Paysite owners, how do you protect your content from torrent sites?

The billing model is just fine IMO.

$15-$35 for a months access to a decent site (that has good quality video and photo in quantity plus any other goodies) is way more than you can fit in the average mag.


When you join a site for the first time and its been around for a while you get a shit load to look at.....its not as if when you order playboy for the first time they send you a telephone directory sized magazine with everything from day one in it.

"content theft hurts us all"</50>

Fair enough. I run webcam sites not paysites so I don't claim to be the expert.

I am still not convinced, however, that you can't make money with torrent sites. Our industry has made money for years by offering tons of free content (i.e. via TGPs and the like). There has to be a way to transfer that model to P2P networks.

As you said you get a shitload of content for around $30 a month. The problem is it takes less than a month to rip all that content. Perhaps it could be doled out in smaller chunks so they can't rip and run?


B

Id wager that the webmasters who care more about content theft and take measures to reduce it...actually make their own content.

You could dole it out in smaller chunks - there are a few reasons why i wouldn't but I'm not that keen to go into it. Too many non industry lurkers here and i dislike giving them ideas LOL.

Well as a person who runs a DRM service provider I'll give a very frank outlook about the possibilities of using DRM.

DRM can help this sort of issue, however all it takes is one very dedicated person with some screencap software to post a clear copy of the video on the torrent sites, and once it's in the wild, it's over. Luckily that's beyond the skills of most people but it only takes one.

DRM won't work on Macs which loses you about 5-10% of your possible customer base.

5% of windows users have a fucked up DRM (it tends to get fucked up, especially on Win9x systems), and thus it takes some magic to get it working again.

Depending on how you set things up, users may need to visit your site using Internet Explorer. (Although this can be avoided)

Some users at the mere mention of DRM will pretty much crap themselves.

So those are all some cons about using DRM.

Your possible advantages are that you can make content expire after the user's subscription dies, and you can easily limit each member to only download N copies of each video.

Overall, if you have a plain vanilla subscription site, don't bother with DRM. The users will just choose a different site without it.

If you have some truly unique content, or higher priced content, and are willing to deal with a bit more pain, then it can be a good fit.

lastly if you do some unique items, like adding High-Res videos that can be purchased individually to an existing site, then DRM can be a very good fit as well.



Now the potentially interesting technology coming soon is the addition of DRM to Microsoft Silverlight, (Microsoft's Flash competitor). the plugin can play DRM protected files in IE, Firefox, Opera, on both Mac and Windows. So if the DRM is actually stable, then it could be real interesting.

I don't think watermarking alone is going to help, and I don't buy the argument that a person that visits Rapidshare is the type of person that won't buy porn online anyways. You can have an otherwise honest customer that rebills for months on end, and as soon as he stumbles upon a forum with Rapidshare links to all of the content he is paying for you can kiss him goodbye. Not to mention that there is so much content from so many other sites on there that he may decide that a yearly membership to Rapidshare is a much better value for his dollar. It is also NOT outdated content. I see forums posting Rapidshare links to brand new content as soon as it is made available in the members area update.

I'll say it again:
Make your member's area worth more than just pictures and videos.
Webcam shows, private messaging, competitions etc etc.
Reward your members for being members.

Oh - and are you [and others] able to start listing the names of some sites/forums that are dumping RS links? I'm starting to do some research / tracking ;)

I'd very much like to know how do you do that?

one place to start is to not do business with the companies who fund all these torrent sites.

Most torrent sites only source of income is advertising, if you penalize the people who advertise on them that will be a start.

Simon, I'm passing a bunch of the info on to Selena that I found for your guy's sites.

On the subject of sites posting Rapidshare rips, you might find some of your content here.

http://www.forumophilia.com/


Rapidshare the .com version remove links very quickly if you mail abuse @. Not sure about the .de site.

Windows Media Video file format allows you to specify metadata commands such as adding urls that are popped up in an external browser when you play past a certain point in the file.

However due to this feature sucking so much for users, it was turned off by default in windows media player 10 and higher making it damn near useless.

It's a pity that this feature is not usable anymore, but thank you for your response.