[Hell Puppy]

There are three things that have allowed these things to come to be:

1) User demand -- there is and always be strong demand for free porn and the more you give away and the easier you make it the more people will come.

2) Cheap pipe -- pipe keeps going down. we didn't give away much when a dedicated server with a couple of megabits cost $2500. price went down, we had picposts. price went down some more thumbposts. more? mgp's. Now? tube sites. Anyone wanna bet against DVD rips next?

3) Monetization -- users will share stuff, but someone somewhere has to pay the server bill no matter how much of a bargain the pipe is. some of these guys hanging out in the top 100 of alexa are still paying thru the nose. they aren't doing it for charity, they're making money. The site tony posted as an example had the "usual suspects" for advertisers.

So what do you do?

Hard to fight it, the genie is out of the bottle. They have traffic, someone will ALWAYS be willing to pay for the traffic. Individual copyright holders can certain vigorously enforce their rights. But that is a game of whack-a-mole and a drop in the bucket. There might be some overall action taken by government, ftc or whatnot, but by the time that happens it's irrelevent.

Cant beat it join it? Some have, some more will. Is there a legitimate way to do this? You bet. Same as there was with TGP's. Those who can do it well will make good money due to the traffic. Those who dont will wonder either why they cant get traffic or why they cant pay the bandwidth bill. Or why they are getting their ass sued off. Content producers should be working toward embedded digital watermarks so those who desire to be legitimate for tubes, p2p, etc, can check and see if the copyright holder desires a clip to be broadcast.

Imagine a world where you could electronically tell the difference between trailers and promotional material versus actual content? Wow, I can think of some hellacious business plans for that. For now you can only do it with heavy moderation or restricted posting, lots of manual labor required, but you can run one of these legitimately. YouTube is trying, as are others.

The rest of us have to adapt. There has an always will be free porn. In fact there will always be more and more of it as bandwidth allows. You can easily track this all the way back to the BBS days. So how do you get people to pay when they can have so much for free? You've gotta market and sell WHY they should pay. Exclusive content, friendly well organized UI, no malware or intrusive ads, and quality quality quality. The big things these tube sites can NEVER offer is full on high-def quality. You have to find a way to give users a taste of that without giving away the farm to make them want more quality and less of the jerky flash crap from the tubes.

Also realize you can NEVER force anyone to buy something. There are certain people in this world who have more time than money and will never pay for porn. This is probably 90%+ of the people who visit your sites. You have to get over there, nothing you'll ever do to convert those, let 'em go, filter 'em.

Now if I come across here as being in favor of tube sites and free porn, I'm not. I'd love nothing more than a world where you cant see a nipple without a credit card. But I live in reality. We've been dealing with more and more free porn for 20+ years going back to the BBS days. I've been making money selling it that entire time. You've gotta adapt.