Obscene Losses: How YouPorn is Killing the Adult Entertainment Business
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The major difference however, is that YouPorn followed many pay porn sites and a huge volume of content, as opposed to YouTube which preluded TV really coming onto the web. Often you hear that the TV and movie industries have squandered their opportunity to make money off the web. YouPorn makes a case that no matter what the TV execs or movie execs had done before YouTube, the proliferation of free content would have happened anyway. People like free, even if it is inferior. DVDs have better quality than streaming, even downloading is better than streaming, but free beats 1 cent any day.
Porn? Sure, it's wonderful when it's well-produced, but people don't care first and foremost about production value. They watch porn to masturbate in nearly all cases. That means that porn films benefit from shorter, more manageable scenes, and that quality doesn't matter whatsoever. The film industry has a subsection that operates based on quality. Porn profits almost exclusively from access: the easier access is, the more attention.
So TV still has some fight in it. So does the music industry, though I think in both cases there will be changes. Porn? I think that the professional industry is going to be gutted through-and-through. The porn industry can't compete with amateurs.
Most porn sucks (and blows), but one day pornography will be recognized as a proper art form and attract people who actually care about exploring the genre. Yes; porn is used exclusively for masturbation. But it's better to masturbate to a better product.
90% of mainstream pornography consists of dicks going really fast in and out of vaginas, punctuated by some guy blowing his load in the girl's face. It's hard to think of something involving sex that is less exciting and creative than this. The real fun comes from subtle emotional interactions, power play, fantasy and a million other things I haven't thought of. High budgets and production values are worthless if you're only recording cumshots, but there are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and power isn't put to better use.
Assuming that parts of the HN crowd, in fact, watches porn: have any of you, for instance, ever seen a believable reenactment of a sexual fantasy? I sure as hell haven't. There is so much that could be done here. Sex is one of our deepest drives. Pornography has the potential to be one of the most profound art forms we have.
Consider what the advertising industry (clothing, underwear, perfume) is doing. They usually get blamed for destroying the woman's role, setting unrealistic expectations for people's looks, etc. But some of the things these guys/gals make actually has some emotional impact, on a sexual level deeper than what I see in most erotica and pornography. Although a randy ad never conveys any meaning or realism, the writing and acting is so much better. Fine art nudes are rarely effective at getting its viewers horny...advertising is. The highbrow crowd is obviously doing something wrong. Shouldn't artists put their effort where the impact is largest?
The porn industry will, happily, never get bailout money from the government. I'm hopeful that some competition will set the commercial porn studios thinking, or at least drag them down far enough that they can be attacked by teams with less financial clout. YouPorn is good for us, because of its equalizing potential.
I'm not familiar with the industry, but I would guess the reason behind the inertia and lack of imagination is the social stigma which means that porn producers are very much self-selected.
The pros follow the exact formula you described: too fast to be fun -> zoom in way too close -> finish while not even touching each other. FAIL.
Amateurs may not do it perfectly, and may forget to change position 5 times, but at least they are having a good time.
Right now? I think the answer's no. The problem is that you're going for two audiences: the porn-watchers and the content-seekers. The porn-watchers pay for the scene. The more scenes you have, the better. The content-watchers are the ones who'd watch something straight through if it was worth watching. The problem is, a large part of writing-directing is a matter of taste. When you're writing a sex scene into something, you only keep what you absolutely need to advance the plot. Most porn scenes are 10-20 minutes long, which means even if you only have one per film, you're making a really imbalanced product.
I can see writing an interesting, compulsive scene if you've got great characters and great acting, and if you weave plot in. But the more of that you add, the worse the scene gets for the porn-watcher. It's much more a zero-sum game, where you can't win with both at the same time.
And that gets to the bigger problem: porn is not intended to be art. It's meant to soothe people who aren't getting something they should be getting. If you're getting great sex, you don't need porn. You can subsist entirely on art pieces that aren't erotic in that sense. I'd put porn in the same category as something like Office Space in that the main intent isn't artistic merit, it's helping somebody who's in a situation they don't like. The fact that it's no sex versus a dull job doesn't change the fact that neither one is quite as funny if you aren't in that sort of a situation.
