jayeff

It's nowhere near so simple...

The fingers of two hands are probably about enough to count the really excellent membership sites. You just might be able to find 100 that are good.

The exact numbers are a matter of perception, but I doubt many would argue that most of the product we attempt to foist off on people is second-rate and over-priced. Because we could get away with that back in '96, we are still trying to get away with it now and the only reason standards have improved at all is because TGP's and links lists started pointing at more and better content than most paysites provided. But do you seriously imagine that if this hadn't happened we could still be selling the same crap we were back then?

So the first level of unreality in this business is that we provide junk and then wonder why trials don't convert or why members only rebill for a month or two. In '96 there was a fraction of the competition there is now and the vast majority of surfers had never bought a membership. Today, thousands of sites are fighting over a relatively small number of newbies and most of our potential customers have been disappointed at least once. It's a joke to imagine we can solve our problems by tweaking the traffic but leaving the product as is. If you want a clear distinction between free content and member content, the answer is to improve the latter, not waste your time on some doomed attempt to stifle the former.

The second level of unreality is the apparent belief that everyone looking at free porn is a potential customer. Strictly according to the meaning of the word "potential" yes, but in terms of presenting a realistic opportunity to extract money from them on a regular basis, no. At the very least, not by simply denying them free porn. Indeed, I am convinced that if free porn were softcore only, most of the curious would drift back to mainstream sites far more quickly and therefore many fewer of those who did not initially intend to spend money would be around long enough to be tempted to do so.

And finally, you cannot ignore the market forces by which someone perceives a demand and satisfies it, because the internet is global. As is happening with 2257, if you limit the ability of one part of the market to satisfy a demand, another part will take up the slack. Thus it is with free porn: it is an obvious demand that someone will always be happy to accomodate. Rather than play King Canute and tell the tide to stay back, you would be better off figuring out how to monetize the traffic more effectively.