Content, hosting, design - prices
 

Is it just me or have prices really gotten insanely low? It seems to have gotten to the point where many people working in porn simply can't be making more than they'd be working at mcdonalds...

I'm still trying to grasp how prices have gone this low personally.

Either pricing was outrageously high before and they were gouging the shit out of us, or they're selling at cost or below cost and hoping for the best.

I know my costs haven't gone down to produce content, so I just can't figure out how it's making sense in the long run for some...

Thats because everyone is stabbing each others backs to make two red cents to rub together :2 cents:

Ive just been looking through our company accounts this morning, on hosting alone the company has gone from paying $1500 a month to just under $600 a month in hosting for EXACTLY the same setup in under 3 years.

Just think in another 3 years we will only be paying $100 for hosting :Graucho

Has the quality of service or tech support changed at all with the signifigant price drop?

As far as i know we went from an inferior hosting company to two of the better hosting companies in adult.

Im told the support at Nat Net + Webair are some of the best in the industry.

Having never opened a support ticket myself i wouldnt know, i can only go on what im told be Lee and Gary-Alan :2 cents:

They seem happy though :thumbsup

Actually thats a lie, i opened a support ticket at Nat Net a week or two ago, it was answered in a little over 8 minutes for domain and email setup including cgi location changes :thumbsup

Well, with hosting bandwidth prices have just gone down in general over the past years, so that makes a big difference.
However, some people right now are offering deals that go below the price you'd get when buying directly from Cogent...

Profit margins have steadily dropped in the last 2 years for design, I know.

Moving more to mainstream where profit margins are realistic in design. albeit we don't get mainstream orders for 100 sites at a time like we do in adult.

This is true with a few hosts. My guess is that they are soon to be bankrupt, they are commited to way more then they are selling, so they are grasping at straws to stay afloat a few months longer. :2 cents: :2 cents:

you get what you pay for

yeah crazy low, it's like what closeout prices were a year ago and normal prices now

The good thing working for McDonalds is, you will have something to eat :)

There is a wide variety in the market i have found with hosting prices, some are cheap, some are just revoltingly expensive.

I am growing tired of this.

stuff like this should only take 2 minutes really ;)

log in in to you control panel..
add domain...
add ftp access...
and you are DONE...

who really needs ticketing shit ...

It's definately getting tougher to profit.

Yeah, I work for a mainstream web design firm. We thought about trying to branch into adult work, but it's impossible. A professional grade mainstream site starts at about $3000 and the sky's the limit depending on the work they want done. I had some adult guy hit me up for a Flash site the other day. Dude wanted the whole thing up and running for $400! I don't what type of shit adult designers are throwing together, but my company couldn't touch a project like that for less than $4000. It's a crazy situation.

Outsourcing is why prices are getting so low

The industry is devouring itself.

Once porn made money because it was not so easy to access, had a little social stigma attached to it, little adult book stores formed the main distribution channel and people were prepared to pay high prices as consumers to access the material.

When things started to go online first with BBS systems then the Net, the adult bookshop model was transformed with a few sites offering material (much of it stolen/scanned early on) then a few more content providers providing original material. Porn still had a stigma attached, consumers found online access to porn a novelty and prices remained high.

In the late 90s but more this century two major events have taken place. One is a huge infux of internet pornographers trying to cash in on what has been perceived as an easy cash cow. The second is that by making porn so freely and widely available, just about all the stigma attached is gone. This is in turn driving the adult industry to devour itself in the scramble to keep the interest of consumers who don't see porn as dirty anymore.

Now at the end of 2003 we see the start of the third major event in the online porn industry's history. The crash. Prices are driven low to insane prices, there are some people still making money (those with empires and volume) but for every one of those there are 100 making nothing yet contributing to the huge pool of freely available porn. It is no longer just a bid by webmasters to capture the imagination of consumers but a battle for content providers to even move content.

Porn has changed now, irrevocably. It is no longer a sought after product that could only be bought in private situations. It now a highly commodotized , universally available thing which no longer holds the imagination of consumers. The huge popularity of Reality Television has provided a last gasp for many porn providers as they have been able to use the model in web sites but now even the Reality TV shows are barely distinguishable from the Porn sites which mimic them.

Webmasters see Card Associations (eg VISA) and Government Regulation as the big enemy of the online adult industry yet the biggest real threat to the industry is itself.

Excellent points Oz - we're looking at a porn version of the .com bubble, it's going to pop sooner or later.

You still get what you pay for. Any moron buys an instamatic camera now and calls himself a content provider. Guys like SOBE steal other peoples stuff and sell it for pennies.
If you pay a cheap price, expect a cheap product

it is called competition

It's called Over Saturation !!

why? if you are customer, that you must be customer in some ways, IS GOOD SO FAR!
If you are not making millions is because of YOU.
i never heard complainings of big webmasters...
Ask Battus if he have complains, he is millionaire because he works like one nigerian in one cocoa farm! :)

Dude, stfu, im trying to make people believe i work as an webmaster.

i meant that you work as much as that ******, no that you work in a cocoa farm :1orglaugh

:glugglug

not always the case. www.cloud9content.com will sell anyone today 481 sets and 91 videos for the price of $2600.

Paul Markham's product is excellent yet very cheap. Such quality at low prices would have been unheard of a little time ago.

This could be because he moves in volume so that his ROI is met sooner rather than later?

Which is exactly the point I am making.

Porn has moved from being a highly lucrative, specialty business to a highly commoditised , widespread industry.

Porn is now free, widely available and relatively unprofitable compared to before online availability and even early in the online era.

Now that porn has become so cheap the industry that has made it that way is devouring itself.

