Is there still innovation in adult?
 

Conventional wisdom in our industry says that in the early years of the Web, the porn biz was one of the main drivers of online innovation - whether actually creating new ideas/techniques/apps/etc or being the 'first adopters' to bring them into widespread use. We were supposedly at the forefront of new waves of technology and invention in the 90s & early 2000s.

Now these days as the industry stagnates economically, it seems that innovation's disappeared too. You see a lot of the same old business models, same old marketing strategies, same old content (minus incremental improvements), and anything truly "new" we're focusing on that didn't exist 10 years ago is just piggybacking on the ideas & platforms of others - social networking, tubes, etc. Even with things that are problematic for our industry - piracy/stolen content/tubes, lack of control of payment options, etc - we're mostly passive about as a group, there's no real initiative. Mostly seems a case of doing the same ol' shit for less & less money while pretending we don't notice the massive issues plaguing the industry, and no end in sight to that trend.

So my question is - is this assessment incorrect, do you guys see any actual innovation or initiative exclusive to adult nowadays or in recent years? Technical or marketing or conceptual or content or whatever.

And what are some areas ripe for future innovation, if any?

Should note that I'm not looking for companies to come in here and spam their self-promoted product or service as groundbreaking - want to hear some real discussion.

You are correct, there is no innovation. i was on a panel at a show in Miami last year and this was the topic. The moderator was from livejasmin and he held forth that their popunders were "innovative" I interrupted and said no they arent, they are fucking annoying...and I got an ovation.

but lets hit the high points here

if this biz were really innovative like we once were we would have videoplayers that overlay the users login and ip onto the video

these players would play the new MPEG-DASH standard and piracy would be greatly thwarted.....so would encoding multiple standards for video streams

ccbill would have direct deposit

Ccbill and netbilling would have jumped right out with wordpress integration plugins

we wouldnt be giving away what we should be selling

The main problem is we got lazy and all the real technical guys went elsewhere or retired leaving a bunch of empty suits and scumbags banging cards and annoying the customers with intrusive advertising tactics.

It's funny, I was having this same conversation with a mainstream guy this last weekend. He said - "man, what happened to your industry, you guys used to lead the way. Now you are the red headed step child of the internet."

All the programmers I used to work with have gone on to companies like, Associated Press, Valve/Steam, Facebook and QVC

They all make 6 figures where they are at programming. Hard to earn that in adult when you are just changing join forms, light nats programming and setting up API's.

Yeah, that right there is part of the problem - while programmers are going to be a vital cog in any online industry, we're not even coming up with the ideas necessary to keep them around and make it a desireable (i.e. profitable) biz to work in. There's a major lack of creativity & forward thinking, so many of the pros - in whatever aspect of the business - have already jumped ship.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying but in fairness- see below:

I believe it's possible to do this it's just that no one that I know of has implemented it. I could have swore I remember Robbie or some programmer or other person talking about how they had this developed.

People seem pretty happy with streaming and downloadable .mp4 nowadays. I haven't heard anyone talking about MPEG-Dash.

And an interface that doesn't look like it was developed in 1996.

I believe any biller can be used with Wordpress as it can with any CMS. You don't specifically need a plugin to do that. I have Zombaio working with Wordpress on one of my sites.
Agreed, although many are doing a lot of both- giving away, willingly or not- and selling.

Those elements have always been involved in this business, however most of the bigger brands that the fans know and like are indeed running good businesses. They have to to get anyone's trust.

I see a lot of innovations and things to change. Internet and mobile is the market. Forget DVDs. Have new ideas by shooting your things. People don't wanna see always the same shit. Show the strange, ugly, subversive everything not the normal.

Be creative.

Payment gateways? No creditcards solutions matters (allready 80% don't have some). Pay per phone, bitcoins or create a own solution.

thats the problem :thumbsup

no innovation OR money in porn

other then your hard on for ccbill and the direct deposit(which is not innovation) ;):1orglaugh

this +!

Jim Gunn....MPEG DASH is H.264 just in a container that is optimized for adaptive streaming via http (apache) ie no need for streaming servers

and it supports secure streaming and its cross platform....encode one version and it plays at the optimum bitrate for your connection on ANY DEVICE

the only thing holding mpeg dash back right now is the lack of a cross platform player like jwplayer or flowplayer

There is one in chrome but only works for chrome

Its the only reason I havent implemented DASH

Yeah someone did something along these lines and it would be real easy for me to pay them to allow me to Upload all my content to their servers so I could then download them after they had been re worked to be tracked.

If we are talking about the same thing.

There was a time where we could embed additional information into movie files, it worked really well actually, until companies started abusing DRM and it turned into something surfers actually hated...

The same is true for pop-ups, it wasn't until the PPC programs started to abuse them that surfers felt they were an annoyance.

Tube sites WILL go the same way, it has already started, what was supposed to be a medium for surfers to get access to free porn clips has turned into a paysite.

Everything that we in the industry have touched in the last 10 years we have fucked up, including the industry itself.

giving everything away for free is pretty innovative

Speaking from a programmer stand point a lot of us have left the industry due to over worked and under paid... Most adult webmasters seeking programmers are cheap, and flaky on payments.. So we have options, take a VERY good cushy job working in mainstream bringing innovative ideas to life, orrrrrr spend most of our time chasing around enough clients to make money to pay our bills for the month.

