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Originally Posted by mynameisjim
Just to be clear, this is just a friendly discussion, I don't want you to think I'm trying to attack you or anything and I respect your arguments.
But as far as "accepting" it, yes I totally do and that doesn't mean I'm whining. I can say something is a bad thing and still accept it. I feel that war is a bad thing, but I still accept it as a reality. I also have defense stocks, so I can profit from it as well. Even though I think it's bad in the long run.
Same with this mad dash towards free. It's a bad thing in the long run because like I said, it causes the economy to get smaller, not larger. The examples you made in your first post leave out a critical point which actually proves my point. Yes, the blacksmith was put out of work by the auto industry, but the auto industry was hundreds of times larger than the industry it replaced, in this case the horse and carriage industry.
This is the total opposite of what is happening in this push towards free. Large industries are being replaced by tiny ones with a fraction of the value. How is that good?
As for the ATT example, the cost of long distance came down because ATT was serving pictures and videos along the same lines that just carried voice before. ATT didn't just start giving away nearly free phone service so it could make a fraction of the money it did by offering some other service instead.
Just like with the PC industry, the cost of PC parts came down but the industry itself became larger and larger. In the free economy, industries get smaller and smaller and that's the problem I have. I guess I'm just not wise enough to see how shrinking industries is good for everybody and creates opportunity and wealth. But I guess we'll all find out soon enough.
But I don't want you to think I'm one of these guys crying for the old days. I got into adult when tube sites were pretty much at their peak so I don't really know any other market environment (as far as adult goes).
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Well here's the thing, we're still really early in the game, so nobody really knows what's going to happen.
BTW, AT&T didn't drop long distance prices because they were serving pictures and videos on the same lines. They dropped prices because MCI and Sprint did to them, what Craigslist did to newspapers.
They took a far far lower profit margin to offer the same service.
At the time, most people didn't foresee internet service or cellular service or whatever, there were just new players trying to break into the biz, and the competition and innovation that followed over the years was astounding.
Is telecommunications a larger industry today or a smaller industry today than it was when AT&T was basically the only game in town?
Now, while there is no perfect analogy, the adult internet space is going through something similar. Margins in the early days were astronomical. Not because of any great business savvy on the part of the players, but because they were the only ones there.
Now the delivery technology has improved, the costs associated with delivering the product are a fraction of what they used to be, and there are many more competitors in the marketplace.
So now, today, the winners are the consumers, and the losers are the business owners who don't innovate.
Today you can get a membership to Brazzers for $100/yr. They're offering full HD videos and have an insanely large library that's updated multiple times a day.
For $25/mo you can get a membership to Naughty America. They have a similar content library plus offer several hours per day of live interactive content for free to their members.
These products are 100 times better than what Cybererotica was charging $50 a month for 10 years ago.
Obviously, their margins are tiny compared with what sites like Cybererotica and Karasxxx made in the early days, but that's true of any maturing industry. The internet and adult internet are no different in that regard.
They won't be "smaller industries" by any stretch of the imagination, but they will be "smaller margin industries". That's just the nature of the marketplace though, it's inevitable.