The porn industry is under attack - what are we going to do about it?

I wonder what DH would have to say about this. Oh he has already spoken http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?t=728563

All the tgps under the wing are feeding a monster and from what I see 2 big ones just signed up.

Jon, don't let Paul get you down. Paul's entire stand is that he can apparently produce content so cheap that he can give it away for free and make it up in volume. His plan is to turn customers paying $25 a month for porn into customers paying at most a few cents to watch clips. His thought is that someone is way more likely to pay to watch a 10 minute clip than they are to just download a DVD rip from a torrent site for free.

So, having marked that off, here is the reality:

The adult industry isn't alone. The movie, television, and music industries are suffering greatly at the hands of the torrents and other "user generated content" sites. Apparently, most users can't generate much, but they are remarkable effecient when it comes to ripping stuff off of other people and giving it away for free.

The MPAA and RIAA are taking steps, and today Torrentspy had to start blocking out US users because of a court order that would require them to track the users and report them to these groups. A group in Amsterdam has had 6 or 7 torrent sites taken down in the last little while. Megarotic lost more than half of it's total processing, and the rest is in question.

The offensive has started.

Next week, a group of content producers will get together in LA and discuss the issue further, try to understand the problem better, and hopefully work towards finding methods to attack the menace.

Part of problem is the companies that finance these sites. I notice you have Adbrite on pussy.org - they along with Etology are the two biggest purveyor of ads on torrent sites. Dating sites such as AFF are also paying big money to be part of torrent sites, supporting them to the very end.

If you want to fix things, your site is big enough, start at home. Ban companies that appear on torrent sites. Stop doing business with them. Contact them and tell them why. Contact partner sites that you trade with, your friends, and tell them the same thing. You know your business is suffering, their business is suffering too, even if they don't want to admit it. Making the companies that support the torrents and tube sites that are killing your business unwelcome on your sites. Make sure they know why.

We all need to stop tolerating these sites, and we need to stop dealing with the companies that finance them.

Adult needs an association like RIAA.com

LOL, the record industry is still making plenty of money... will make even more now that it embraced the change rather than fought it.

It surprises me as well.

Wrong. The record biz has had a double digit revenue decline every year for the past 3 years. So far this year it's at 18% down.

You really are clueless. The record industry is suffering greatly, and key in this is that thier money to develop new actions to national and international status is drying up fast. Fewer and fewer new bands are getting label support to get going, and most bands are getting shittier contracts that pay them less because there is less to make.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/sto...ustrys_decline

In 2000, americans bought 785.1 million albums. In 2006 they bought 588 million, almost 1/3 of the sales disappeared in 6 years. Replaces by some income from Itunes style sites, but they are selling mostly single songs and not albums, which is highly negative for the recording industry, which uses the number of songs and the ticket price of an album to stoke the fires of development for the future.

The music industry at this point is on the brink of collapse, being unable to develop new acts and being unable to promote those acts in meaningful ways. When that happens, the production of new high end product will cease, replaced by garage bands making garage music.

So sorry, but your argument fails.

Wow.

I think you TGP/MGP guys are a riot...

You think everything will just stay the same...

Notice we don't use trains for passenger travel anymore... Catch a fucking clue, the world isn't going to stop for you.

Uhhh... spreading viruses is illegal dumbass.

I did not say it would save everyone from the big chop. But so far I see it as the only feasible suggestion. Come up with a better one.

We could all form a union and only do business with those in the union. Sponsors, Affiliates, TGPs, billers, traffic merchants, etc. would be in the union. Anyone in the union would not use, promote or submit to the Torrent sites so if and when the content appears we know it's stolen. Anyone outside the union cannot do business with anyone in the union. Everyone would pay an appropriate fee to pay top lawyers to go after the Torrent sites. Maybe affiliates could take 10% less which is put into the unions fund.

Or would the 99% expect the 1% to step up and pay for the fight while taking the benefits? As per usual.

If you buy it why not.

Bottom line is would my idea make you more money than running a conventional site the normal way from scratch?

I applaud and will support and contribute to any effective action to stop people stealing and illegally using content. But if all your efforts work, well if the efforts of the record and film industry work and we can follow them, the model of sites will change. What ever way you want to cut it the model of over charging the surfer for a poor product to pay for a bloated "traffic" industry is going to change.

You can't keep charging $30 for a 30 cent need to pay affiliates $25.

And you are so wrong about the surfers downloading whole sites or even whole DVDs. We all know if the surfer really wanted that much content the Torrent sites would be screwed. Their BW bill would be even bigger. The truth as you well know is the surfers want 20 minutes of video and at a low quality.

