The Online Porn Biz: a Primer for NOOBS

The Online Porn Business runs on free samples and trailers.  Just like the movie studios that will “give away” a few minutes of the feature film to bring in the paying moviegoer, Porn produces hundreds of thousands of minutes of video and millions of still pictures every year – most of that is dumped for “free”, sooner or later into the churning surf.  If you’ve had any experience with online porn yourself (LOL, as if ), you know that there’s a lot of stuff out there you can see without paying for it.

If I wanted to spare ya the full Porn Industry history lesson, all I'd have to say is the porn guys fucked up – BIGTIME.  A mistake that was made about 5 years ago, fucked things up, and there’s no going back.  In a nutshell, as soon as streaming video technology and broadband availability crossed paths, a number of big players in porn panicked. If you were big in porn 5 years ago, you understood the “free sample” model very well.  

Before online video porn, it was all still pictures.  And the way the free sample hook worked was they gave away the soft-core pix, and used them to make you buy the hard-core stuff.  It worked great.  The money rolled in so well and so fast, it turned a whole generation of computer nerds into Tony Montana’s overnight. You can understand the magnitude of anxiety, if anything should jeopardize that. 

Here’s the big mistake – and it's one of the most costly, I would wager, in all the history of business.  By the time video started to get big, the Content People who saw it coming and were in a position to do something about it were sitting on a shit-load of still pix.  If you’ve been fishing on the edge of a sunny dock all day watching the fish jump out of the water to grab the merest crumbs, you have a pretty good idea what they’re going to do if you should fill the ocean with chum.  That’s exactly what they did.  At the time, they didn’t understand the optimal relationship between still pix and video.  They just assumed, if there’s video now, nobody will buy pix -- therefore pix are worthless.  BIG MISTAKE. 

Getting set-up for video wasn’t the issue.  Some of these companies were pulling in Fortune 100 top-lines. What worried them was that the advent of video would re-shuffle the power structure in the industry.  The people on top wanted to stay on top.  

So, thinking that the days were over of being able to make a customer pay by holding-out on the hardcore pix, and knowing it would bring in unprecedented levels of traffic (thus giving them a first-mover advantage), an ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF VERY GOOD PORN PICTURES were dumped into the frenzied clutches of the world’s consumers of porn.

The short term effects were, of course, beyond description. You think Silicon Valley made a lot of Billionaires.  There’s a difference – well, two differences.  The Silicon Valley guys WANTED the world to know they had made it big -- they hired publicists for Christ’s sake.  But the porn guys, who have always been (and, sadly, always had good reason to be) a little wary of visibility, didn’t tell a soul.  That’s one difference.  The second difference is – most of the porn guys still have their money today.  The Bubble didn’t happen for online porn.  In fact, all the marketing money that had been wasted bringing millions of new surfers onto the Internet by companies with no revenue models, went straight into online porn.  There wasn’t a whole lot else to buy online back then, and neither did porn need any “marketing”.  The word “bonanza” never looked so small.  

But, within a couple of years, things started to change.  With so much eminently jerk-able picture porn out there, sales relative to production cost began to decline.  The ROI on a production dollar began to drop, even as overall sales kept climbing.  They kept right on chumming the water to bring in more and more traffic – they had to.  Once the web had been flooded with video clips as well as millions of still pictures, and no one NEEDED to buy any more – because the clips kept getting longer, and finally the HARDEST of the hard-core pictures had been offered out for ballast, too, what could they do but keep stretching the envelope.  In the end, more and more production value was chasing a smaller and smaller average transaction size.  

It’s important to remember, however, that NO ONE IN THE INDUSTRY WAS VERY CONCERNED.  After all, even though so MUCH MORE money could have been made if they’d used all those pictures to lure them in for the video up-sell, the money was still very much INSANE.  On the plus side, factor-in also that pro-PORN electronic transaction processing was getting its act together and increasing the efficiency of the money coming in.  Foreign markets were being tapped, also; sites were translated and the appropriate payments options were offered.  There was growth.  

But, the most costly consequence of flooding the Internet with tons of free hardcore images in 1999 and 2000 may yet remain to be felt.  Near the end of 2001, right around the time the first inklings of a huge mistake began to trouble some of the wiser heads in Porn, 9/11 happened.  A blow to the Homeland in her tenderest most arrogant part doubled the country over, but left her even more afraid than injured.  Conservativism, sexually-repressive Christian dogma and an apparent preparedness by government to reverse previously-sacred civil liberties have swept the land.  And they have American Pornography running scared in their sights.  

Since forever, the Porn industry has relied on the protection of the First Amendment (Free Speech), whenever legal push has come to legal shove.  But the prospect of a grievous stroke of censorship is, suddenly, quite real.  They are coming at us from new angles, things are moving faster in Washington, now, when anti-Porn laws come up for vote, the people who might have chimed-up on behalf of the People are overwhelmed and horrified by assaults on other (morally less equivocal) civil liberties like Due Process and Reproductive Rights.  And, it doesn’t help matters that there actually is more free porn on the Internet for kids to find than ever before – both in quantity and in hardness of core.  Make no mistake, American Pornography is vulnerable and all alone. That’s why we need your help.  Not just because you like porn and there’s money to be made, but because you believe in Porn’s right to exist. 

We fucked up, I admit it.  And I’ll stand in solidarity with this industry, even share in the culpability for what we’ve permitted to happen to Sex in America.  But, something drastic needs to happen, something Revolutionary.  We need to make a stand for Sex, not as a business, just, but as a basic human right.

The Porn Industry has been too distracted by the money being made, too aloof, and too reclusive and afraid of the mounting governmental threat to realize how much was in our hands to protect. 

I am so sorry we let it go this far.  But, I think it’s not too late.

My thought is very simple: If there are more Pornographers in America, we’ll be harder to single out in a crowd and harder to persecute or prosecute, for the sheer number of us.  And, if there are more of us creating Porn in our image, in accordance with our own standards and beliefs, there will be a lot less hypocrisy in our use of the First Amendment as defense.

Join us.

2HP