

Obscene Losses: How YouPorn is Killing the Adult Entertainment Business - jorgeortiz85
http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile

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krschultz
YouPorn follows YouTube in pretty much every way. It became popular because it
served copyright infringing content that others charged for, and it makes
little money.

The major difference however, is that YouPorn followed many pay porn sites and
a huge volume of content, as opposed to YouTube which preluded TV really
coming onto the web. Often you hear that the TV and movie industries have
squandered their opportunity to make money off the web. YouPorn makes a case
that no matter what the TV execs or movie execs had done before YouTube, the
proliferation of free content would have happened anyway. People like free,
even if it is inferior. DVDs have better quality than streaming, even
downloading is better than streaming, but free beats 1 cent any day.

~~~
unalone
I think there's also a difference in the type of content. TV shows offer the
possibility of mental stimulation. People will pay for quality. If I was able
to, I'd get HBO for the level of programming. There's money to be made from
quality.

Porn? Sure, it's wonderful when it's well-produced, but people don't care
first and foremost about production value. They watch porn to masturbate in
nearly all cases. That means that porn films benefit from shorter, more
manageable scenes, and that quality doesn't matter whatsoever. The film
industry has a subsection that operates based on quality. Porn profits almost
exclusively from access: the easier access is, the more attention.

So TV still has some fight in it. So does the music industry, though I think
in both cases there will be changes. Porn? I think that the professional
industry is going to be gutted through-and-through. The porn industry can't
compete with amateurs.

~~~
marvin
I agree with your sentiment that there is money to be made from quality, but
you're underestimating the unrealized potential of the pornographic industry.
The porn industry can't compete with amateurs _if it keeps doing what it's
always been doing_. But that's just because the amateurs make an equivalent
product at a lower price.

Most porn sucks (and blows), but one day pornography will be recognized as a
proper art form and attract people who actually care about exploring the
genre. Yes; porn is used exclusively for masturbation. But it's better to
masturbate to a better product.

90% of mainstream pornography consists of dicks going really fast in and out
of vaginas, punctuated by some guy blowing his load in the girl's face. It's
hard to think of something involving sex that is _less_ exciting and creative
than this. The real fun comes from subtle emotional interactions, power play,
fantasy and a million other things I haven't thought of. High budgets and
production values are worthless if you're only recording cumshots, but there
are no reasons deeper than inertia and lack of imagination that this money and
power isn't put to better use.

Assuming that parts of the HN crowd, in fact, watches porn: have any of you,
for instance, ever seen a believable reenactment of a sexual fantasy? I sure
as hell haven't. There is so much that could be done here. Sex is one of our
deepest drives. Pornography has the potential to be one of the most profound
art forms we have.

Consider what the advertising industry (clothing, underwear, perfume) is
doing. They usually get blamed for destroying the woman's role, setting
unrealistic expectations for people's looks, etc. But some of the things these
guys/gals make actually has some emotional impact, on a sexual level deeper
than what I see in most erotica and pornography. Although a randy ad never
conveys any meaning or realism, the writing and acting is so much better. Fine
art nudes are rarely effective at getting its viewers horny...advertising
_is_. The highbrow crowd is obviously doing something wrong. Shouldn't artists
put their effort where the impact is largest?

