Survivors of the Internet bubble and the big dot coms success.

* No pop ups, pop unders

I can cope with the odd one or two. No big deal.

* No advertising

A lot of pay sites have upsells inside.

* No redirects, circle jerks.

Not had that with xhamster and other tubes. Plus I can cope with that. May go to another tube for even more free porn.


* Safe from viruses and spyware

Never had a problem with a tube site yet.

* More Creative and Original material

No. Tube sites are full. Do you know any paysites with as much content as a tube site?

* Better Video quality

Not an issue. The quality is perfect for me. Never been yet on a tube site that I thought the quality was a problem.

* Original great music

The music is still there on the tube site.

* All Films of studio in one place

So it is on a tube site. And often easer to look through.

* You can save the films to your computer to watch as many times as you like.

I do not want to fill my harddrive with films. I can watch the film on the tube site as often as I want. But to be honest once I have seen the film, I want to see somthing new. Tubes offer me that.

* e-mail support and help

Are you for real? Thats so not important.

* Photos, stripteases and movies in one place

You just describes xhamster.

* Choice of formats WMV or Quicktime

I do not want to spend hours downloading films. I want to see it now.

* Choice of file sizes

I do not want to save the films. Just watch them.

* Backup materials and behind the scenes about models and video production

Who wantys to see that rubbish?

* Support performers and technictions have a living

I do not care about them.

* Support continued production of erotic materia

Not my problem.l

* Support a website that pays its models

Not my problem.

* Support a website that treats it models well

Not my problem. I do not care if they treat the model well or not. And how do I even know if they treat the models well or not?

* Support a website that produces films in a moral and safe way

Not my problem.

* Avoid breaking Copywrite laws and risking prosecution keep your IP out of the hands of lawyers

I am not brreaking any laws. I am not uploading or downloading anything. I am watching on a tube site.

So do you have one and if so, why not share it?

Because if it's any good 100 to 10,000 others will copy it and it useless. An original idea that can be copied is no help to the guy who thought it up. Plus getting it doesn't supply the money to see it through.

Still in the 3.5 decades I've seen few come up with an original idea. And there's always the hurdle of, if it's too original the customer won't get it either.

Often all we did was use others ideas and adapt the technology available to fit porn. Some of our most inventive ideas were limited to how to give away porn or scam people.

This is part of the problem. So many thought or said the Internet made it all different. It didn't to the guy who was paying for it, to him it was just porn to jerk off to. The guy who invented Biros wouldn't of made money if he gave them all away. Unless he sold advertising space on them.

Still most clung to the notion that it was all different and applied it exactly what they were capable of doing as the "New way forward". Obviously true in my field, so many who faded fast continually told me we would be gone and weren't producing what surfers wanted. Yet they were and I should copy them. They're gone and I'm still here and retired on the earnings of doing it wrong.

The reason for their comments and the hatred I seem to attract is simple. Often my ideas didn't fit peoples budgets, or capabilities or worse still. Attract affiliates to send them tons of traffic. And that's been the main selling aim of most sites, attract affiliates to send traffic often to the expense of attracting and keeping customers happy. Affiliates and sponsors looking for them can now tell us this is rubbish.

Paying 50% or more for a join isn't leaving enough money for the rest of the job. Then the cost and effort of supporting and marketing to them had to be paid. To the buyer traffic isn't king. To the seller it's not either, getting affiliates is. To affiliates, if the best way to increase your income is to get traffic using a method that deters more sales than it gets. Traffic isn't King either.

In business there's only one King, $$$$$.

The big difference online was now 10,000s could put up a paysite to sell porn. Which meant spreading the money thinner than before. For a tiny handful there was a real pot of gold, for a few more the income of a top businessman. For the other 98% a good wage. Of those that made it passed $1,000 a week.

Creating a great business for the 98% was never going to be possible. Play with the %. It doesn't change the principal.

Yes Cherry7. If that was a good list, we wouldn't be in trouble.

Wrong conclusion. If you give it away for free they are not gonna pay. Period.

This is ultimately the bottom line. Sure, there is something to be said for a quality user experience and other things like better quality videos, but for many people porn is not something they do a lot of thinking about. They are horny, they want to jerk off and they want porn to do it to. For many average looking free videos is good enough.

A perfect case in point. I have a friend who used to be a porn buyer. At any given time he always had a membership to some site. He would even ask me about good sites to join. A few years back he discovered redtube and from there other tubes. He has not bought a membership since and says he never plans to unless those sites either get bad or disappear.

What will survive

Live webcams has a change but they are starting to kill that one to.

Adult dating / swinger sites ( people will pay for memberships if there is a descent client base )

Niche sites with exclusive content ( if they can keep it exclusive )

What will save the industry is some regulation and Cooperation!!

Too simple an answer.

Tell Nescafe that the girls in supermarkets giving away a tiny cup of coffee are killing their sales and they will enjoy the joke.

Sponsors competing with each other to get affiliates and using free content as the tool to get traffic were the biggest problem.

If it had stopped at in house traffic generation, giving away 10 images to get surfers to the tour. Things would of been fine.

Once it was sponsors giving affiliates as much as possible, paying them as much as possible, giving them all the support possible, spending money on marketing to affiliates, creating content to suit affiliates needs and creating the sites to fit their needs (with programs like NATS) there was so little to spend on the product. The product and customer became less important.

Add scamming in general, to pay affiliates inflated payouts and you have the perfect storm.

