Tubes, torrents, and piracy. A webmaster's take

I want my 5 minutes back.

5 minutes?

Then I recommend
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/044...SIN=0446676675

You miss one major point though.

The illegal Tube and Torrent sites make HUGE HUGE HUGE profits.

Very well thought out, and excellent explanation and reflection.

I have explained the answer time and again at shows, and on here. No one wants to hear them because at the end of the day, especially with programs going under, they are greedy. As one program owner told me... making custom banners, and putting in the work for the affiliate that 'may' send one sale is worth it to them for $35 PPS.

So supplying free hosting, content, domains, to ANY affiliate whether proven or not has been the greedy way to doing things. Now the market is flooded by every beer money barons and surfer who just had to sign up and got all your content for free.

Instead, you should have had minimums, and requirements, and raised the bar for entry. You can still, over time, solve this. However, greed and short term thinking combined with this economy and companies on the verge of going out of business, will never change.

You are not going to, easily, put the genie back in the bottle. Year's ago, many program, cut their own throats.

Now reep what you've sown. Enjoy the tailspin.

The biggest question for me, the webmaster, is where is my place in this scenario?
I, like 95%+ of the people here am just an affiliate webmaster. I don't own any content (I have licenses for tons of content, but I don't own the copyrights for any of it), so I can't sue anyone for copyright infringement, and even if I could I doubt that would be a profitable endeavor or stem the tide of freely available content.

I'm not a performer who can go on tour.

I am not nor am I going to be a pirate, even if my morals would allow me to do that, I've already explained that it's not a profitable long term business model.

I'm not Steve Jobs, nor would I benefit in any way if a Steve Jobs came along with a solution that would allow the industry to profit from the situation.

Basically what is comes down to, is as an affiliate webmaster, I'm a record store owner.

All I have is traffic, and the know-how to generate traffic. However, even the most popular and heavily advertised record store isn't going to survive for long in the digital music age.

Even the traffic dynamic is changing. The most popular free sites in the world are losing their surfers to tube sites.
You can't blame the surfers, one place has headphones where you can stop by and listen to songs off of a CD, the new place is giving away the entire CD for free.

Even the old stand-by profit machine, organic search engine traffic, is changing. Search for "sitename.com", or "pornstar name", and in alot of cases "niche name", and at least one if not several of the top 10 results are for a torrent containing that content.

If I were a record store owner at the height of Napster's popularity, I would either have to close my store and find a new line of work, or at the very least start selling other things in my store and become a "Music and <<other thing>>" store, that would eventually morph into solely an "<<other thing>>" store.

Dropping the price on my records, chaining my records to the counter so nobody could leave with them, suing Napster, complaining to everyone that walks by, tearing my clothes and doing the sackloth and ashes routine, none of that is going to bring back the 8 track, the 33, or make customers want to buy an $18 CD.

<<continued>>

You miss one major point though.

The illegal Tube and Torrent sites make HUGE HUGE HUGE profits.

I don't think that is true.

I don't think that is true.

When I first read your post, it got thinking that maybe a pay-per-scene model might work better in the feature, but with so much free shit out there this market is unpredictable.