So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly).
Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have.
I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility.
I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
When working for Naughty America, I made a website for the members' area that was attempting to be like hulu for porn. Queueing, favorites, recommendations, subscriptions. We had it ready to go...
Naughty America was very resistant to change. The didn't want to divert all their members to a new site. They continued to work on their old members area so I was always feature chasing.
What it comes down to is that porn companies are not set up to be tech companies. They start out with 1 hacker that throws together some shitty CMS site and starts hacking content into it. Since the site quality isn't driving the money, they never lose the "one guy hacking on the site" mentality. They were basically doing everything as a one-off, without actually trying to make a good quality solution that would serve them long term.
I'll speak for the ones i've been dealing with (Pornhub.com, Brazzers.com, Keezmovies.com, XTube.com, and some other small ones).
Since i started at my company, i only did a website from scratch on one occasion (Videobash.com, not porn), and i think it was done right, it scales very well, using a framework we (me and an ex-colleague) designed and coded targeted for high traffic/high load needs. As for the other sites, i think people here summed it up pretty well, very often the decision are made by managers/marketing people, and we just can't spend the time we want to on optimization and good coding.
But, it's a situation that is starting to change, at least at my company, after a year or so of fighting, we finally started to rewrite all of our sites, using the proper technologies, structuring it correctly, using the framework that we did. You still have to keep in mind that the teams are very smalls, for example, Pornhub.com (17Millions visists/day, 3Billions+ pageviews per month) is maintained by 2 Programmers, and from time to time we can get our hands on an integrator, so understand that it's very hard to address all the issues. So even if, in the case of Pornhub, we were able to scale (since i joined this team) from 12Millions to 17Millions users with less hardware and better performance, i'm still far from being satisfied with the current state of the code.
But be sure, that personally i take the performance of my websites at heart. But there is also all the factors i can't control, advertisers to begin with, a lot of heavy crapy Flash/JavaScript.
The inherent flaw is that most people who actually pay for porn are not geeks, they are generally people who dont know the internet well enough to find porn for free.
Really, how often do you see these things on mainstream sites? Most developers who care about those things are fighting other developers or founders who continue to use the "We need to make money, not be standards compliant" argument.
When I give talks on accessibility, that's the #1 thing people say. THey can't be bothered to care because they believe that time could be better spent solving their business problems. They often truly believe that it's too costly, or that their target audience doesn't care.
And sometimes, they're spot on. Fact is, people come to web sites (not apps, but sites) for content. If it's wrapped in a crappy container, people tend to just deal with it, as long as the content is worth their time.
I would like to know what size of the audience of these porn websites are accessible users. Really.
Sometimes people who study accessibility get so harped up about it that it becomes a must for them to implement on almost everything they do regardless if the audience size may be minimal to none.
It's a dangerous thing just like an entrepreneur who is blinded by the fact that his idea is not useful and is not satisfying a need yet he still plugs away at it hoping one day a dollar may be extracted from his beliefs.
Step back and take a look at it realistically. You need to be effective and efficient.
In almost anything we do the majority outway the minority. And it should be.
When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.
Hey tibbon, this is my first post on HN, but could not resist the urge to add to the thread.
My current position is Operations Manager at a company called Dreamstar Cash based in Altea (Spain), owned by Steve Matthyssen, a good friend of mine for many years.
Back in the day it all started with a TGP called gals4free.net. In Nov 2008 Dreamstar launched 4tube.com that is now ticking over with around 1.6M visits a day, 9 weeks ago we launched a new project PornTube.com that we're very excited about as we're using our existing tube model on a valuable/trusted/recognized domain that has historically outperformed/converted any other domain we've seen. Steve has built a solid reputation for himself over the years by not ripping off content. PornTube is 100% DMCA compliant, we believe the way forward is to work with, and not against the content producers.
Our current site has been designed with usability best practices in mind, as well as SEO (We're working with a highly reputable firm in the UK), scaleability, information architecture/semantics, MVT/CRO/LPO. Currently in the process of implementing rdf tags for some of our "starlettes" studios and movies, video sitemaps and dynamic rss feeds, social features...
As a small team it can be very hard to stay focused, develop all these features and ensure HA while managing +100k videos, security, performance and the list goes on. One of our goals for Q1 2011 is to review our SCRUM methodology and how we can improve our existing processes to stay on top of the game.
We worked VERY hard on setting ourselves a good foundation for growth, if there is any interest regarding the actual technologies used please forward your questions and I'll get our CTO to reply.
Nonetheless we do realise that their is much room for improvement, so any feedback would be very welcome, we're always looking to improve.
(We're also currently hiring ;-) feel free to pop over to http://www.dreamstarcash.com for more info or send your resume to jobs[at]dreamstarcash.com)
They are normally so poorly done because it does not matter. Most porn sites are either traffic sites or membership sites. If its a traffic site then the goal is just to upsell and send the user to another site and if its a membership site then the users care much more about the content than the site.
I think you're right. But at the same time, we know that Google is grading things on speed, and of course search engines love accessible sites (since they can read them easily too).
I can only speak for one company, but I believe the vast majority of traffic comes from affiliates and not search engines. I was pushing to do more SEO and SEM, but there was a fear that the affiliates would revolt if we started taking steps to cut them out (the industry standard is 60-70% revenue share from affiliate sales, good affiliates make a LOT of money).
Traffic sites == affiliate sites. @ aebn they have an entire traffic department that does nothing but throw up traffic (or affiliate) sites and drive traffic to their theaters. Also the pure affiliate model has been in decline for some time now. I also personally own about 10 traffic sites and each one has appox 10 affiliate offers on it. the term "Traffic site" has nothing to do with how the user gets to the site e.g.: organic search vs clicking link on 3rd party page. It simply refers to the purpose of the page which is to drive traffic to another site.
Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have.
I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility.
I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.