DamianJ

So, what can we learn from Apple about getting pirates to pay, their new amnesty.

Their new music match service (which is what became of LaLa, if you were following that acquisition) is amazing. If you don't know, this is what it does.

- Scans your music collection and instantly lets you access it from the cloud on any device
- Any low quality versions of songs will be replaced with 320KBPS AAC. EVEN SONGS YOU HAVEN'T PAID FOR
- You can download the high quality replacements and just own them
- All for 25 bucks a year

You can imagine the pitch to the labels.

"We all know you are making no money from piracy. How would you like to? Yes, that's right, you can take money from millions of pirates overnight. Sure it won't be billions of dollars, but pennies is better than nothing, right?"

Is there a lesson we can learn? For years I've talked about iTunes Music Store for porn. Get the large producers together and actually offer punters what they want, instead of what we want to sell them.

Would this be the logical extension to that? Get millions of people to pony up a small amount of cash to get decent quality versions of all the stuff they pirated?

kane

If you cancel your membership do you lose access to those songs or are they yours to keep no matter what?

DamianJ

AFAIK, yours to keep, DRM free, no matter what.

Paul Markham

Thanks for the heads up mate. Not Damian.

1. Trying to sell the same crap porn at a lower price might work. Try it without affiliates and there will be something left in the pot.

Doing it with affiliates and the massive costs of driving traffic and it's a non starter. Even Tubes need to make money to pay the bills.

2. Do those who have stored tons of illegal porn want to put it on a another platform. Do people who don't pay for porn actually store it or just look at it and delete it?

Porn in general isn't worth collecting and a lot of music is.

3. It's still pre-recorder porn. Just cut price pre-recorder porn.

4. How does delivering a better version of a pirated video collection, mean the pirate now owns it?

These are the solutions to the decline of online porn.

A. Stop selling pre-recorded crap porn at a price dictated by the cost of traffic.

B. Build an industry that's more interested in selling to customers than generating massive amounts of traffic so 1-2,000 will buy something.

C. Make customers the most important person, not the affiliates.

D. Stop thinking that you need to give away porn to sell porn.

Or just watch the decline increase. A few will buy up what's left of any worth and end up with the decline.

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kane

That is a pretty big deal then. I guess there is not much keeping people from hitting torrent sites and downloading loads and loads of music, joining the music match service for one month and getting all of those songs converted to high quality, legit files.

I have mixed emotions about it. It is at least getting something from this, but at the same time it is rewarding piracy.

Maybe the music industry is just adopting the attitude that people will steal music no matter what they do and they can never sue enough people or do enough legally to stop it so they might as well make a few bucks wherever they can and then just rob the artists more by taking away shares of of their live performance and merchandising income to make up for it.

Adraco

Yes, that is my understanding of it too.

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DamianJ

A % of something is better than 100% of fuck all, as they say.

And of course, people will always steal music no matter what they do, they have PROVEN that suing people only increases piracy, so what to do?

Getting some money out of them is astounding when you think about it.

Just wondered if there is something to take away from it for our industry.

DamianJ

kane

I suppose there is something you can take away from it from this industry, but I don't really know what it is. Could you offer someone the option of trading in their lower quality videos for HD if they bought a membership to your site? Likely not because chances are unless your HD videos are protected they are already out there and the downloaders have them.

The problem is that our is not a self policing industry. Here is an example. If one day Warner Bros. announced that from that day forward every DVD they released would be sold for $3.99 for movies that have been out over 6months and $5.99 for new releases the rest of the movie industry would come unglued. There would likely be lawsuits and if that didn't work you might see some studios refusing to work with anyone who worked with Warner Bros. They would react harshly at them trying to undercut the market by that amount.

In porn if one company price the movies at $3.99 and $5.99 instead of collectively trying to stop them, another company would just sell theirs at $2.99 and $4.99. It wouldn't be long before one company was just giving them away and they were just putting some watermark ads in the movies to try to get traffic to their site.

So to me any solution that we might come up with that could be similar to the apple match idea would just be undermined and someone would figure out a way to give more to the pirates than they initially stole in hopes of getting more traffic.

But then again, maybe I am over-thinking it.

DamianJ

This is nothing to do with the race toward the bottom for pricing. It is to do with extracting money from pirates.

kane

The question is can you (or whoever is producing this porn) generate enough traffic without affiliates to sell enough porn to make it worth your while? I would guess for many companies the answer is no they couldn't.

I think this is misconception. Everyone I know who views porn on at least a semi-regular basis has a collection. They keep it. They might get rid of some of it, but they keep most of it just like they keep music and mainstream movies.

True

That is what Apple is offering up. I guess we will see how it works for music.

