
How MindGeek transformed the economics of porn - fraqed
http://fusion.net/story/212078/how-mindgeek-transformed-the-economics-of-porn/
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gizmo686
>As a result, there’s little obvious reason to produce new porn: everything
has already been done, probably better, by somebody else, and is already
freely available online.

Where does the author watch porn? Maybe it is just a curation problem, but I
find the quality of most porn to be insufferable bad. Even the "good" stuff
would be bad by the standards set by the mainstream film industry.

~~~
technotony
Technology shifts may change things as well. I imagine wide spread adoption of
VR viewers is going to create a new market for instance that might be
'premium'. Or some integration with internet of things devices (tele-dildonics
anyone?)...

~~~
gizmo686
I suspect that we will see porn take advantage of these new technologies (in
fact, I have seen internet controlled vibes). However, I doubt that the
quality will be substantially higher.

The one way I can see this technology leading to higher quality is by
centralizing capital in a much smaller number of producers, who then have the
resources to produce higher quality porn. However, they also would have much
more of a monopoly, so I am not sure how well this will work out; and
eventually production of new style porn will become more democratized.

The bigger change we need to make is social/economic. Porn simply does not
have the monitization avenues that film does. Mainstream advertisers don't
want to touch it, and consumers are reluctant to pay for it. This puts us in a
situation where, as the author describes, most porn is itself produced as an
ad for other sex services.

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prawn
I've seen some porn created for the Oculus Rift which is high quality. Once VR
is accessible and the media is out there, it will dominate. Even with the DK1,
it's a step up.

~~~
plonh
VR seems mainly for providing an environment ("celestial sphere"). To use it
to examine a target (such as a human performer) you'd gave to walk around in a
ring, which seems a weird movement while watching porn. Unless you were
watching a scene with many performers?

~~~
soylentcola
I've also got an Oculus dev unit (dk2) and must admit to checking out some of
the porn content out there for it. Right now it seems to fall into two main
categories: wide angle 3d movies and virtual scenes/environments.

In the former, you're looking at mostly paid/premium content that is ideally
played in the company's player application. Still, it works in some other more
general VR players. These are shot with cameras that, while not 3d/360 due to
current tech limitations, give the illusion of sitting in front of
performer(s) doing your typical sexy stuff. It generally mirrors the viewer's
assumed seated position so it gives the illusion of watching a live sex show.
You can turn your head and look around to some extent but doing 3d/360 is
still difficult due to the way dual-camera 3d works. There are several non-
porn examples of this as well.

The latter is more like CG porn since the tools for creating and viewing 3d
graphics in VR are a lot more established. The flip side is that you're
basically watching video game porn. Some of the stuff that can be done in
Unity or Unreal Engine is pretty realistic, just like your average modern AAA
video game but in the end, it's still cartoon porn so it will appeal to some
but not others. On the viewing side, it's more flexible since you can turn
around in a full 360 degrees and change your viewpoint just like any other CG
virtual environment.

Basically the live stuff is like the evolution of 3D movies while the CG stuff
is an evolution of video games.

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lips
Relevant: Stoya on MindGeek (Text with SFW banner image):
[http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-
ethi...](http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-
piracy)

It's worth remembering that the behavior of the market is essentially
influenced by the stigma, and subsequent banning of porn (and sexually
explicit material in general, art or otherwise) in many TOSs. For that matter,
I wonder how iTunes-type availability of porn would even affect spam.

~~~
hkmurakami
DMM provides an iTunes like commerce market for porn in Japan. They are doing
quite well and exploring ways to go public.

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abruzzi
This article seemed to have a deceptively shifting focus, often conflating or
confusing the incentives for studios with the incentives for performers. The
ability to sell side services has limited impact on studios, for instance.

Also, in a very simple answer to the opening question of why new porn
continues to be made, it is important to understand how much novelty impacts
the porn industry. There are lots of types of novelty, even the improvement
from SD to HD productions can effectively obsolete older productions. And
there are production style novelties such as the rise of gonzo type
productions. But the biggest novelty that customers pay for is the novelty of
the latest young woman that enters the industry. The entire genre of so-called
amateur porn is built on that.

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smallerize
Here's Stoya's epic rant against Manwin/MindGeek, including her plan to
compete against them: [http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-
the-ethi...](http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-
of-piracy)

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Mahn
That's a pretty impressive monopoly, for some reason I always thought those
"YouTube-like" sites were competing against each other. MindGeek may well turn
out to be the Google of porn.

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mastermojo
I wonder if MindGeek will move to a more legal revenue split/share model as it
grows the same way Youtube did.

~~~
jonnathanson
That seems like a distinct possibility. If Mindgeek can aggregate the majority
of adult entertainment eyeballs on the internet, then studios basically become
Mindgeek MCNs. In some ways that may be an easier transition than it would be
for Hollywood studios, in so far as production costs are probably cheaper by
several orders of magnitude.

~~~
notjaycarney
Can you tell me what MCN stands for?

~~~
jonnathanson
Multi-channel network. It's a term YouTube originally coined. Basically, a
content publisher on someone else's platform who operates multiple channels
within that platform. In the YouTube world, this is someone bigger than a one-
channel YouTube star and perhaps smaller than, say, a premium content provider
like NBC or CBS.

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dev1920
The article makes it sound like all company revenue comes from tubes sites.
The company also owns hundreds of pay-to-access original content sites (ever
hear of Brazzers?). This company was not the first to do tubes; they had to
adopt the format because competitors did so first and their revenue suffered.
Once again, a large part of the problem is users opting to not pay if someone
else will illegally put it up for free. You want free tubes to go away? Stop
watching tubes and go pay for a monthly Brazzers subscription.

~~~
Mikushi
Not really, Pornhub was launched in 2007, at that time they were not that many
other prominent tube sites, Youporn had been around for a bit longer but
Brazzers was pretty much printing cash at that point and growing insanely
fast.

They did not do it to reply to the competition and revenue was sure as hell
not suffering, they did it because it was the future and they saw it as such
as well as a great way for them to funnel sign ups to Brazzers and other
paysites such as Moviebox.

By then they were already a dominant force in the market and moved on to
acquire most other tube sites to apply the same model as they did on Pornhub.

Also last time I heard advertisement on tube site were still the main revenue
stream for them, might have changed now as I've been out for a few years.

Source: Was Lead Developer on Pornhub and Back end dev on Brazzers before
that.

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plonh
All I see is a full page pop-up ads for their email list, with no escape
control in view.

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NickHaflinger
Am I the only one here that see the pornification of the culture as so very
very sad.

~~~
kansface
> pornification of the culture

What does this mean? Which culture and what is pornification?