Porn is still more profitable than most other industries, but now, you must be more competitive than EVER...
and Smarter than most for making money.

Unfortunately many of those who created the situation that we're now in are the ones walking away and giving up. They made their bed, guess they are going to make everyone else lie in it.

I think the situation with the industry was bound to happen at some stage.

I have tried to think of some long term benefits of moving the business of porn to the internet. After a great deal of thought and analysis I cannot see any.

Porn was unlike most other businesses. The thing that gave porn the edge once was it's non ubiquitous nature. It had an excitement to it that has been totally lost after several years online.

When porn was distributed by limited numbers of fixed outlets, when it had a 'seedy' undertone and was priced accordingly to it's relative availability (ie: you couldn't buy it on every street corner) in mainsteam community - then there was good profit to be made.

The mere action of bringing the availability of porn to the mainstream consumer so easily, it's commoditisation into something no more remarkable than any other widely marketed consumer product, has itself poisoned the long term viability of porn business models in place today.

Porn is no longer anything different, its just something else to spend money on... add to the mix the influx of aspirant pornographers and webmasters has just sped the inevitable up.

There have always been scammers, spammers, thieves and scoundrels in porn. There have always been some people offering a product a little cheaper than the next guy.. but the shift in the past 12 months has been marked.

There is a recent shift in the ferrociousness of marketing, a slump in pricing and measure of profitability has dropped through the floor. The big players obviously aren't going to admit things arent good for them, but right now things are not looking good.

There will be no sudden crash but there are indicators pointing to a very bad few years ahead.. I'm not sure there will be a recovery ever, certainly not to the point experienced early in the life of this industry.

Porn now largely fails to capture the public imagination, the industry meanwhile is feeding off itself and is in a tailspin.

Unregulated, uncontrolled and relentlessly pursuing more market share, the reliance on spam, scams and theft to make money will only further lead to spread the cancer in the dying golden goose.

Scamming the consumer is what is killing the industry.
We treat people that visit our sites better than when we are charging them.

There is a grocerie store on every corner. Sex is no different, everyone needs it and likes it and enjoys it. Sex is just like food.
One thing that is indeed different is ya do not see food stores giving food away while over charging for it at the same time.

This industry is based on attrition and it has gottin so bad that we are fucking ourselves in everyway possible and when we earn someones trust to pull out a credit card that invidual is ass raped.

The industry needs Regulation to the point where government should step in and protect those that actually purchase XXX entertainment.

Seal off American Dollars to over sea's processing for porn.
Bar bad business's from launching under new names.
Fine fraudulent card holder's.

And damn sooo many other things its not even funny...

Ha that is pretty funny. Yes and competition is what alot of people have trouble dealing with.

Oversaturation? I doubt it. There are so many surfers out there that if you make your galleries and tours unique you can present the same old content over and over again and still make money.

Cheap content is cheap becuase sales are slow. Webmasters get the impression that becuase it is cheap it is being sold exponentially more times but that is not the case.

The fact is that the content is cheap becuase it is not selling that fast in the first place becuase of the slow down in this biz. This really is a great time to take advantage of all the blowouts going on.

You can get tons of content at a affordable price and in reality the number of sales that content providers are getting are no more than when the prices were 700% higher.

I am not saying that for example, the 240 video sets you can aget at http://www.************* for just $1299.00 or the 14 sets you can get at http://www.fillercontent.com are the most unique best content in the entire world.

I am saying these blowout deals are what they are. They are great quality content and lots of it at a very reasonable fair prices. Any webmaster that has a pay site can benefit greatly by filling up their members area with these blowout content sets and building galleries with this content.

I suggest that if you have not scoooped up these content blowouts yet that you do so soon. I believe that as sales continue to tank, even with these low low prices, it will leave content providers with only one optoin. To raise prices again.

Think about it. Let's say that you are a content provider and your expenses are $10,000 a month. You are selling your content at rock bottom prices and just barely meetting your expenses. You have only one option before going out of business. To raise your prices and hope for the best. I am talking about reselling content here not excusive one time sale content. l

And this just might work becuase there is also less competiton today. I also suspect that after the new year you will see exclusive content get more expensive too since the misconception webmasters have about content that is affordable will create a premium on exclusive content prices.



;-)

Two words. Eastern Bloc

Good post :thumbsup

Said it for me.

We got two stores. One for newer, better and harder sets, the other sold on price.

<a href="http://www.paulmarkham.com" target="_self"><img src="http://www.banapro.com/banners/our_banners/banner_old_backup.gif" width="120" height="60" alt="PMCS 120x60" border="0"></a>
This site started selling solo, $35, 2 girl $40 and boy-girl $45. Check out the prices today they have not changed, but we do give a little bit away for those who buy in bulk. Got more than enough regular buyers.


<a href="http://www.bargainbasementcontent.com" target="_self"><img src="http://www.banapro.com/banners/our_banners/bargainbasement.gif" width="120" height="60" alt="BBCS" border="0"></a>
This one is $5, $10 and $15 and the not so good or new stuff.

If anything we have put up prices and we still sell well.

amacontent and Lady Mischief said it, you get what you pay for and some of the blow out sales are realy closing down sales or "Can't sell it so might as well give it away" Sales.

The business has evolved in the two years we've been here and it will continue to. Some of the new boys are picking up the business from the old ones. The surfer is being offered a better product and sites that deliver it have the money to spend on content and are not interested in a "Blowout" they want a "Surfer Magnet"

I know for a fact that one of the biggest brokers from 2 years ago is barely scraping by now and when David bought Fetish Brokers he cleared out a lot of suppliers. Guys left with debts and nothing to sell but content. If they could have sold it before they would not be giving it away now. Burning bridges with regular clients is not a good business move.

:2 cents: