METAFILTER discusses YOUPORN amd the collapse of the porn industry

[xxxjay]

Originally Posted by Bill

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.)"

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.

[bDok]

Originally Posted by Toby

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.

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.

Originally Posted by xxxjay

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.

Lets hope it happens sooner rather than later.

[GonZo]

This is an old article.