So you suggest only live cam style shows or streaming live shoots? You shoot porn. Do you think customers are going to want to sit through set changes and lighting changes and hearing directors tell people what to do? If you just set up a webcam and stream it live and let the actors do what they want then what about those who like a higher grade of porn and not just some amateur looking stream?

The problem is we gave the customer what they wanted instead of giving them what we wanted them have and now we are paying for it

This goes back to my earlier question. If you can generate traffic on your own, great. If not the affiliate is just as important to you as the customer is.

Very true. The problem is that for this to happen you would need the industry to work together and that is like herding cats. It just won't happen. Short of the industry just drying up and dying on the vine there will be no sea change anytime soon. You could shoot a very specific niche and control your content so at least you had limited control.

kane

Right. My point is that this industry would find a way to turn it into a race for the bottom because we don't police ourselves.

If Company A came up with an Apple Match-like service and charged $25 per month and members could upgrade all their videos to HD it would only be a matter of time before another company started the same thing and offered it for $15 per month and pretty soon there would be a company offering it for free so long as you agreed to join a dating site or put up with some ads on the site etc.

Call me a cynic but this industry seems to have a knack for being handing a gourmet meal and taking a shit in it.

DamianJ

I remember when people said there was NO WAY Steve would get the music labels to play together, and they did. Then they said NO WAY would the movie people play together, and they did. Then they said NO WAY will the TV people play together, and they did.

Nothing is impossible. You just need to get the right person to pitch the right product to the right people. IMHO.

DamianJ

Why has no one done that to iTunes?

Amazon could undercut. Google could. A.N.Other could. They don't. Why?

kane

Because they are smarter than most porn people.

For years online porn has been run by everyone and their brother. Small 1 and 2 person operations (I am one of them). So instead of just having a few companies that have to agree with how to run things (IE there are only a handful of major record labels and only a few companies that have the capability of putting together an iTunes like program) you have thousands and thousands of people who are running the industry.

The other factor is you have to get the record labels to go along with it. If they won't let you sell their product at the price you want to sell it at, you have nothing to sell. Here I can buy content from any number of content brokers and do with it as I please. So with music the main players involved are smart enough to try to keep the prices around the same and compete on a features base (IE Amazon sells DRM free MP3s which iTunes does not - although that may be changing) instead of a price base where as we have a very documented history of competing simply by giving more away for free.

kane

Now more than ever there is a chance of something happening in the porn business because a few large companies are starting to buy everything up. I think we will see more and more of this over the next few years. If those big players decide to flex their muscle they could exact some change that could alter the industry for the better.

Still, I don't know that this will happen because a few of these companies got huge by giving away tons and tons of content. However, if doing that starts to dry up for them they could make a change and that could be a very positive thing.

DamianJ

Sorry, I disagree with you massively here. There are around 5 companies that produce by far the majority of porn. Exactly the same as music and movies. Sure, there are thousands of indy producers, but the bulk of the stuff is controlled by very few people.

iTunes has sold DRM free for years. Obviously you have to get the studios to go along with it. But everyone told steve it was impossible to do with music movies and tv. He managed it. Somehow.

I'm not saying this is the saving grace of the industry, but it is an interesting thought. Getting pirates to pay you money. Willingly.

kane

this would mean that these big producers would need to put every performer of any merit under contract so they can control where and how content featuring them in created. They would also have to get control of any and all content that is out there featuring these stars. This would control the pornstar aspect of things to some degree.

But in my experience pornstar fans only make up a small amount of porn surfers. As you say there are tons of small producers, enough that I could easily buy up a ton of content that I could do as I please with. With music it is all about who you like. If you are a U2 fan, you want to hear U2. Another band playing something similar just won't cut it. But with porn if you just want to see a hot girl get drilled for many people it doesn't matter if she is a known star or some girl who made two movies and is now a school teacher in Iowa.

The music labels control most of the acts any typical music fan will want to hear. If you told fans they could pay $25 per month and have unlimited access to all their favorite acts and all the hot new acts that came along or they could pay $5 per month but only get access to unknown, unsigned acts, most would pay the higher price. With porn if you offered people an option to pay $25 per month for access to all the hottest stars or $5 per month and they get good scenes, but no stars there are a ton of people who would pay the lower price. And if they attracted a lot of people you know there is someone out there who would then make a site with all that content featuring unknown stars and give it away for free.

For any real change to happen the content producers, actors, talent agents etc would all need to get together and decide up front who they would sell content to and how they would allow it to be used and in the end it still may not matter because there are plenty of people who will download it, then put it up on tubes and force those companies to DMCA them to get it off there.

To me ours is an industry of rogues while mainstream media is an industry of white collar crooks. They have their shit together while we just run around looking for a car with an unlocked door.


