METAFILTER discusses YOUPORN amd the collapse of the porn industry
 

Metafilter is pretty much the premier general techno-culture blog. So it's very telling that this is news on metafilter...

"Is Vivid going to go out of business?
November 30, 2007 12:12 AM

http://www.metafilter.com/67015/Is-V...ut-of-business

"DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube [NSFW], especially a secretive site called YouPorn [NSFW]. And the amateurs [NSFW]are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse."

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Some links from the half dozen or so in the metafilter entry...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=15631011

http://www.freetimes.com/stories/15/...-iporn-youporn

and

http://www.portfolio.com/culture-lif...le/?print=true

"On Friday, May 18, Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment Group, the world’s largest producer of adult videos, was expecting a mysterious visitor. But Stephen Paul Jones was late. When Jones, an unknown figure in the pornography world, finally arrived in the all-white reception area of Vivid’s Los Angeles offices at 2 p.m., he was apologetic. His private plane had broken down, he explained, and he was forced to fly commercial. Hirsch, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, found that excuse a little slick. But he was eager to speak with Jones, so he let it slide and introduced him to two Vivid colleagues. When the four men sat down in the company’s conference room, Jones got right to the point: He wanted Vivid to buy his website, YouPorn.com.

As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)"

looks like all us webmasters selling porn for a living and fighting for traffic is gonna have to have a tube site and try to sell the surfers other things besides porn, cause the middle man (thats us) won't be able to make nothing upselling a paysite hardly....

you can't really blame the amateurs, for sharing a few movies, the sponsors and a few others are the most to blame....

if the tube sites grow in numbers and torrents get more popular, were fucked...but IMO there are way to combat the tube sites IF it dont get to out of hand

I did some searching on you porn and most LL have way more content listed, it's the length and no ads that's bringing in the massive traffic they have...

I'm going to go on the record now and predict that 'tube' sites will take a path similar to Napster. It's going to take some time for it all to shake out, but all the copyrighted content being uploaded to these sites illegally will eventually land them all in court. They'll have to learn to work with the content producers in order to survive. The true homemade vids alone aren't going to cut it.

When Napster went down a bunch of other file sharing networks took over.

A lot of my college friends stopped using the Napster knock-offs when they heard about other people getting charged and convicted for illegal downloads.

EDIT: I just remembered another reason one of my friends stopped using illegal file sharing networks. It had something to do with flooding the network with corrupted music files, so it took too much time and energy to get a clean download.

What happens to these fools the first time some 13 year old uploads their "amateur" vids? The primary reason I don't own a site that lets users upload photos or videos.

Tube sites with massive clips on them burn serious bandwidth. They will end because the business model doesnt work. You Tube runs at massive losses.

You can make good bank using Tube sites and uploading all your free movies and let the clown running the site pay for your bandwidth for your site to be promoted.

I think tube sites which limit the size of files will make money allowing they know how to sell the pay site.

I dont think tube sites are anything to worry about. Rapidshare and forums like this http://planetsuzy.org/ will kill the market.

Rapidshare must be the most joined site in the world today.

RS is like #11 on Alexa(20,000k/day), and they burn massive bandwidth that has to be paid for. |huh

Another forum I checked occasionally(they sometimes link to a gallery) is BabeIndex.dk that must have every XXX DVD, scene, pay site rip listed for free download.|angry||banghead|

So I just saw a nice thread at the zoo.|jester|

Seems one paysite owner went and tracked down some idiot that ripped some of their stuff and uploaded it to RS & some torrents. Seems the jerk never figured that anybody would ever come after him.|club|

Having seen similar "the sky is falling" stuff before, I'm not too worried.
I'm not going to embrace it, but I'll deal with it.
I believe it to be a fact that the whole free site, TGP model of marketing porn for free is short term thinking at best if it's the only way you market your goods , tube sites just take it a bit further. Diversify.

Very Interesting article - thanks alot for posting that.

I think that Tube sites are just going to be absorbed by this industry like every other good idea has. I agree that the basic structure is pretty flawed, however YouTube approached Royal Cash to advertise on their site and I would think that for the money they are charging, he is making some serious money

I think the porn DVD industry needs to become a lot more innovative then they currently are and heavily re-invest in outside related fields. On line porn may change, but i don't think it will ever collapse.


spaz

Yeah, good luck with the sale. Unfortunatly, Youtube set a bad example by making a hugely popular site off stolen content and then selling it to Google. Youtube was hemoraging money when Google boughty it and still may be right now. Now there are a dozen or so of the adult youtube knockoffs. None are getting bought. All will be out of business soon.

That's just my 2 cents.

This exactly how I have felt. These MASSIVE ones with FULL movies just can't stay in business. And someone responded to your post Toby with people just move on. When I was in college napster was awesome. It had pretty much everything you wanted and then some and the ease of access to it was that even girls that weren't computer savvy AT ALL could get on and download music they wanted. Now yes there are other things, limewire, etc. but none match the ease of use and MASSIVE amount of content napster did back in the day.


Lets hope it happens sooner rather than later. :)

This is an old article.