The same thing happened to the DVD market. Prices remained stagnant while costs and piracy went up making the cost of making them not profitable. It actually amazes me anyone is still shooting content these days (the ones not subsidized by the big tubes).

I've read the only way to succeed at raising prices is to have a long term strategy. meaning you will lose Members at first but they will come back in time. That never worked for me. I keep things where they are and just try to add value. For those shooting content weekly I don't know how they do it anymore. And yet new paysites open all the time. Makes you wonder. LOL

The DVD market was completely different they had a huge cost of entry barrier in the tens of thousands. After starting my first site I wanted to supplement with DVD income and laughed when they quoted me $12k as the lowest entry point for one DVD release. All the middlemen became so greedy they priced themselves, and the platform, almost out of existence. Then prices went down but it was too late.

One method to raising prices is to start a new site, themed with a modern designed and providing new content in your best niche then promote it with your member base. Dressing up an old site gives current users a different perception then going to a fresh new modern entity.

Same here. I cannot imagine investing in exclusive content during this era, especially when updating several times per week.

Porn was an impulse buy. It's now an impulse people consume because we made it that way.

The problem is there were very few real marketing people who understood the product, its uses, and the consumer. There were webmasters talking bollox and how to give away more free porn than the next man. They compared bottled water to porn and now Netflix to porn. Neither compares, especially Netflix.

In effect, you were all losing over 100% of your possible sales the day you started to give away porn on TGPs. As time passed the percentile grew. Today it's over 10,000% lost to every sale. You threw out the baby with the bath water and now crying over spilt milk

But you did achieve your real goal, you now have more people looking at porn than ever was possible in the days when it made loads of money.

You were not alone and they laughed at us.

I'm the boy who cried wolf. :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

That will kill more sales than it creates. Because unless you can get clips down to a few minutes and make them outstanding. They will be long enough to jerk off to or too short and people will jerk off to something else.

Porn is for 99.99% of us a 15-minute experience, which is why the length of a porn scene is usually 20 minutes. Netflix, bottled water, etc, lasts for hours and can be enjoyed by the family.

Study the length a surfer stays on a Tube site video to see how it's consumed. Even girls on Webcam have problems holding the customers online. This was also the problem back in the days of phone line sex.

Sell the girls as people who also do live or recorded sex. The concept of Selling Sex alone is nearly over. As stats on Tubes prove.

i lik in taint

And yet today we learn one of the best producers is going to create great content and give it to Tube sites. :upsidedow

By 2020 there will be so little left of the porn business few here today will still be here.

Because we had an industry dominated by the concept of giving away free porn. I used the past tense as it will be the most appropriate.

How much do you invest in content production?

That was the song they sang back in the day of losing 99% of potential sales. They assumed because they had 1,000s getting off on free porn and 100s buying it was all good. I told them the signups were coming from offline porn and when that well ran dry they would see the real picture.

They laughed at me then, they're not laughing now.

We didn't try time machine technology. We could go back in time and disable people who invented tubes?

We disagree. 2020 is only 4 years away. Also it was organized crime theft from paysites posting to illegal tubes hosted in DMCA noncompliant countries that brought the industry down. When content producers started pulling back on providing longer & longer clips to tubes, new paysite updates were all of a sudden mysteriously stolen and posted on the tubes, that's when things came apart for the industry.

Things change but human instincts & behavors have fairly well established components & patterns. The hunting/gathering component of sexuality is what tubes play on, luckily most are retarded and stop there.

The owners of tubes also have a slash/burn mentality, for the most part, which isn't sustainable for a renewable content driven, members based profit model.

We'll see if the smarter stronger tubes will be successful at creating their own content in a way that's sustainable and release it in a way that's profitable. I'd work with them to assist if it was Pornhub, or a handful of others, the rest a dying out.

EDIT: Funny the tittle of this thread actually pertains to tubes, not paysites. Tubes Have To Change Before It's Too Late

Here's what I was hoping and it's similar to MyPorn but MyPorn is going to have a helluva time building anywhere near the traffic the big tubes have built up with user uploaded infringing content.

The big tubes should have one-click processing, if a viewer wants to buy the full scene in the highest quality format the producer makes available he pays $3.99 or whatever price the producer chooses. If the viewer is a big fan of the producer's work he can pay a monthly recurring fee to get all updates, $9.99/14.99/19.99 whatever the producer chooses - producer gets 50% and paid out by the tube site.