Edit://

The average programmer should be making upwards to $100,000/yr so that comes out to about $50/hr IF we get 40 hours a week in, but being a programmer in this industry isn't really a full time job, so lets say we average 20 hours a week, that's $100/hr to be able to make what we're worth, now how many of you actually have paid a programmer $100/hr for their services? Everyone in this industry wants to rebuild Facebook or Twitter and they want it done in 30 days without going over a $1,000 budget... Good luck getting a programmer who can do that... Oh you did? And he flaked out on you because he was some 3rd world programmer? Gee golly! Whodathunk?

The business has been over run by scammers. I guess they have innovated money laundering but not much else. e-currency? :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

Not just scammers - but also lemmings who saw how easy it was to clone/plagiarize/re-package/re-distribute the stuff created by the earlier innovators. The industry was quickly overrun by multitudes of otherwise 'non-adult' folk (people who would never have gotten involved in the adult industry prior to the online digital era) who hopped on the bandwagon and started churning out a glut of mediocre, formulated crap.

Hell...Linda the local librarian and Connie at the Yarn Barn started their own AdultCheck operations after finding out how relatively easy it was.

The template was too easy to duplicate. Temptation for easy money was too great.

Yes most adult sites run in plain PHP and recycle 10+ years old code, doing minimal, little updates, mainly to make the ancient pages to display on mobiles. The fact it is, adult it was innovation in 1990's so that's the time and age when most code was done, then it was kept "as is". Certain control panels (some billers.., traffic networks) are so 1990s, definitely you wonder if you're in time machine. Perhaps some cam site (but some not yet support H264 codec in 2013...) are up to date tech, but cam sites are so few, a dozen original (all rest is whitelabels), so not even to be counted, 1% probable you work in a cam site, 99% you work at something else.

To be specific, in adult there's no ruby, node.js, C++11 or even python (just example of what's "hot" for a dev to work with), so no any skilled and up-to-date (or perhaps just young) developer would want to waste his valuable time to fix ancient tgp's or CJ's code, talk via ICQ (!?), even if paid well (which does not happen in adult, except perhaps a few biggest programs, who do not hire since years). It is just a matter the technology is not cool, this is important even more thaqn the money for the skilled dev guy.

Even bitcoin sites (but not mtgox) are more modern technology than adult, most of them. It is more likely a dev work for free bitcoin project, than paid (so so) to edit an ancient standards adult site.

I noticed even fraudsters, carders and such are no more attacking adult sites, but are more into politics, banks and such. Until a few years ago I was getting in sites some very hi-tech hacking, they're all gone to go robber real cash in banks, or steal industrial secrets to real corporations. To hack a porn site it became so lame :)

Just my view. Innovation chases money.

A 13 billion dollar industry is now a $5 billion dollar industry.

All the innovators are probably working on Wall Street high frequency trading algorithms or in politics trading insider information.

http://virtualpornstars.com/

Innovative

Problem with programming how it's simply not profitable anymore,just look howmany developers simply went away,like bigdotmedia,jbmsoft and others which i dont know names.I want to make my own combo of rotator/trade/gallery creator but there is simply no market anymore for it and my own network is not big enough to make it worth.Beside i already have my own trade script which is better then any other but code was not done by me and it's a bit obsolete.
And i noticed as well how adult sites are not being hacked anymore,could be because of traffic brokers which was was accepting such traffic gone.But when it comes to cc fraudsters they are still very alive.

innovation is one thing. the user is the other thing. We're talking about porn and i think, we reaching a point where the user has seen erverthing in all possible ways. And if there are hundreds of thousands free porn movies in the web, why pay? in the beginning the people where hungry, you had to pay for all what was porn...dating for me is the thing left.

USB Pussy will be to small ;)

Internet Porn 3D Printers, Neuro Connectors for be in the net without a computer...

Yes, its true many scripts are trash. There is a lot to do and you can make more with clever programming. Artificial intelligence will be also a point-of-sale

Porn is a pretty basic concept. People used to talk about adult and innovation back in a time when ecommerce was just being created and even just watching a video on a computer was a new idea. Now that the technology is established, I doubt we'll see much more "innovation" beyond the same standard technology all basic content driven websites will employ.

This industry plateaued technology-wise a long time ago :2 cents . There's only so much you can do with watching a video or viewing a photograph. 3D, usb powered toys, cybersex camming, these are just really simple bonus features on a concept that hasn't changed, people want to watch a video for a few minutes, bust their nut, and go about their day.

A lot of the things people on this forum seem to consider "innovation" is really just average sysadmin/programming stuff that has been around for a while, but the average webmaster or program owner is so low tech their only understanding of that side of their business is asking their host to install a cms.

Innovative sites are expensive and with everything being free, who is going to pay for it?

QFTT

:2 cents:

the innovation I can see happening for adult is in virtual reality area..live or simulated... cams will get only better, even holographic as some point... this will be a technology where adult (cams) will be a pioneer again... IMO

livejasmin had 3d cams (needed glasses) section long ago... no one cared and then even models who had the 3d cam equipment stopped to use it, and logged in normal.