The porn industry will, happily, never get bailout money from the government.
I'm hopeful that some competition will set the commercial porn studios
thinking, or at least drag them down far enough that they can be attacked by
teams with less financial clout. YouPorn is good for us, because of its
equalizing potential.

~~~
unalone
I've been thinking about this. I'm a writer, and I've wondered whether it
would be possible to get together a good director and good actresses and make
a really good porno.

Right now? I think the answer's no. The problem is that you're going for two
audiences: the porn-watchers and the content-seekers. The porn-watchers pay
for the scene. The more scenes you have, the better. The content-watchers are
the ones who'd watch something straight through if it was worth watching. The
problem is, a large part of writing-directing is a matter of taste. When
you're writing a sex scene into something, you only keep what you absolutely
need to advance the plot. Most porn scenes are 10-20 minutes long, which means
even if you only have one per film, you're making a really imbalanced product.

I can see writing an interesting, compulsive scene if you've got great
characters and great acting, and if you weave plot in. But the more of that
you add, the worse the scene gets for the porn-watcher. It's much more a zero-
sum game, where you can't win with both at the same time.

And that gets to the bigger problem: porn is not intended to be art. It's
meant to soothe people who aren't getting something they should _be_ getting.
If you're getting great sex, you don't need porn. You can subsist entirely on
art pieces that aren't erotic in that sense. I'd put porn in the same category
as something like Office Space in that the main intent isn't artistic merit,
it's helping somebody who's in a situation they don't like. The fact that it's
no sex versus a dull job doesn't change the fact that neither one is quite as
funny if you aren't in that sort of a situation.

(Art nudes, by the way, aren't meant to be erotic. Usually they're meant to
capture the human body in its entirety, and there's nothing erotic about the
human body unless it's actively teasing you. The novel Syrup has a great scene
describing this. Nudes aren't sexy unless you've been teased with a partly-
clothed body, and when the girl isn't deliberately denying you the sight of
more.)

Now, I can see porn becoming more integrated with movies and TV. I can
imagine, in a long-running TV show, a "moment of release" sex scene that
literally climaxes seasons of building tension. But that's not the porn
industry. That's a little porn added on to a much bigger thing.

Look at how porn is used in books. Pulp writers (Dean Koontz and kin) use it
wholesale to raise reader interest during boring sequences. That's pornography
in the current sense. Once you hit higher art, though, sex scenes are always
used to portray something. You lose the full erotic impact. People aren't
buying literature to jerk off: if anything, the jerking is incidental.

And so there lies the problem. Pornography is by its nature a low-brow
product. If people pay for more, they'll pay for something that's not
inherently pornography. And that means the current porn industry is screwed
(ahahaha pun). If you want to masturbate, amateurs are perfectly fine. If you
need a level higher, there's always piracy in the form of streaming legal
videos, which the porn industry, shady as it is, can't compete with as easily
as the RIAA can. They're fighting a battle with everything against them.

~~~
msluyter
_I've been thinking about this. I'm a writer, and I've wondered whether it
would be possible to get together a good director and good actresses and make
a really good porno._

I believe the films Shortbus and 9 Songs attempt this to at least some degree.

~~~
smikhanov
9 Songs does not attempt to be porno, i.e. does not attempt to stimulate the
viewer, it imitates life instead (as any other art does). Main characters in 9
Songs are having sex like normal people do, unlike the porno actors and
actresses.

------
nihilocrat
_He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a "very cool brand, perhaps the
Virgin of adult entertainment."_

Did anyone else find this use of words a little amusingly oxymoronic?

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stcredzero
So instead of just being an industry, porn has firmly entrenched itself as
part of our culture -- to the point that everyone is not just a consumer, but
also a participant, and it will get harder and harder to make money at it?

Parallels with the music industry as well as movies and video?

------
staunch
FYI: YouPorn runs on the Perl-based Catalyst framework (supposedly -- not sure
how it was verified).

~~~
jrockway
This makes it awkward when clients or people in my training classes ask me
about big Catalyst sites. "Uh, YouPorn..." "What's that?" "Uh..."

~~~
mst
So mention other sites instead - the BBC iPlayer website, vox.com, etc.

Or you just say "two sites in the alexa top 100 that we know about"

It's not rocket science.

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kqr2
The article is actually more than a year old. Traffic seems to be declining at
youporn. I wonder if that means dvd sales are up.

[http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/youporn.co...](http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/youporn.com)

~~~
run4yourlives
Nah, it means youporn has competitors.

~~~
sachinag
I would make an interesting/funny/insightful comment here if I could leave
anonymous comments.

~~~
derefr
But enabling anonymous comments would just hurt things in the long run, no
matter what kind of additional positive short-term effects it would have.
People would feel little need to "join" the community, as they could interact
with it as guests, and thus they would always feel out-of-touch with it, and
apathetic to it (it would be outside their Monkeysphere.)