Producer can still have his own paysite - cost of a paysite is not much but the impulse buying with just one click while on the tube site will produce more sales.

as long as pirated content is so easy to get there is no reason for 99% of porn viewers to ever sign up to a paysite.

i guess you can do something fancy and maybe appeal to another 4% but generally porn is not a necessity for most people.

i've downoloaded "pirated" porn since 1999 and its always getting easier.

cams used to be something you had to pay for before myfreecams.

i saw the writing on the wall back in 2004 and decided to mostly get out of trying to sell porn.

[QUOTE=Bladewire;21020641]We disagree. 2020 is only 4 years away.

I said. And we can wait and see who is right.

Knowing who spilt the milk, won't make people's incomes change.

For most who were here in 2008 it's over they have moved on, moving on, or planning how to move on. We have and as I knew the bad times were coming, we're fine. For those who are planning a long career in porn, I have a bridge to sell you.

For content producers there are far easier ways to make a living, assuming they have skills. Affiliates again those with real skills can move on, the rest are going to find life tough.

Online porn had 12 years maximum for most people in the business. Then getting it for free became a better option than paying for it. Once that line was crossed, it was downhill from there.

All this talk of starting again with something new makes me smile. Try mainstream with something that's worth consuming.

:thumbsup

So much talk about tube sites. Tube sites aren't the problem, pirate sites are. From pirate sites i can download an entire membership area, with full size uncompressed videos. Why would I want shitty tube site videos when I can get the real deal from pirate sites :1orglaugh Sites like KK and VG offer content as soon as it's released too.

Paul you have been moaning about free porn and how no one can make money anymore ever since I joined this board in 2009. Yet as I have stated over and over, I make money and have done so ever since 2009 while YOU sit there and predict doom and gloom for years now.

All this proves to me is you are an old man who does not know how to sell porn in 2016. Or 2009. Or 2002. No offense but it is extremely easy to sit on the sidelines, having been out of the game for over a decade, and piss on other's efforts (and success). I am sorry Paul but I do not listen to your observations on this subject because they come across as excuses for your own failure, nothing more.

I have never said no one can make money. In fact, recently I have said Tubes do make money along with the big companies.

you make money because you don't pay for the content. You do a rev share deal with those who now find the income no longer supports producing new content. Or are you saying your great income does support you paying for new content?

If you had joined in 2000 I was warning people that a race to see who could give away the most content, would end badly.

I never failed, I retired on the income I made from 3 decades of selling porn. You would know the reasons why I retired if you were here earlier.

Price point is key. I've become used to Netflix at <$10 a month. That price point is a no brainer for me and I don't mind going 2 or 3 months without using it (as I just did these past 3 months). Once it goes over $10 (esp towards $19) I'd have to be using it regularly for me to justify keeping it. As a family we don't use it enough so I'd cancel.

Apps are the same. I rarely will pay for an app. I have to be super motivated and interested in the app or it's a lego kids game that I know my boys will love. Besides that I'm not keen on spending $$ for an app. Why? Because the app environment has taught me what is worth spending and what isn't. There are apps that I used to buy as software and pay $50, $100 or $200 for. But in the app environment they are now worth <10 and usually <5.

Music I'll buy from itunes store without every researching an alternative. It's just how I buy music.

I never buy movies.

Tv Shows I'll research when they'll be on cable. If I really can't get it within let's say a month I'll then go to itunes and buy it. If Itunes and Amazon do a geo block and try to stop me from seeing it for 6 months time (ie like they did with Ballers) then fuck them I'll download illegally. If I'm buying on itunes to watch on apple tv i'll buy HD version but if I'm going to watch on my ipad i'll buy SD version.

Just to give you insight into my buying decisions.

That's interesting because I've never felt pirate sites were a threat. I know they are huge but I've often felt they cater to a different group of users. I may be naive and completely wrong but my gut just always told me pirate site users were never going to be members.

We actually had a situation for a while where the pirate sites actually listed our updates BEFORE us. That was not good.

I know some people have questioned my reasons for bringing up a thread/topic like this. My main reason is a brainstorm session really. There is definitely still money to be made. Just running things as they've always been run isn't the way.

