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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.



I'm not bothered about where or with whom they host it...it's the 'leak' (purchaser/uploader) that I'm looking at. If they live in a country where there are no specific applicable laws to stop or punish them for filesharing, then it seems prudent to me not to do business with that country.

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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.



What happens if you don't find value though? The whole 'pig-in-a-poke' approach of a monthly membership is a lot more haphazard. With a Pay-per-clip model, you only pay for what you want to watch.

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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.



This is very true, but let us suppose you are a fan of one particular girl. Let us say that 'Content Bros.' sign said girl up to do one scene for each of their subsites (let's simplify things and say they have 5 sites).

Let us also suppose that our particular girl has an identical twin who does five scenes for a pay-per-clip company in the exact same niches/genres. Both companies release one scene a month.

Pay-per-clip charges $10 for a scene
'Content Bros.' charge $30 a month

To get all five scenes via PPC, you'll spend $50...to get them via monthly membership, you'll spend $150. To me, spending $150 on five scenes (basically, a standard DVD worth of content) is an incentive for surfers to look to obtain said content via 'other' means.

If the customer is allowed to pick and choose exactly what they want, you get 100% customer satisfaction. No adult company that puts a DVD on the market can tell you anything about why it sold. Most will assume it's because of the girl on the cover, but in reality, it could be one of the other girls that made the customer's mind up. Something as simple as a postage-paid customer response card would yield a bunch of valuable information, but most studios are too cheap/apathetic/ignorant to bother with it. With pay-per-clip, you are removed from playing the guessing game as to what the customer wants...what is popular will sell, what is not will not. There's no 'piggy-backing' on the hot girl's coattails.

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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.



Your mileage may vary...but the opportunity is certainly there, and in these troubled economic times, people are going to be looking to squeze all the value out of their expenditures. Sure, you might have only found two scenes on the site you liked, but why not download them all and then use them to trade/curry favour with people who have got scenes from other sites you want to watch, but can't justify joining? Stretch that $30 for all it is worth...

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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.



Join, download, chargeback...if you let them have unfettered access to everything, then prepare to get fucked in the ass.

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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.



Yes, you can slow them down, but bear in mind that for a lot of people, piracy is how they make their living...if you don't have content for your tube or site, nobody will visit, and you won't make any money off of your pay-per-click ads, click-thrus, page/banner-views, etc. They have the time on their hands to clean a site out.

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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.



Is 'I'll get your content from an illegal source but I'll also take out a paid monthly membership to your site but not download anything so as to save on your bandwidth' the l33t-speak version of 'I promise I won't come in your mouth'?


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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.



Again, I favour a more Darwinian 'the fittest shall survive' business model. Also, there's no reason why content shot for PPC sites cannot be re-edited and packaged in exactly the same way, so I fail to see how this is to be considered any inherent advantage on behalf of monthly membership sites.

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



Which is bullshit...if you're going to give the house away for $30 a month, then you should honour your promise. Again, it's another thing which is going to drive customers away because they are being penalised for the actions of others. With a Pay-Per-Clip model, if you've got the time, money, and inclination to download 100 clips in a day, then there's nothing stopping you.