I'll probably get burned in effigy for this, but here it goes.
People seem to forget that the hun started out by linking into the members areas of adult check gold sites.
People had their hosting shut down because of this.
In the early days of TGP 90%+ of the galleries listed had stolen content on them.
There were sponsors that refused to accept TGP traffic because they were "giving away the store" and TGP's made their money from things like dialers etc.
Now, today, the TGP sites are a staple of our industry, in fact alot of people think they're the only traffic source in the industry.
While the illegal tube sites definitely go alot farther today than the TGP's did back in 1997-1998....that's really more a function of the cost of bandwidth and the availability of content than it is a moral decision by the site owner.
If bandwidth was $15 a meg and content was plentiful when the TGP's first started, they probably would have given just as much away.
You can either sit on your soapbox and be righteously indignant while your competitors put you out of business, or you can be realistic and practical and make money.
I think the reason so many people are steamed here is that Shap has always been a soap box kind of guy, so people didn't expect this from him.
There is no good option here, the tube sites aren't going to go away no matter how much you scream, so you can either try to use them to make money, or you can scream about them. Faced with those two choices, a smart business man is going to choose to make money.
I'd like to point out that the people who are screaming the loudest don't have a dog in this fight. Shap is the one who spends millions of dollars a year on content and has it stolen. He's the one who had to make a business decision.
The dogs who bark the loudest about tube sites aren't the people who are having their stuff stolen, it's the people who are losing traffic to the tube sites....or people who think their drop in income is attributable to these new sites. (Their logic is more free porn=fewer members and lower retention)
You can make a valid argument for that....but still, if they're not stealing from you then you really have no right to bitch about Shap's decision to do business with them.