I do have one possible solution, though: for every 50 karma points you earn,
say, you get a "free gift" of some sort _within the system_ (because otherwise
it would encourage gaming of the system to earn such points). One gift could
be a one-use "post this comment anonymously" checkbox that would then
disappear. Another would be, to use a fun example, the sort of "mega-upvote"
everyone wishes they had around for when something truly deserves it.

~~~
yters
I think it'd be interesting if people could use their own karma for the "mega-
upvote."

EDIT

Part of what's neat about this idea is that support now can cost people
something, so they have to really be behind what they support. On the other
hand, it would probably establish a oligarchy.

~~~
derefr
The problem is that capabilities on this site in particular are partly based
on your karma. Spending away your ability to downvote would be a problem,
especially if you're a very prominent member of the community, and then even
more especially if you served in a sort of vigilante "moderator"/"role model"
role, keeping the community clean and pointed in the right direction by your
actions. (I know this site can't really be influenced as heavily by its users
as that sounds, but it could head that way if pg wished: giving users with a
karma total of over 3000, say, automatic moderator powers makes quite a bit of
sense to me.)

Sure, it can be a "noble sacrifice" and generate some sort of epic story
retold throughout the community where user-Gandalf sacrifices their karma in
the fight against troll-user-Balrog, and then others step in to "forge ahead
without them," but just because a notion is romantic doesn't mean it's
Utilitarian (in fact, they're almost opposite by definition.) Although boring,
the community as a whole is likely better off if the others could restore
Gandalf afterwards, _as long as they thought his actions were justified_.
Since, in a database, there's no difference between taking something away and
instantly finding reason to give it back, let me phrase it this way (thank
Doctorow for this):

You don't _spend_ whuffie; you just _have_ it. However, if you do something
stupid with it, it can be taken away.

I'm not sure if this has been tried on a social news site before, and it
sounds stupid on face-value, but, what if, instead of each comment having an
individual score that _also_ affects its author's karma, the comment's score
(and therefore its page placement) simply _ _is_ _ the author's karma? That
is, a comment by a user with 3000 karma starts off with a score of 3000, and
is placed on the page accordingly.

As such, you wouldn't really be voting on the comment itself anymore, but
rather voting _on the user_ by considering the comment as an action _by_ that
user. Taking all your points off of a user for one especially bad thing they
did--considered on sites like this and reddit to be quite uncouth--wouldn't be
a "sin" any longer, because _you're not rating their comments_ any more;
you're just rating _them_. When you give someone one downvote, it applies
across the "scores" of _all_ their other posts, and likewise for upvotes.

I'd love to see this system tried out. I don't even have a special attachment
to its success or failure; it simply sounds like a great experiment in virtual
sociology. I might even be motivated to implement it myself if anyone else
shows interest here in being part of the resulting community.

~~~
yters
I wish there were a good way to try out all these ideas. I've considered the
idea of wikiable applications, perhaps on top of a common database, that might
be a possibility.

------
Dilpil
The major difference between hollywood vs youtube and san fernando vs
porntube: $500 million movie may actually be better than some guy in his
garage with a video camera. A $50,000 porn movie however, is almost certainly
less interesting than a video of two people having real sex.

------
lpgauth
Not really bringing anything to the conversation but 7 page article, really?
Way to try to milk those ads...

~~~
brandnewlow
It was a good article. I clicked my way through. I'm happy to generate ad
revenue while consuming an article I liked.

Make something people want.

~~~
markessien
You "consume" articles?

~~~
brandnewlow
I do. I also devour, absorb, take in, chew on, consider, ponder...etc.

~~~
markessien
All that must need a lot of synergy, huh?

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nazgulnarsil
when anyone is willing to make regular sex videos and upload them for free the
future is in sites like kink. find highly specialized niches and serve the
people willing to pay for them. I envision a website where people can request
videos of certain themes. pornstars could choose to make certain themed videos
and then offer them to customers.

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steveplace
The implications behind this research are benign, I swear.

The one company I see coming out of this is Brazzers. They seem to have
partnered up with YP and a lot of clones to generate traffic and more leads
through short "review" videos. And there the only real brand that has been
embracing the new shift, including the social aspects.

------
sireat
Vivid and others do have a valid point that Youporn could eventually get into
a LOT of legal trouble because of age issues.

------
rokhayakebe
Soon we will see Twitter for Porn. "@exgrilfriend Having fun with your best
friend."

~~~
ivey
<http://hotwitter.com/> ... not particularly work-safe, powered by Yonkly