Again I applaud and support your efforts to stop theft. In the long run the laws will change, it's simply down to economics. Too much money is involved in the Internet. If people don't pay for porn, music, films, games, programs, etc the economy of so many industries is affected. Governments will be forced to act.

porn industy is in status quo, it entertaian people esp. adult. but we should be strict for those whose patronized pornography that they should be in proper age.

That in a nutshell is what they want. They want the industry to stop and keep funnelling $25 of every join into the "traffic" sector of the industry. For years they acted like kings who could not be done without if you wanted to make money on the Internet. Then up pops people who don't have an affiliate program and are able to give content away on the funding of advertising. And they are screaming it's not fair.

Watch my lips TGP/MPG guys. The future is not giving you $25 on every sign up. Sorry if that sounds tough, but the horse and buggy gave way to the car and no one worried about the wheelwright when they're buying a car.

Paul, quite simply, the traffic is worth that much. If you aren't going to pay it, the dating sites, the poker sites, and the (insert next big thing) will pay for it. People will send porn searches to non-porn adwords sites and make money there. Without traffic, you won't have many 30 cents to sell... perhaps you can raise enough each money for coffee and a donut.

Would your next suggestion be that the DVD producers should just sell their DVDs mailorder only because there is no money left to pay the retailers?

One of the things about business is that business runs on models where all of the required pieces are in the game. Attempting to come up with a strategy that says "we will cut the price until we outperform people who give our shit away for free" is failure to understand the basics on a buisness system.

Funny. In Montreal, they are working a plan to re-install tramways in the city. Japan is one of the best countries to travel in... all trains. It is actually net faster to go downtown montreal to downtown toronto by train than by plane (1 hour plane ride, get there a couple of hours early for security, get to the airport outside of the downtown core, reverse it in Toronto.... train does in about 5 hours what a 1 hour flight takes 6 hours to complete).

Nobody thinks anything will stay the same, but you have to be a frigging moron to think that there is any valid business model to compete against "and everything is free".

And the earth is flat.

The traffic is worth what you can get from it and what this whole situation is proving is it's not worth what it WAS worth.

Do you seriously imagine traffic is that hard to get?

Getting traffic is the easiest part of this business. Getting it to buy something is the toughest part. Made even tougher, as you and so many rightly point out, if another site is offering a better deal. Will more people buy if the site was $5? Yes. Will more buy if it's at $3, YES. Now we have to see how we deliver the product at the price we can sell it at and stay in business.

Affiliates do not create or own traffic, you simply guide it. Assuming you don't go out and force a person to go to the sites you want him to go to, this is the truth. The surfer has logged on to the Internet, he's interested in looking at porn, he goes to the sites he knows or a search engine, and he surfs. He's a free agent and no one OWNS him.

As he gets more familiar with how the adult Net works he start to bookmark, he is learning all the time. And this is the problem you have. Most $30 sites are not bookmarked, the surfer just SEES them. Conversion ratios prove this. The surfer is starting to learn that his need for 20 minutes of fun is going to cost him $30.

Then he hits a site that is free and he stops and LOOKS at it. He tries it out and he BOOKMARKS the site. Most of these sites are a mish mash of good, bad and crap. Download speeds are slow, quality is slow and the site is not what he really wants. But instead of paying $30 for 20 minutes he's accepting it.

My thinking is he hits a site that costs $1 to $5 that hits his needs exactly to what he wants. The porn he likes, well laid out, delivered at a speed and quality he likes. The site is WORTH the price he's willing to pay and better than free sites.

So you won't send me traffic. Big deal. I can't afford to have you send me traffic and unless you succeed in closing down all sites under the price of $29 a month you won't have a lot of traffic to send. Because every surfer that hits these sites is one less for the $30 a month sites.

PPV and VOD is part of your problem as well and I think partly responsible for the diminishing ratios of many sites and affiliates. Maybe someone could confirm or deny this.

I hope and pray we can close down Torrent sites and any site that steals content. but that is not the problem. The problem is in the future the SURFER will not pay enough to PAY affiliates what he wants.

and i bet you don't have any suggestions on how to adapt either

i find that hard to believe.

the people who are going to these sites do so because they are looking for something for free. So you saying that these sites make more from donations then they do from selling advertising spots / traffic ?

I know some offer "upgraded membership options" for faster downloads and all that shit, but still it goes back to the same logic, these people are there to see stuff for free not pay for it. The money is being made in ad sales.