(Art nudes, by the way, aren't meant to be erotic. Usually they're meant to capture the human body in its entirety, and there's nothing erotic about the human body unless it's actively teasing you. The novel Syrup has a great scene describing this. Nudes aren't sexy unless you've been teased with a partly-clothed body, and when the girl isn't deliberately denying you the sight of more.)
Now, I can see porn becoming more integrated with movies and TV. I can imagine, in a long-running TV show, a "moment of release" sex scene that literally climaxes seasons of building tension. But that's not the porn industry. That's a little porn added on to a much bigger thing.
Look at how porn is used in books. Pulp writers (Dean Koontz and kin) use it wholesale to raise reader interest during boring sequences. That's pornography in the current sense. Once you hit higher art, though, sex scenes are always used to portray something. You lose the full erotic impact. People aren't buying literature to jerk off: if anything, the jerking is incidental.
And so there lies the problem. Pornography is by its nature a low-brow product. If people pay for more, they'll pay for something that's not inherently pornography. And that means the current porn industry is screwed (ahahaha pun). If you want to masturbate, amateurs are perfectly fine. If you need a level higher, there's always piracy in the form of streaming legal videos, which the porn industry, shady as it is, can't compete with as easily as the RIAA can. They're fighting a battle with everything against them.
I believe the films Shortbus and 9 Songs attempt this to at least some degree.
I don't think porn necessarily has to be low-brow. Exploitation films and other really violent stuff was pretty lowbrow at some point, but today the best films of these genres are as good art as anything. I'm not sure this analogy holds all the way, but at least it's a good argument that these things are worth exploring. It's surprising how culture and people can change.
I love to discuss this stuff with you guys. It's not really something you can talk about over dinner, or in any other 99% of social situations.
[Note that I'm using a liberal definition of art here - I prefer to use the word in its original sense, as "something really good" which provokes emotions, thoughts and daydreams.]
I agree entirely with your definition of art. I'm not certain about how sustainable porn is as an artistic medium, though. Money has to come from somewhere. And the problem is, most people who would appreciate it as a medium would be people less desperate for porn. I don't know if more artistic porn filmers would be able to sustain their craft.
But recently I stumbled on something completely different, and a lot like what you're describing: Fate/Stay Night, a visual-novel. Technically an ero-game, in reality it's a book, with image backgrounds and music. One scenario (out of 3 possible) took me about two weeks to read, and it had exactly 2 (two) scenes of sex. But they were worth every line/image, exactly because they were so embedded in the story.
One problem with doing the same in movies is that you can't be as free as in manga. Under-aged characters or incest are "like saying hello" in manga, but I doubt they'd be well received in movies.
Another problem is the quality of actors. To make what you're describing you'd have to start from the other end: have a good show, with good actors/story and put a real sex-scene in it. Otherwise you have with people who are willing to have sex on tape, but you lack everything else.
I hope the porn industry either learns or gets out of the way. =)
Sure the end of copyright is hurting them. But they seem better off the say music studios. At least they're not acting like the world owes them a new business model.
Did anyone else find this use of words a little amusingly oxymoronic?
Parallels with the music industry as well as movies and video?
Spread the joy, indeed.
Or you just say "two sites in the alexa top 100 that we know about"
It's not rocket science.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/youporn.co...
I do have one possible solution, though: for every 50 karma points you earn, say, you get a "free gift" of some sort within the system (because otherwise it would encourage gaming of the system to earn such points). One gift could be a one-use "post this comment anonymously" checkbox that would then disappear. Another would be, to use a fun example, the sort of "mega-upvote" everyone wishes they had around for when something truly deserves it.
EDIT
Part of what's neat about this idea is that support now can cost people something, so they have to really be behind what they support. On the other hand, it would probably establish a oligarchy.
Sure, it can be a "noble sacrifice" and generate some sort of epic story retold throughout the community where user-Gandalf sacrifices their karma in the fight against troll-user-Balrog, and then others step in to "forge ahead without them," but just because a notion is romantic doesn't mean it's Utilitarian (in fact, they're almost opposite by definition.) Although boring, the community as a whole is likely better off if the others could restore Gandalf afterwards, as long as they thought his actions were justified. Since, in a database, there's no difference between taking something away and instantly finding reason to give it back, let me phrase it this way (thank Doctorow for this):
You don't spend whuffie; you just have it. However, if you do something stupid with it, it can be taken away.
