made us change it back.
Why? Because it was too nice and the UX was too good.
He told us that his customers actually appreciated a more 'dirty' and 'raw' feel to the site. It is porn after all!
So, we went back to the drawing board and did just that... many of the changes we made to the UX were reverted to intentionally make things a bit harder to use and make the site feel more 'dirty'... which is funny given the content was already super dirty.
Sounds like HN.
Weeaboo sites seem to be an exception for some reason, probably because the average community member is obsessive/hoardy enough to give a shit about tagging at all.
https://github.com/philomena-dev/philomena
Edit: PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE LICENSE, it is AGPL licensed, which means if you copy any of the code into your back-end, your whole back-end must be open sourced, as a back-end nerd I stay away from anything AGPL'd just to be on the safe side of the law.
13. Use with the GNU Affero General Public License.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, you have permission to link or combine any covered work with a work licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License into a single combined work, and to convey the resulting work. The terms of this License will continue to apply to the part which is the covered work, but the special requirements of the GNU Affero General Public License, section 13, concerning interaction through a network will apply to the combination as such.
I'm not sure where you got this, but that phrasing is not part of the AGPL license as posted on https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html
Kind of unfortunate if there's a leak though.
That’s a feature, not a bug. If you don’t want that, don’t use it.
a demo of the search engine running locally. Yes, it is that fast. And its not just counts, but the actual result sets. (in this case, no fetching is done though)
Also supports and/or, even nested, along with ranking by whether it has a specific search term (called boosting in the documentation) Oh, and in the example, the default blacklist was used. https://derpibooru.org/pages/search_syntax
Is it also surprising that the "booru" websites, which are likely frequented by the most ASD of the ASD inflicted men, would be well cataloged? It is simply what our brains do.
Take a step back and imagine what success, and reflection of good rankings algos would be on these sites. Longer engagement times and multiple videos (+ads) for YouTube. Shorter time on site and less videos for Pornhub.
The interfaces would be designed accordingly with those end goals in mind.
Still could cause some interesting 2+ order effects though!
That's a sweeping assumption you have made there my friend :-)
Firstly getting the speeds up to load images, then videos with buffering then 4k, then VR.
The design features and business model of porn sites is years ahead of anything else, for a reason these sites up until very recently were the majority of bandwith over the Internet.
A business model you will start to see more which is very common in porn is to use the streaming site as advertising to your paid membership site.
You release 10min clip of say a podcast and to watch the rest you need to join the members only site. As YouTube partner programme gets worse and rules about what content get more strict you will see a drive to only using YouTube as a marketing tool to get people behind the pay wall.
We were the first to do live 1080p streaming. At the time, even finding a hardware mixer for this content was difficult. It was so early that there was only one product available that wasn't just prime time equipment.
Porn sites, while very cutting edge in a lot of ways (which generates more revenue for them), are extremely slow to adopt changes to their source of revenue because they are very protective about that aspect (for obvious reasons).
Not only that, but the sources of revenue are all deeply intertwined with their affiliate networks, which drive the traffic to the sites in the first place. Shaving is a huge concern, so these sites have to use 'approved' software that everyone else uses for this.
One of the largest used pieces of software is called NATS [1] and it is a trainwreck of complexity. Everything is directed through their integrated billing options [2]... which as you can see is extensive. Why? Because credit card companies will routinely shut down your merchant account randomly... because p0rn.
For the company I worked for (early 2000's), we developed a micro currency that was HUGELY successful and was used for all sorts of interesting things, like pay per minute billing. This was all early/pre days of blockchain adoption and had we used a low cost blockchain of some of this, it might have allowed for earlier more interesting experiments.
Anyway, the full answer is that this is a lot more complex than it appears on the surface and you have no idea what you're talking about here with a comment like that.
From the engineering side, the software was beyond horrid. Different versions of their software would re-use the same column in a database for different things! They'd do things like if id>=5000 { do something else } in their code. I always wanted to rewrite it and produce something that was actually sane.
But, being in the p0rn industry, it made it super difficult to hire talented engineers because people were afraid to talk about where they worked (or just had issues p0rn) and I myself left without ever having the chance to do so. Funny enough, I see a similar hiring issue with crypto today.
I can't believe I'd never made that connection, but it's dead on. If crypto can't even take over porn payments, which are practically an ideal case for the technology, it's not taking over anything else meaningful, either. Now that it's been pointed out, it seems obvious.
( note to self: keep an eye out for headlines re: Mindgeek or similar creating a crypto currency, and invest in it pronto if that happens, because it'll mean they found a way to make it broadly useful )
2k -> 4k -> 6k -> 8k side-by-side video over the course of a 4-5 years.
That's exactly what John Oliver's show does, and has for years, right? They have a couple major segments and two or three smaller bits in an episode, and one of the two major segments gets released in its entirety for free (and inevitably linked by someone or another in every half-way relevant discussion thread anywhere on the Web). They post them on YouTube, I think, I suppose since HBO Max doesn't have a free streaming site and it wouldn't get 1/10 the eyeballs of YouTube even if they did, and the point is advertising, after all.
The layouts were designed over a decade ago and most tubes sites just copied YouTube for a layout, assuming They know what they were doing when they designed it. Or copied other existing tube sites’ layouts. A lot of these sites started by using an out of the box software that has a prebuilt back then as well. The designs weren’t changed because why would you change a horse that’s winning you many millions per month? Plus everyone was afraid of changing anything that might hurt their seo ranking.
Source: worked in that industry for over a decade and know/knew many of the decision makers at these companies. They weren’t that strategic, I assure you.
Turtles, turtles, turtles! All the way down.
Porn was the first to adopt portable cameras. VHS. DVDs. Credit card payments for online. Chat. Webcams. VR. 4K (not the best idea). etc.
For many years, the Adult Entertainment Expo and CES were held simultaneously in Vegas. And the AES tech talks were often better as CES tended to blur the line between marketing and tech while at AES the marketing/sales and tech were ... more strongly delineated.
Oh, hey, look at that. For 2023, they're back to being on the same date. Presumably attendance at both is sufficiently off that they needed to consolidate again.
I’ve seen porn videos with a YT-style thumbnail (annoying person making a dumb face in front of whatever is actually interesting), but so far they are very rare.
So... let's just be glad YT only allows mouths to be agape on the thumbnails you have to scroll past.
Again, I don't know anything about UX, please tell me if I'm wrong.
Maximize search accuracy.
Give people what they want rather than string them along for as much time as possible.
It's not like they have a monopoly, so that should be a valid strategy.
I strongly believe that most web sites are leaving a lot of money on the table by not having their ads in-house. It will be more work (and cost) in the short run, but a good ad salesman can find those customers who really want to target the people reading your website in ways algorithms do not. The big automakers and fast food don't care about targeting - nearly everyone is a potential customer so they can get everyone. Most care about targeting and so by selling direct you ensure that their ads never go to someone who won't buy anyway because of the algorithm.
3 steps:
1 - fund high quality, totally free content, great UI, minimal ads
2 - poach customers from subscriber sites, wait them out. will take about a year. they'll go broke.
3 - start to optimize for "engagement" (ad views). profit.
porn, the slow-slung engine of progress
Gutenberg might have printed the bible, but he made is money off of porn.
Also possibly NSFW (illustrations of the porn sites).
>This story is part of our Weekend Reads series, where we highlight a story we love from the archives. It was originally published in the fifth issue of Eye on Design magazine and again online on August 8, 2019.
They're optimized for short form, continuously scrolling, mini videos. They don't do the recommendation algorithm though, at least not for free users.