The article seeks pretty rambling and doesn't have a clear point, but I have friends in the sex-work industry and the closing part is true: like music, people don't want to pay for porn anymore, and it's making it harder and harder for non-megastars to make a living. Everybody I know making a living off porn is doing it through twitter, premium Snapchat accounts, patreon and the like, not traditional sites, and it's not easy.
I've been banging on about this point for years. Filesharing doesn't hurt megacorps, who have vast marketing departments that reliably shepherd people through the fare gates or monetize them in other ways, but indie and niche performers and creators suffer terribly because they don't have a big capital pile in addition to their labor and natural assets (whatever those happen to be).
Filehsaring has a great deal to recommend it, but ultimately it comes down to wanting something for nothing (and often whining about the very people whose performances it desires to devalue).
I tend to think that the economic value of porn would have plummeted in the past decade or so even if there were no copyright infringement. Good cameras keep getting more affordable. Today's smartphones have better video capabilities than professional video gear had at the end of the 1990s. It only takes a tiny percentage of people with exhibitionist tendencies to produce and share more new porn than anybody can watch. Most of these performers don't care about getting paid. And in this niche, true professionals have little if any quality advantage over enthusiastic amateurs.
Most of these performers don't care about getting paid.
Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals. Gonzo and amateur porn are categories but most porn is made to make a buck. Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true. That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street - it's an excuse to ignore their problems, though I appreciate you may not have meant it that way.
Btw I base my views on over a decade in the indie film (not porn) industry, and from having a lot of friends and acquaintances who are sex workers, and who are already having a tough time dealing with FOSTA/SESTA.
> Performers like getting paid because they like to eat and not be homeless, and suggesting that most of them don't want to be paid is simply not true.
He suggested no such thing, you should try reading more carefully.
> Amateur porn is absolutely not the default, as even a cursory glance at porn sites reveals.
He also never claimed that.
What he did say was that there's enough amateur exhibitionists who would do it for free and don't care about getting paid to more than satisfy the demand for porn and that's why professionals are going to continue having a hard time being paid.
Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not. The market demonstrates a clear preference for professionally produced material.
> Yes, but if that calculus were true, tube sites (which display viewing figures) would be dominated by amateur content and they're not.
That's not a logical conclusion, so no. The market demonstrates a clear preferences for free content, that's what tube sites show; that professional content is popular when free does not demonstrate that professional content matters more than free content. That professional are having such a hard time making money in fact demonstrates the opposite, the market cares more about free than about quality. As long as people are willing to make free porn, which they are, professionals will always struggle to make money. The same is true of much art, music is another example of exactly this phenomenon.
By volume, the vast, vast majority of gay porn on the major sites (pornhub, xtube, xhamster, etc) is amateur. Similarly, if you look at the "most watched" and "top rated categories" only about 1/5 are non-amateur. Straight porn I have no idea.
> That's like saying most homeless people choose to be on the street
While hard to show real data, I have 14 years of experience in the EMS field were a LOT of our "customers" are homeless. I can say unequivocally that greater than 50% of the homeless in my jurisdiction have no desire to live a "normal" life. That is... life with a job, mortgage/rent and/or insurance... and TAXES. We (tax payers) literally pay for everything and they know it. They abuse the living shit out of the 911 system and emergency rooms because they know they will be treated regardless of the ability to pay.