Spending no more then 10% to 15% on marketing leaves a company far more to spend on the customer. And when Tubes became a reality. They would never of survived. Because there were no sponsors to host, give away content or pay for them. Pornhub can go 100% legit, because the money spent on "traffic" allows Tubes to pay their bills.

At $30 a month a site can afford all the traffic generation it does today. Bring the price down to $20 and that model can't. What is the $10 spent on? Affiliates to give away free content.

Play with the figures, the principal is still right.

This isn't the thought of affiliates, sponsors are to blame. And yes it would of meant many who now work in online porn wouldn't of been able to. They won't be able to for much longer or already gone. Business is tough.

That's an astonishing viewpoint Paul, why didn't you ever mention those ideas before?

Seriously, are you dead and been replaced with a morphing content bot?

And what funds the free videos on Redtube and free galleries on The Hun?

Look into the problem.

Great question.

Big fish or little fish?

Big fish demand a lot of food, if the food isn't there they might become extinct. Doing OK at the moment consuming little one and on what they used to get. Will it last?

Interesting article recently by Louis Theroux might give an indication. He returned to porn to do another documentary visiting people who saw years back. One was a porn star doing live Cam from home, she did her show and reported $100 earned. If that's the average and she works 5 days a week, it's $250,000 a year. Not bad for a Ma & Pa operation.

If I returned to shooting it would be just Eva and I, hiring a make up artist part time and shooting from home or locations. No way can we fund the operation we had.

Manwin are boasting how many employees today? That requires a lot of sales every day for years to maintain at the same level. Great while they're gobbling up the little guys and their traffic. what happens when there's little meat left to gobble up? The one man bands won't sustain them. They are fueling their own demise. Maybe the long term plan is to make a quick buck and get out before the fall. Or jump to another ship.

Downsizing to a life raft might not work.

Because the one thing that came out of the documentary was these big guys created sales, had great financial backing and planned long term. Yes they were in it for the duration.

@paul m for the love of God, please stop typing "of" instead of "have".

Would you shut the fuck up about free porn already. Your a fucking photographer, not a webmaster.

Simple, advertising. As of right now it is still working. They are still selling memberships to dating sites and live cams and even some paysites so giving away all this content for free is not hurting their bottom line. They might not have as good of rations as other sites could, but clearly they are doing well enough to make them want to keep giving it away for free.

If there comes a day that the number of people what join various sites from these tube sites drops to where they are making little or no money from it then they will be forced to change.

One of the biggest culprits in the free porn world is cheap bandwidth. I now pay $8 a month for hosting that is 10 times better than what I paid $100 a month for in 2000. If hosting costs were the same today as they were 10-12 years ago tube sites likely wouldn't exist.

I've been away from this site for a few months, now reading this thread and thinking... nothing has changed much.
Paul and Damian you both have too much time for useless arguing on here. You just need to work harder.
The answer is: give your clients something better than what they get on tube sites (I agree with Cherry7) and keep your content out of the hands of the pirates.

$100 per day x 5 days per week is $500 per week or roughly $26,000 per year, not $250,000.

For the love of a myth put out to fool idiots.

Yes, sorry I got it wrong. Still better then working the check out till.

Not that simple.

The budget in online porn for "marketing" is too bloated. Let's say it's 40% of the revenue. $40 in every $100 is spend on getting traffic to a site to make the sale. If it were only 10%, the advertising wouldn't pay the bill for running a Tube. Even today we have thread after thread of people asking for 5 minute free clips for Tubes, maybe hosted and in a way that it's little more than a click of a button to load it.

With lots of replies, from sponsors able, because the budget for marketing makes it possible, able to deliver. I remember someone from a big Tube telling us they need 8 minute clips, with a climax shot if they were to add them to their Tubes. And they seem to be getting them.

The biggest culprit in the free porn world is the paid porn world. Cheap bandwidth is a saving that could of been passed onto the consumer and not the marketing sector.

So Paul, let me get this straight.

You are saying free porn is bad?

FUCKING HELL

Of course, why didn't you mention it before man?

WHY!?!?!

Well I don't work, so can't work harder.

Damian is back on my ignore list and I'm doing my best to keep him there.

Which is and is it profitable?

Been said already and it was obvious from the beginning. If 1-100 consumers are buying it's 99% happy with free. And that was in the days of TGPs. Today with Tubes we might be lucky to convert 1-10,000. Play with the numbers, the principle remains the same.

And is it profitable? Well from the beginning who could compete with what offline porn was paying producers to get great shooters? I wasn't the only offline shooter who wasn't seduced by $300 a scene exclusive.

Then how many scenes for one site is good enough and with the updates? 50, 100, 200? Updating 1 a week or 1 a day? 5 scenes a month for $30, isn't going to be enough. Getting a good experienced offline porn shooter to do this on an exclusive basis would of cost $500 to $1,000 or higher. So a budget of $25,000 to $200,000 for a solo girl site. They don't make enough money.

Sounds harsh, but few sites could afford or would spend $25,000 for the content and the scene that they would get for $500 isn't going to be good. We were competing with guys who would shoot 50 scenes for $12,500 and sponsors were buying.

Then things like downloading. Some say they want to download everything on a site, fast with no limits. So they can just spend $30 for it all.

No when the budget for the product is 10% approx, it's not possible for most.

If it were all so easy as writing out a list Cherry would do it.

One of the problems is, when people who only know how to operate a computer, think they know anything about porn.