I agree, it is a very interesting point and I am very curious to see how it works. Getting pirates to pay anything is better than nothing so maybe it will light a way where this industry can squeeze a few dollars out of those who would otherwise not pay a dime.

V_RocKs

Music Match = $25 a month...

Pirating = FREE

It will never happen... It will get fringe people with money to waste, but the real problem will still exist...

DamianJ

What will never happen?

Not sure what point you are making?

Obviously this will never stop piracy. Nothing will. Ever. No one said it would.

This is about getting SOME money out of people that have stolen content. Which most definitely WILL happen.

DamianJ

That's all my point was

kane

What I am most curious about is what their average subscription length will be. I wonder how many people will join for a month just to update their collection and then bail. If they get a lot of people who stay for a long time, it could be a good sign for us.

I also wonder if they will be collecting info on the users. It would be interesting to if they were charting those who had the largest amounts of pirated stuff and gave/sold that info the to the labels. Although I guess it would be hard to know for sure what was pirated in someone's collection and what wasn't.

seeandsee

you can't stop piracy, you can just fool some people

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DWB

First let me say... Apple is always brilliant, even though I prefer a PC. And for music or even movies and TV shows, this is a brilliant concept. I will pay for this service without question because I love music.

Having said that, it is totally different when it comes to masturbation and the urge to orgasm vs listening to music or watching a Hollywood movie.

For example, audio simply doesn't sound good if it's of poor quality, but unless you are an audiophile you probably can't hear the difference. However, most guys can still wank to porn even though it's smaller or of lesser quality. This is why tubes are so successful and amateur and GF sites do well. Guys who want to cum simply don't need the highest quality porn in order to get off. Sure, there are a few quality fiends out there who seek out the highest res in everything, but generally speaking Joe Blow just wants to get off as quickly as possible and get back to work or to his family.

Most guys will wank to anything so long as it captures their fantasy at the moment. That includes images, cell phone videos, or a girl laying out at the pool who they can see through their window.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I do have a cock and know that the actual quality of video, in terms of bit rate / SD / HD/ video size, is of NO importance to me. It has EVERYTHING to do with the fantasy and whatever is going on in my mind at the moment and if what I'm looking at plays into that fantasy. And really, tube quality isn't that bad if you just want to rub one off, which is why guys are looking at porn in the first place.

I wish it did work like it does for music, but it doesn't. The urge to orgasm trumps everything else for males and most of us will accept whatever quality is at hand so that we can get to it and get back to whatever it was we were doing before we were sidetracked.

Take yourself out of the porn business, forget everything you think you know about what porn watchers want, and reduce yourself to a guy with his cock in hand, in the dark, surfing the net. Suddenly quality doesn't matter so much.

ottopottomouse

Isn't this just going to release into the wild higher quality versions of everything to be shared around?

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DamianJ

I guess the music labels have realised it doesn't matter. Pirates will pirate whatever you do, you can't stop the sharing. So you may as well get 25 bucks out of them.

DamianJ

So you think if you could get together millions and millions of porn customers and say to them "would you like 1080P versions of your porn library for 25 bucks a year" people would say "no thanks"?

I disagree.

gideongallery

that still less then cd quality so everyone can rip that quality if they wanted

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u-Bob

It's time you start looking at affiliates for what they really are: people who send you traffic you otherwise wouldn't have received in exchange for a percentage of the profit.

TheDoc

Depending on how it's sold, that has always worked. That doesn't mean a paysite can do it, as you've already learned.


Why not just pay less?


Affiliates = profit... and massive costs of driving traffic? It's pretty cheap...


Sure, some people would want it on another platform, legal or not. Yes, people archive porn.

Millions of people collect porn.


And people still buy it by the billions.


Who said they did?


The price has been set by the surfer for years....

What was the ratio of 'your sales' to total overall traffic in a store? Exactly.... not everyone person purchased 'your porn' during that visit, but that doesn't mean they didn't buy some porn at some point.

Yeah because keeping your CB's under 1% which is l lower than a retail store totally means we're forgetting about the customer....

What about those that use free content as ONE source of traffic among 100's of others?


I like to watch those that are growing by leaps and bounds... and not everyone is for sale, no matter how much is offered.

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Dirty Dane

Scan their citizens porn collections. I'm sure many governments will love that option

tony286

porn is not music, we cant go on tour, no one is going to license porn for background in tv commercials. Porn doesnt sell like music,a million copies of one thing, George Micheal had an album sell 3 million copies and was considered a failure. Music gets a piece from radio,video,licensing(from tv commercial to being played in bars) music sales are apiece of the pie.
The thing the music industry does have on us, you don't see them buying ads on pirate sites.