I'm not sure if this has been tried on a social news site before, and it sounds stupid on face-value, but, what if, instead of each comment having an individual score that also affects its author's karma, the comment's score (and therefore its page placement) simply _is_ the author's karma? That is, a comment by a user with 3000 karma starts off with a score of 3000, and is placed on the page accordingly.
As such, you wouldn't really be voting on the comment itself anymore, but rather voting on the user by considering the comment as an action by that user. Taking all your points off of a user for one especially bad thing they did--considered on sites like this and reddit to be quite uncouth--wouldn't be a "sin" any longer, because _you're not rating their comments_ any more; you're just rating _them_. When you give someone one downvote, it applies across the "scores" of all their other posts, and likewise for upvotes.
I'd love to see this system tried out. I don't even have a special attachment to its success or failure; it simply sounds like a great experiment in virtual sociology. I might even be motivated to implement it myself if anyone else shows interest here in being part of the resulting community.
YouPorn does have competitors. Let's take a look (and see how many double entendres I inadvertently use)
RedTube - First totally free porn site I found.
Pro's - Dead simple UI. Blazing fast load times. You can scrub through videos quickly (to skip over boring parts, this is very important). Also, Looong videos.
Con's - Lots of repeat videos. Few ones that you don't see everywhere else. Not too many ways to drill down through the content. They sacrifice user control for simplicity.
Note: Arrington always mentions this one by name when writing about the porn industry.
Spankwire - Digg for porn. Hard to tell though, their UI is awful.
Pro's - Blazing fast load times. Loooong videos. Ability to scrub through them as they play quickly. Also, a really deep, varied selection of videos. User comments on videos are actually intelligent.
Con's - Doesn't update as frequently as other sites. UI is imprenetrable. I've never voted on anything. I wouldn't know what to click.
Xvideos - Big player.
Pro's - Adds about 30 videos each day. Crazy deep selection of videos. Decent tagging system. Related video algo is pretty good. UI is pretty ugly but serves its purpose.
Con's - Video's are slow to load. You can't skip through them without waiting for them to buffer all over again. Major performance issues here.
Megarotic - One of the big semi-pay sites.
Pro's - Incredible video selection. Really good performance and playback. Can scrub through the videos.
Con's - Costs money to watch more than 4 videos a day on their site. Their video player is getting more and more proprietary, adding popup ads, massive popup controls and branding.
Fantasti.cc - This site's incredible. Social network for porn and people looking for casual sex. Rather than power their own videos they simply scrap embed codes from Xvideos, Pornub and Megarotic and tack on a slick UI and social networking features. I think all this could be done with Drupal and a few modules.
Pro's - Well-designed. Really nicely designed. Enormous selection of videos by sucking in everything on other sites including xvideos, pornhub and youporn. There's also an actual user community of people making collections of videos (a great feature I've not seen anywhere else, letting humans organize and categorize them into weird subsections like "Chicks with flip - flops"). Users review videos. They also create user profiles where they post up amateur photos and video clips. The slick UI sets it all apart from other sites that do the same.
Cons - Because they steal from all the other free sites, videos disappear from the DB. Also, performance is only as good as the sites they steal from. I bet 60% of their content comes from XVideos...which means performance is often terrible.
Pornhub - Slick video site.
Pros - Well-organized. Fast playback. Good selection.
Cons - Has the same videos as everyone else. Front page features stuff that people just watched, so you end up seeing the same clips over and over on the front page.
Conclusion from my own observations: There are loads of competitors. The ability to scrub through videos is crucial but still not available on all sites. Offering a simple UI is important but without advanced search or other organizing features like Fantasti.cc's wonderful user collections one risks losing users (I rarely go to redtube. It's too basic and hard to find new stuff.)
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/youporn.com/?metric=uv
The question is: which is crappier - alexis or compete?
Make something people want.
The one company I see coming out of this is Brazzers. They seem to have partnered up with YP and a lot of clones to generate traffic and more leads through short "review" videos. And there the only real brand that has been embracing the new shift, including the social aspects.