Quote:
Originally Posted by Nathan
This is a very important and interesting point you make here. Yes, online porn in general has a very low barrier to entry. But this low barrier to entry gets you to the bottom of the hill, not to the top. In your analogy with international shipping, the low barrier to entry get's you basically to the equivalent of a packaging factory owner that serves a packaging company that in turn servers some international shipping company. It arguably also let's you climb the ladder faster than other industries, and there are a ton of the bottom level people in this industry.
BUT, the barrier to entry into the top league is by far bigger. It is still doable to make it big if you come to the right place at the right time, and have enough contacts in the industry, but from 0 to 100 is obviously very very hard. If it were this easy, we would have 500 big tube sites competing over the top 5 traffic ranks. But we do not. We have only a handful or two meaningful big tubes, with maybe 20 to follow which are decent in size and worth looking at, and then 500 small ones which combined have the size of tube #30.
That's not a low barrier of entry, that shows its actually becoming higher.
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You make excellent points here sir. As market share "shifts" a division will occur and, as always, it's the people in the middle who will get pushed one way or the other (and ultimately OUT).
I saw this in the music industry. When I became a journalist in 1985 (I was a teenager, very much akin to the film 'Almost Famous') there were 50+ music magazines and, more importantly, 40+ record companies or more (including small but thriving "independant" labels).
Then, as we get closer to the Millenium, the bigger companies started gobbling up the smaller companies until, around 2002 or so, there were only 4 "major" labels left standing. FOUR. You may see dozens of "imprints" with this name or that but they're all owned by four major players.
EXCEPT - and here is where the Hope lies - for a second market, a smaller, more independant market, that emerged around 2003 via MySpace (remember them?). Musicians copied iTunes and mastered social media and brought their music directly to their fans/consumers via their own websites. Substitute "porn" for "music" and it's the same damn thing.
It was and always will be the "medium guys" that have the biggest issues here: too big to just go away, too little to compete and/or be gobbled up by the big boys. So they fight for dwindling market share and they tread water and trudge through until they lose enough to just bail or become desperate enough to accept pennies on the dollar for their years of hard work and web presence.
The "little guys" in the above scenario is where the Hope lies because a one or two or three person operation can "survive" (thrive) quite nicely on 400k a year, or 300k, or 200k, even 100k...
And when the "big boys" lose interest, or steam, or growth they will lose momentum, stagnate then their market share will dwindle. Meanwhile, one of the "little guys" will stumble unknowingly onto "the next big thing" and get rich and gain entry into the "big boys" and shake the whole thing up. Again. It's called a Cycle and it may take years for this to happen but it shall, no doubt.
How many can survive/thrive during all this depends greatly on their willingness to tough it out, stay flexible, work their asses off and wait for that Hope I mentioned to kick in. Good luck to us all.