Paul Markham

Yes this industry is it's stupidest moment decided to erect a barrier they now have to cross, to get sales. Without figuring that one out good luck selling the idea.

I think you'll find most just go to Tubes and watch and go. The sale of hard drives did jump when online porn became available. but it would need Terra bytes to keep the stuff people DL today. Especially pirates.


If it works for music, it must work for porn. Just like bottled water and MacDonalds marketing works for porn. Whoops, no it doesn't.

It needs to be better organised than that. 1 site doing it for themselves is something few if any can afford. How many online porn sites can afford decent content today? It needs a rethink. The days of selling cheap "exclusive" content that's cloned everywhere are coming to an end. The customers are voting with their mouses.

We gave the customer what suited affiliates. We built this part of porn on what affiliates wanted and we are paying for it today.
Then the business is screwed. Because affiliates will demand more and more that costs more and more which will be taken from the cost of the product. That's the only thing that sell. If you need 100 interested people to look at what you have for 1 to buy. What you are selling isn't right. Today 1-100 is a very distant memory.

If 99% of affiliates disappeared this year, traffic would remain the same. Affiliates don't create surfers (traffic) they merely guide it. Too many affiliates = too many distractions. The customer is spoilt for choice. And the only way this industry seems to be able to get affiliates is high payout, tons of tools, support and it costs.

The result is simple. The product isn't good enough to get people to buy.
Agreed. the only thing they did agree on crippled the industry. Give affiliates everything they ask for.

I'm not blaming affiliates, even if it sounds like it. I'm blaming the fools who set up the whole system.

You don't have to do a lot to get men to look at porn.
You don't have to do a lot to get some to buy porn.
You just keep the customer happy and he keeps coming back.

The illusion is that people came online just to look at porn and the free porn created the traffic. Stupidity. Those people were coming online and would of found tours if there were 0 affiliates. The increase in porn traffic was due to the increase in people getting connected.

Any one around in 1995 will remember the awesome conversion rates from Newsgroups. Because buying porn was so much better than free porn. Today we've gone full circle. Free porn is far far better than paid porn.

The solution is simple, turn that around or make as much money as you can before you have to leave. Because the slide is still going down.

Harsh words, but true.

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candyflip

I would pay for this, but I'm guessing that there's probably not going to be any real way to access your music library from an Android phone.

This is a move that also might bring a few Android users to their phone platform.

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TheDoc

The porn industry already has this......


That's so wrong and incorrect it's not even funny. Affiliates create EXTREME world wise exposure into areas of the Internet no program could ever reach into.

We've lost a godly amount of affiliates over the last 10 years, mostly do to 2257.

The only way to get affiliates today is to do actual sales... which is why 99% of our Industry is 'actually' failing.


Like everyone in the world... something suck, others rock. It's for sure not all crap as you try to make it sound and not everyone should shoot perfect porn, not everyone wants that!


How would they have found us? How would have all those micro niches been found out? How would those people have known what to even type in?

Well people are still getting connected today and traffic isn't skyrocketing. Probably because the Internet is more than porn and chatrooms today, but that's just a guess.


I've pushed 100's of sales daily and into the millions in profit from newsgroups back in the day... however I made FAR more money with affiliates.

I remember entire paysites that were pirated in the 90's from nothing but newsgroup content. It seemed like every week someone was opening a new paysite with nothing but newsgroup content.

I also remember 1:50k ratios, 20k ratios, total bomb traffic sources, the same crap we see today. Without question, it was not all golden, it was not build it and make millions.... SHIT TONS of programs and paysites, with killer content, failed in the 90's.

Other than for those that see the slide going up.....

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Redrob

If you want legal porn, you can already by it at 10 cents a minute.

bronco67

As long as a human being can get something for free and get away with it, they will do it. End of story.

Unless they have some some kind of ethics, which most people don't.

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DWB

I could be wrong, but I don't think it would make a difference for several reasons:

1) A large portion of the videos you see on tubes are not HD to begin with. The amount of quality improvement for SD content wouldn't be worth a price.

2) The majority of guys are simply OK with rubbing one out to what they currently have. An upgrade in quality isn't going to make them cum any harder. They don't need that upgrade in order to have a better orgasm.

3) I don't think you will find millions and millions who are willing to pay to give it a shot. Not everyone is a porn collector or downloader. Some just want to cum and move on. So you are limited to only porn collectors who would find value in it.

Sure, some guys would try it. Maybe even a lot of guys if you tossed huge amounts of traffic at a system offering this. I just don't believe it would be a huge success because it's not needed on a large scale. You can't compare porn and music.

Now, if you said for $25 a month you can access every porn video on the internet, THEN I'd agree with you.