Your idea is great. There is definitely something in that. There has to be some sort of advancement in the delivering of content (maybe not necessarily always on your own website) and the billing of content (different price points, different areas you can buy it again not only on your website).

100 posts of why paysites won't change.

Nobody regularly consumes porn to pass the time. They're all potential buyers.

The excuse of them never being customers, never made sense. Now we know that people downloading or viewing porn are potential customers we converted into freeloaders.

Mutt's suggesting PPV. How did that work out the first time it was tried?

From his responses it seems Shap already has his mind set on a certain path and is looking for affirmation of adding a lot of new functionality to paysites while reducing membership fees, preferably lower than $10 it looks like.

They should give out free gifts to members ;)

This is different though than the conventional PPV. The 1 click and reach being the big difference here. Makes perfect sense and would be a big change.

Of course, two clicks is far too much for a surfer to figure out. </sarcasm>

One click to what, biller or deducting money from a pre-deposited pot?

Pornhub works with one click.

Figure out what a 1 click means in this context and come back please :2 cents:

$10 is no longer profitable unless the content is free for the site owner. Shooting 10 scenes, worth signing up for, will cost between $2,000 solo to $20,000 BG. Yes I know people will churn out garbage for less

At $10 a sign-up, taking all the other expenses traffic, servers, equipment, etc. That means the site has to sign up 400 to 4,000. For every 10 videos.

Back in the boom days, 95% of the industry was buying exclusive cheap crap because that's all they could afford. Of the remaining 5% a lot of them were started by people with an in-house content producer.

Oh how I enjoy posting this. :1orglaugh

http://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/up...largehorse.jpg

So tell us what it means. 1 click to what? Having fancy names for a process doesn't make it work.

Why would a Tube site pay the producer 50% when they can force the producer to allow them to put it into a members area as part of the deal to display the clips on the free side?

Wouldn't the producer be better off getting the fan to his own site?

As I said, $10 is good if the content is free and Tubes can make it so by binding producers to a contract.

Figured so, carry on!!

How much more content needs to be produced? We are not talking about a finite consumable story-based product which leaves the viewer wanting to know what happens next. The average viewer needs a few minutes of visual stimulation and then moves on with their lives.

I think the oversaturation of content caused by the industry converting content production into a commodity is as much to blame as tube sites.

What I love about your post is how it demonstrates how even smart people (like you Shap) can have kooky buying habits. :) If you pay $9.99 and do not even use Netflix but once every 3 months then guess what? You're paying $29.95 for Netflix. LOL The magic price point! :)

But again, companies can only afford to charge $10 if they are massive. Think Wal-Mart.

Classic right? I don't try to explain things to Paul. His interest in these things are purely intellectual these days. He has no skin in the game so his perspective is...classic.

I know you don't believe this but I don't have an agenda here. Just having a conversation about it. It may surprise you but I'm not the selfish manipulating bastard you have me pegged as. If anything I'm the complete opposite. I started the thread as a brainstorm to see where it goes. No secret plans behind it.

That's not true. I never have and never will pay for porn. No amount of convincing will change that. I'll consume it for free but the second it's not free I won't consume it.

This is one case where those who get it get it. I saw exactly what mutt meant immediately. Makes sense. We've always limited our thinking to the idea we have to charge for our content on our website instead of other ways to charge for it ie on the tube itself.

Drop me a line, people are on this already in a way.

Well, the issue has always been on the tube side. It's their website after all so doing a one-click upsell means splitting revenue (equally?) and, until recently, this has been resisted. But as the industry changes I think more tubes will be open to this.

Personally, I think tubes should act like cable providers do now. In other words, strike partnership deals with trusted paysites to not only do what Mutt suggests but also help with production costs. Paysite owners would need to adjust their thinking in terms of margins and costs but I think this is the future for some companies. Does Mind Geek do one click upsells for Fake Taxi? They should. :)

I'll throw one at you with regard to monetization;

What about a Porn Tube site with micropayments to content producers or providers?

what if; Each time a full length vid is viewed in HD quality $0.20 is deducted from the tube member's wallet and 50/60///90% is sent to the member/seller providing that content's wallet -- the seller cashes out like an affiliate $50-$100 minimum ....

a la XVideos or Pornhub Premium?