Paul..... WTF?

so i can buy all of you content for $5 ?


i can't even begin to reply to your post, it is better for me just to walk away and not even try.

Yeah Paul's idea to offer a low cost membership to compete with a free site was fucking brillant. I am sure people who can get the entire net full of videos for free would pass on that and go to your site and pay you a couple bucks to see your coupld hundred videos.


People may have bitched when tgps came out. I don't know, i started in 99 and never heard any bitching from that time to present.

Here is a little comparison for you. Guy owns restaurant, he gives out small samples so people can taste his food. Some people eat a sample of all different types and get full but most find one type they like the best and they order that one so they can get more of it. Some people bitched saying people were getting full from the samples. Now you are giving them the whole fucking kitchen for free. can you understand the fucking difference???

So what if people bitched about tgps. TGPS were shocking to some i would assume since nothing was given away for free back when they first came out BUT (and it is huge fucking but) even though people were giving away a little with TGPS there was still a LOT that was being held back that people would want to sign up for. NOT NOW, now everything is given away.

For the millionth time, how do you compete with that? There is nothing left for them to want to signup to see, it is ALL out in the open for free now.

TGPS = 30 second clips from a couple videos from the members area. Some sponsors have content that they keep exlusively for the members area and DONT use on tgps, even for short clips.
Torrent sites = 30 minute videos, your entire members area.

Some of you need to pull your head out of your ass, and get a fucking clue about this shit and stop making your retard ass comparisons " but tgps..." and " you need to adapt".


Short of closing down your membership sites, and starting cams and dating sites, there is no adapting. If i am wrong please share on how everyone is suppose to adapt. If you don't have a fucking clue on how to adapt then stop telling other people to do it until you can figure it out yourself.

Excuse me...but don't torrent sites operate like Peer to Peer? So they aren't actually "Hosting" anything? Tube sites do host. But don't the bit torrent sites basically use very little bandwidth?
And no disrespect to you...but a lot of your marketing ideas just won't work for the majority of pay sites. Especially all the ones who shoot their own content.

You need to hire best Russian hakers and hack those pornotube redtube etc sites.

Paul, torrent sites are P2P - bandwidth isn't an issue for them, except for the question of people surfing their pages looking for stuff. They don't serve the files.

File hosting and torrent sites have BW issues, which is why most of them are packed full of ads hoping to make money, because without that income they would die quickly.

Paul, one of the amazing things about traffic is that you don't have to serve it what it came looking for. They searched for "Paul Markham teens", and I can serve them up generic teen. I can serve them up teen dating, teen cams, teen stories, or about anything else teen. Just because they were searching for porn (teens fucking) doesn't mean I am obligated to give them exactly teens fucking. If your teens fucking pays 5 cents a sale and the dating site pay $50 per sale, my conversions with the dating site could be 1000 times worse and still I would make the same money.

The value of traffic isn't just what the porn people will pay for it, but what traffic and exposure if worth overall. You cannot suddenly make traffic worthless, it will just go somewhere else to get paid. Your world isn't flat, but it certainly is about the size of a tennis ball. There is a whole world outside of porn buying and selling traffic often for way more than porn pays. That won't disappear because pornpeople let all their content get stolen and given away for free.

You are talking yourself into a corner here. Are you saying that you intend to give total access to your site for $1? No recur, no rebilling, no nothing? You are slagging the VOD model, but you are going to price even more content for LESS?

Paul, I wish you luck. Giving it all away to compete with illegal sites is just going to play the game they are good at. As Robbie said, your model won't work for most paysites shooting their own content.

lets see....

youporn.com is registerd at namecheap.com which is a reseller of enom & hosted at softlayer.com....if anyone will start sending mass dmca notices to all 3 im sure the site will be down soon.

What I'm going to personally do is continue to not use content at all in my advertising. Just like the past few years.
Hopefully, sales will continue for a long time to come. The more things are 100% free, the worse sales for those things will become. It's kinda simple.

I do remember the debate about TGP's. TGP's started by linking directly to free sites gallery pages which pissed off free site builders and link lists. Linking to the gallery pages directly bypasses the first 2 advertising pages on a free site of course. Link lists were already banning FPA's and pop-ups, limiting the number of links out, and now these new fangled TGP's were bypassing 2 entire pages. Hosting and buying content was not cheap like today! Less ads = less money. period.

It's just a slippery slope, and right now today it's a slippery cliff. I get people hitting me up asking if it's ok if they submit our free content to tube sites, SIMPLY because they can THEN link to the flash version of the video and not have to host it! You figure it out.

