

Obscene Losses: YouPorn, Silicon Valley, and the Future of the Adult-Entertainment Industry - dpapathanasiou
http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lifestyle/culture-inc/arts/2007/10/15/YouPorn-Vivid-Entertainment-Profile/

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shayan
After online advertising start growing rapidly and more importantly Google
introduced Adsense a lot of sites were now able to generate a lot more money
by simply offering their sites for free, and in return have higher traffics,
(therefore, more money from advertisement). I believe also one of the very
reasons why blogging grew out of a simple diary into a very profitable
business, and a full time job for many people.

But the interesting thing here is that the porn sites can't really take
advantage of this fact, since google and many other people avoid advertising
on porn sites. Therefore, a site like YouPorn will have problems generating
profits although it has such huge traffics. I guess the people in the online
porn industry really need to get creative and come up with a new model for
their business. But whats more interesting and ironic is that free porn sites
like YouPorn are becoming more and more popular, and are killing the old media
businesses (exact same thing that happened to the music and movie industry,
and as mentioned in the article) but are not able to make money themselves
either. Clearly the users are the real winner here, LOL

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SwellJoe
Interesting that the 51st most popular site on the internet cannot be sold for
even a few million bucks, despite repeated attempts. pg has said YC (and the
vast majority of other investors) wouldn't fund a porn venture, not due to any
ethical qualms, but because there is no good exit option, and I guess this is
pretty solid proof of that.

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mynameishere
...I think what they are attempting is closer to "extortion" than mere
selling.

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SwellJoe
How so? It seems to me that the YouPorn folks are at far higher risk of being
sued out of existence...yes, all of the traditional pay-for-content sites, and
buy-our-DVDs companies, are in serious trouble, because of sites like YouPorn.
But, taking YouPorn out of the picture through acquisition wouldn't solve that
problem--though I guess I can begin to see the extortion angle if we follow
that through to one possible conclusion: Every 20-something nerd in the world
will suddenly think, "Hey, I can build a killer porn video site, and some poor
schmucks at a billion dollar porn company will have to buy it to prevent
competition!"

Hard to say how the targeted buyers view things. But they're (currently) in
the position of power. They have hundreds of millions in revenues, versus a
few million for YouPorn. And, now that YouPorn is known to have revenue, and
has forced itself onto the radar of lots of people, it's going to attract
lawsuits...

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shayan
agreed

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gscott
It seems obvious that people want something that is not so professional, Vivid
in the article doesn't seem to be getting that they can gain market share if
they would change there tactics, maybe put together a compilation cd of
amateur content or create there own amateur content using models who are not
so worked over that they are impossibly perfect looking.

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asdflkj
Just out of curiosity: do you use speech recognition software, or do your
fingers just naturally tend to type "armature" instead of "amateur"?

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gscott
I can never spell amateur right so I copied and pasted my text into open
office then somehow proceeded to pick the wrong word to replace my mispelling.

