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1) If a country does not have sympathetic copyright laws, simply don't do business/accept members from those countries. Yes, you'll be losing a little money, but I believe you'll save more in the long run.




This assumes the downloader of the content is the same entity as the host which later distributes them, which is very often (or even always) not the case.



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2) Change you business model...the $30 a month smorgasbord is of no use to anyone. Move over to a pay-per-clip business model.





I disagree with statement. Look at a huge conglomerate site like BangBros. They have maybe 20 sub-sites. Judging by the trailers they publish on their website, I frequently find a trailer from one sub-site interesting one week, and reject the trailer from that sub-site the next week. But because there are multiple sub-sites to choose from, I could still theoretically find value on a given week because of the range and selection offered.

I know from personal experience, and from talking to others (and seeing posts on here) that many people have joined given paysites because of a single trailer they saw, found little else of interest once logged in, but still felt they got value for their money from that one or two hot scenes. With large sites containing many sub-sites, or with many scenes in their library, users of varying tastes can poke around and find something they personally enjoy amongst the collections.


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If a $30 a month site adds 1 new scene every week, then the nominal price of those scenes is $7.50. A site that has been going for two years and updating weekly will have 104 scenes on it. To buy these scenes individually at the nominal $7.50 value would cost $780, but the brain trusts that run these sites think 'Hey! Let's give away content with a retail value of $780 for $30!'.





My understanding is that the consumer of the product DOES NOT pick a site they like, wait for it to exist for multiple years, and then attempt to do a mass export of all data found within a single 30-day membership period.

Rather, they join a site when they see a theme or scene they like, they pull scenes down when they browse something that interests them, and then pull their pants down and take matters into their own hands.

My experience also informs that the average porn consumer loads up the website in order to access the content each time, thus making membership seem mandatory. Sure, there's always been a percentage of hoarders who store everything first before watching it, and the prevalence of multi-hundred gigabyte hard drives becoming dirt cheap over the past year have made it easier for the average joe to accumulate and maintain bulk local copies.

In addition, unless they're using site scraping tools with their membership credentials, HTTP makes it inefficient to download mass quantities of large files spread throughout a page layout. Most media companies tune the webservers to open a (small) maximum number of connections to a host, such as would be needed by a human watching a movie or browsing a site, not a spider app trying to download 78 movies at once. My point is, for a lot of users, they come back because they think they need to.

Hell, if they're in any way technically savvy, they likely already know how to obtain the content illegally anyways. In that case, if they're being good copyright citizens, maybe they subscribe in order to support the site owner, but obtain their copies of the content from the pirated sources -- everyone wins in that case. The user gets the content, the provider gets paid, and (as one side effect) the provider also benefits from a lower bandwidth bill because the user got their copy from another channel. This type of behavior is exactly what many users reported doing with the recent Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails "name your own price" download promotions, when they paid to support the artist, but the download facilities were initially overwhelmed.


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How many units are you going to need to shift at 40 cents to break even or make a profit with regards to the production costs? Also, bear in mind that the above is a highly simplified example that assumes the website receives the whole $30, when the reality is that their billing processor (and possibly an affiliate) will need to take their cut. My hypothetical example is the most blue-sky you can get...the reality is a lot worse.





On the bigger sites containing multitude of niches, the more popular ones can subsidize production of the less popular ones. The same content can also be repackaged -- shot for the web, sold on membership/dvd/web ppv/hotel ppv. The membership numbers also typically operate as a floating curve, much like you see in other business models, such as consumer internet usage, unlimited phone minutes, etc. Some people join each month, some people quit each month. Of the ones joined at any given time, some of them download nothing, some download everything; most download a small amount. In my experience, the majority of members aren't maxing out their privileges.

I've also seen some sites enforcing download maximum limits per 24 hour period.