Your going to see a lot of the tube sites popping up. The ones who can handle the costs of keeping them up and running are the ones who will last (AEBN). I imagine the conversion rates will be even lower than TGP's.

That whole issue was because the free sites were unprepared for the onslaught of traffic. The reality is that most free sites were making their sales BEFORE the content and not after, and most of them disn't have a truly hard sell on the content pages.

When people started to build galleries specifically for the TGP crowd, the aggressiveness of the sales pitch on those pages was turned up to 11.

In reality, TGPs don't really give away any more content than a free site, as free sites have usually 2 galleries but you have to step through a couple of pages to get to it. TGP (and pic posts, and even blogs and such) are just another type of marketing at about the same level of free content. Nobody out there is giving away site rips hoping to make sales.

Anyone who thinks that torrents are just the next step after TGPs better not be building staircases for a living.

Will76 mentioned he wasn't aware of that whole issue. At the time, people were up in arms. Using htaccess to redirect tgp sites, wondering if they could get shut down and such. Not because of traffic, but because it bypassed the very best ad a free site will ever have; the top ad on index.html.
Seems the same slope as now to me, basically less ads and more for free.

why not adapt to the change instead of running TGPs that ALL FUCKING SUCK. I'm also a porn user(obviously) and I stopped going to your TGP's because I barely get to a gallery or the clips are 10 seconds long.

Why not get ahold of these "tube" sites and make custom video content for them promoting your stuff. So what if you got a few 2-4 min videos, you're still going to get branded and reckognized.

If you can beat them, join em.

Remeber kids..if you're running a TGP you're stuck in the 90s.

*lesigh* I want my 30 seconds back.

*lesigh* I want my 30 seconds back.

I think I have a pretty good case.

And as a porn user too, can you see yourself typing in a watermarked URL very often? Because thats the only advertising you can get on a clip.

Nothing free and a circle jerk of ad pages: killer sales.
20 free pictures: decent sales.
3 quality clips: ok sales.
1 twenty minute watermarked clip: suckers.

so people were pissed at how some TGP were operating because it gave away their content with out giving the surfer a fair chance to see their ads. So the person was paying for bandwidth and had less of chance to makes sales. That was understandable.


Now people bitch because torrent sites give away their ENTIRE members area, 30 minute videos, etc... and some idiots are trying to say, " its the next step in tgps" ?

Yeah it's clearly a leap, not a step. One watermark! Thats not "advertising" lol.. I havent used content in so long... used to be some would not license use on TGP sites! Is there really a license out there that ALLOWS uploading to a sharing site? I'd doubt it.

Where do you propose these tgp sites get 10+ minute clips from. I don't know of too many Sponsors who are stupid enough to give that away.

Should they steal them like the torrents sites do?

I do agree with you on 1 thing, TGPS are a dieing bread. 12 pics and a couple 30 second videos vs entire member areas. More and more people are going to Torrent sites.

The thing was with TGPS you could make upsale, only a small sample was given away. With Torrents you can't make an upsell when you give it all away, the only upsells are to dating and cams sites.

I respectfully disagree with that 100%. The circle jerk stuff never sold. A properly run TGP (not one made with a script, but REAL ones like I've always run and a handful of others run by HAND) with galleries (both pic and movie clips) STILL makes a fortune.

The only reason surfers don't like most TGP's is because of the Circle Jerk TGP's who redirect the surfer at every click.
You won't see that at a real quality TGP. I've never done that. That's why I gained surfer trust. And once you gain their trust, then they WILL buy off of your site.

All this talk of TGP's "sucking" and "stuck in the 90's" is blatantly untrue. Me, The Hun, Pierre, Shemp, Greenguy, and a couple of others are running stronger than ever before. You guys are making the mistake of confusing us with the THOUSANDS of clowns who bought some software and made a "TGP" Those are NOT TGP's. And they do suck and always have and always will.

Just wanted to clarify that. And anyone who knows me will tell you that I know what I'm talking about in that dept.

Im surprised any of the big tgp owners arent in this thread.

Hi Robbie, I didnt mean the crazy trading type circle jerks that are around. I meant the old style which were just FPA's and ad pages for paysites, that only linked to each other. The surfer could click Back to the SE (hotbot was my favorite), or go to a paysite and join. I joined my first paysite out of frustration, I could NOT find anything good for free. Nothing.

And I agree, I surf too. I can't tell you how many times I've thought of creating an application to bypass trade scripts. THATS how annoying it is to surf and click and get sent all over hell, as if that click had ANY value whatsoever except to a counter.

