Yes Tubes are buying content, that has to be worrying.

The illegal content angle will never kill Tube sites. Even if you could stop them from operating with illegal content they will remain. A lot will go and a few will stay. That few will buy content, sometimes from sponsors closing down, because the "free porn" traffic will move from the sites that disappear to the ones who stay. If you have the videos you can serve them to one surfer or 1 million.

Not that it will be possible to make it impossible to use pirated content. And I don't see this industry suing Tube sites on mass. :(

Prove me wrong.

The only way out of this mess is the profitability of Tube sites.

American and European ones will start using bought content as soon as user-submitted (stolen) content becomes too much of a hassle, or it becomes obvious that they are completely liable for its usage.

That's fairly likely to happen within the next two years or so.

New tube sites aiming for a large audience are best off just immediately going for a large amount of bought content. No hassles, and a few thousand full vids is more than enough to generate hundreds of thousands of bookmarkers.

The only way to mess with the profitability of tube sites, unfortunately, is to mess with their numbers. The only way I see that happening is through competition offering equal or greater amounts of free content.

Such competition will emerge, but it will affect other types of sites even more strongly than it will affect the tube sites themselves.

By the time profitability on tube sites really starts falling, gargantuan amounts of free content will pretty much be a requirement for getting new bookmarkers.

To summarize: free content won't go away. Tube sites are here to stay.

unfortunately, i agree with you, its like a dam thats busted, like music industry was 7 years ago with their wares. all of the sudden, before you can look up, all your shits out there, or shit just as good, for free