Obscene Losses: YouPorn, Silicon Valley, and the Future of the Adult-Entertainment Industry | Hacker News Reader

Obscene Losses: YouPorn, Silicon Valley, and the Future of the Adult-Entertainment Industry

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22 pointsdpapathanasiou11 comments

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After online advertising start growing rapidly and more importantly Google introduced Adsense a lot of sites were now able to generate a lot more money by simply offering their sites for free, and in return have higher traffics, (therefore, more money from advertisement). I believe also one of the very reasons why blogging grew out of a simple diary into a very profitable business, and a full time job for many people.

But the interesting thing here is that the porn sites can't really take advantage of this fact, since google and many other people avoid advertising on porn sites. Therefore, a site like YouPorn will have problems generating profits although it has such huge traffics. I guess the people in the online porn industry really need to get creative and come up with a new model for their business. But whats more interesting and ironic is that free porn sites like YouPorn are becoming more and more popular, and are killing the old media businesses (exact same thing that happened to the music and movie industry, and as mentioned in the article) but are not able to make money themselves either. Clearly the users are the real winner here, LOL

Interesting that the 51st most popular site on the internet cannot be sold for even a few million bucks, despite repeated attempts. pg has said YC (and the vast majority of other investors) wouldn't fund a porn venture, not due to any ethical qualms, but because there is no good exit option, and I guess this is pretty solid proof of that.

...I think what they are attempting is closer to "extortion" than mere selling.

How so? It seems to me that the YouPorn folks are at far higher risk of being sued out of existence...yes, all of the traditional pay-for-content sites, and buy-our-DVDs companies, are in serious trouble, because of sites like YouPorn. But, taking YouPorn out of the picture through acquisition wouldn't solve that problem--though I guess I can begin to see the extortion angle if we follow that through to one possible conclusion: Every 20-something nerd in the world will suddenly think, "Hey, I can build a killer porn video site, and some poor schmucks at a billion dollar porn company will have to buy it to prevent competition!"

Hard to say how the targeted buyers view things. But they're (currently) in the position of power. They have hundreds of millions in revenues, versus a few million for YouPorn. And, now that YouPorn is known to have revenue, and has forced itself onto the radar of lots of people, it's going to attract lawsuits...

agreed

It seems obvious that people want something that is not so professional, Vivid in the article doesn't seem to be getting that they can gain market share if they would change there tactics, maybe put together a compilation cd of amateur content or create there own amateur content using models who are not so worked over that they are impossibly perfect looking.

Just out of curiosity: do you use speech recognition software, or do your fingers just naturally tend to type "armature" instead of "amateur"?

I can never spell amateur right so I copied and pasted my text into open office then somehow proceeded to pick the wrong word to replace my mispelling.

it sounds like there is some personal experience there lol :)

I think that other sites with user generated content like folklore.org has created a tidy profit by compiling the information into a format people can buy (in that case a book). I personally believe if the site had a cd-rom version say on a subscription service (every 3 months you get a new cd-rom) that people would be happy to pay $10 for it and he could hit his revenue target (1% paying $10 a month). Not that I would ever look at such material!

hehe... its interesting you say that since its a totally different business model than any other "web 2.0" company out there... but again they can't function like any other ones since they can't generate that much ad $ ... so a CD of the most viewed, or highest voted videos would probably be appreciate (not me obviously)

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