I like the real sites out there as you mentioned. Liked submitting to them back in the day, and they're still a great way to market samples and gain quality traffic too. I always recommend to people to look for sites to submit to that are not sending their surfers to 100 other sites.. But to their gallery.

I personally would like to see the affiliate model remain pretty much the same and I worry that it's threatened. It's like having a picnic on a rainy day sometimes.. The climate has to remain favorable overall.

This is the first year I have ever noticed large TGP's traffic decreasing.

Way harsh

Large sites with huge skim ratios ? Or even large sites that are clean
I say the big sites that been around for long time with good % of bookmarkers, that are ran Clean are of much value no matter
what anybody says . Like Good Real Estate

Eventually those skimming b.s sites will be weeded out
No matter how big they are for now .
.... Are you married now or what
I miss u

I also want to know what to do.

what u been up too? yup tied the knot on may 12th, hit me on icq sometime , miss ur ass too

IMO, you are in the same boat as the content producers and sponsors who own porn sites. As more and more of your customers find out about torrent sites they will stop visiting your TGP where they see 12 pictures and 3 30 second clips and they will go to the torrent site where they see the entire video.

I agree that the people who bought scripts and do "skims" aren't the same as "real tgps" like you mentioned.

I wouldn't say you are going stronger than ever, way overly optimistic there. Looking at a few TGPS in alexa like the hun, sleazydream, etc.. they are on a steady decline down. Even your own sites have had major drop offs in the last 2 years. Yes I know Alexa means nothing, but when you put these sites up against other sites like puretna.com on alexa it is a good indicator of what is taking place here. Torrents are going up and tgps are going down across the board.

Are you still making good money. I am sure you are. But the writing is on the wall and in 3 - 5 years if nothing changes your fate will be the same as most porn membership sites and producers.

Not trying to hate on you, but if you disagree with me then you need to educate me on why someone would stay on your site looking at short clips when they can go down the street and get the entire video for free. The main reason (IMO) that you still have customers is that they haven't found out about torrent sites yet, that and maybe .0005% of them have a conscious and don't want to take part in stealing.

For those of you who are too lazy to go look.


Do you notice a trend here. Picture speaks louder then words.

The torrent sites are scumbags. That's bottom line. I am going to be attending the piracy roundtable that they are hopefully going to be having in Amsterdam since I can't make it to the L.A. one.

As far as why surfers still come to the REAL TGP's. That's an easy one. It's a matter of trust. If you notice also...Shavedgoat and Grampland offer more than just galleries. We have things for the surfers to do. We were the first to offer humor on a porn site way back in 1996 and I've continued that tradition to this day on the ShavedGoat site.

But back to why they still come....there are several factors. Trust is the main one. They KNOW that I won't fuck them, or let them get fucked, or have anything that can infect their computer or link to anything like that. I know it may sound far fetched to many of you...but people DO develop a trust and a relationship with a website. I'm an entertainer, and that's what I do. I try to keep my audience entertained.

The difference between something that is "okay" and something that is "good" is very small. But it's those little details that make all the difference in the world to the surfers. That's why I keep my shit looking like I designed it with Crayola crayons! LOL! Surfers feel more comfy that way. My sites feel like that old neighborhood bar that you've went to all your life. The place is dark, and old, and smells funny. But you'll go there and pay 3 dollars for a beer. Even though you could go to the store and pay 3 dollars for a 6 pack.

It's just a matter of building up an audience and having them get to know you. That's why all the fake TGP's can't make money. And that's why it's so damn hard to start a new TGP and make anything with it.

And as far as the Alexa stuff goes....all I can say is the same thing I used to say to all the guys who went crazy with all the big circle jerk TGP's a few years ago. They were doing crazy numbers for the time..over a million uniques...but it was all circle jerk and blind linked traffic. Useless.

And as I would see them at the shows and listen to them talk, I reminded them over and over that the ONLY statistic that really mattered was the number of dollars going into the bank account.

Now most of those sites are long gone. But the real ones are still here. And will be until the day that the govt. finally shuts down all free porn sites. So yeah, I'm doing better than ever. The torrents are NOT gonna last. WE are going to put a stop to piracy. I've already done a few things that have cost me personally. But I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I'm walking the walk as well as talking the talk.

What costs me a little now, will be worth it in the future. But the present is still better than it was. If I ever find myself going backwards in the amount of money I'm making....well fuck that...it just isn't gonna ever happen. Just not an option.