You have to thank the assholes who started the whole "free porn" tube movement for most of this.
If you are a producer with a decent website, or a network of sites, and you are charging $30 a month for access, you are right - in today's market it is very tough to make sales when competing against "free".
Think about the numbers: If your site or network offers 300 videos, then that $30 monthly fee = 10 cents p/scene.... if you offer 600 episodes at $30 p/month each scene drops down to 5 cents p/scene, etc.
Even iTunes charges 99 cents p/downloaded song, so subscription porn has been a great deal for a long time.
Do you think it costs a producer 10 cents to film a scene? Think about how devalued porn is now, thanks to the scumbags who are simply giving everything away, all under the guise that traffic = sales, regardless of how many sales are actually being lost thanks to this shortsighted stupidity.
For every $100 some asshat is making off of their legal or illegal tube site, the industry is easily losing $1,000+ in subscriptions.
The "adapt-or-die" motto will kill off most of the people in this business. Many producers will stop or reduce their shoots because their overhead fees exceed their return, coupled with their affiliates finding themselves in the same losing position. Over time this will mean less producers, less affiliates, less NEW content, and ultimately a major shrinking of the adult industry overall.
Niche content can still yield some sales, but it really depends upon the niche. If you are a surfer who likes gangbangs for example, you can find thousands of free gangbang scenes for free now, throughout hundreds of tube sites. If you produce midget gangbang scenes then your content may be specific enough to gain and retain some fans, but the smaller the micro-niche, the smaller the fanbase.
These threads are just useless however, as those who agree with this information can't do much to change the conditions, and those who are making a few bucks in the free porn biz are not going to stop what they are doing very soon either, until conditions change.
If you PRODUCE content it is impossible to respect the folks who take your work and distribute it for free, like your work is virtually worthless, and just good for increasing the size of their industry-killing free sites.
A terrible economy + too much free porn = a very bad time for non-thieves in the adult biz.
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