Quote:

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.



That will never happen, unless some totalitarian government starts mandating identifying traces on every file a computer touches, with computers "licensed" or tied back to the original owners.

Leaked content (whether tangible DVD purchase, or online download) is frequently purchased using stolen credit card information by the thieves. I guess we should also ensure the vendors never get to keep any of these fraudulent charges, too. [sarcasm ends now]. The controls that would suit the content producers (in xxx or mainstream) are contradictory with the needs of the general population, and as long as the content producers are grossly outnumbered by the consuming population, this won't change. That's not an indictment -- I firmly believe more people need to create and produce their vision for art and media. Computers have helped make it easier, and the internet has made wider distribution possible in an easier manner, but there is still more to come. Only then will a greater appreciation for what it feels like to be on the producing end be available on a wider basis.

Quote:

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.



In my case, I can say that the worst possible scenario is finding there is nothing of value to me OTHER THAN the trailer I saw that made me join in the first place. Is it even possible to join a site without knowing anything about what is inside?

Best case scenario is that I like everything they have, but that's never happened for me (or anything even approaching it). I see real merit in a buffet-style system for xxx paysites, rather than ala carte (to use restaurant analogies). For cable TV, sure, I would love to pay on a channel by channel basis; but the hit and miss nature of adult production makes me prefer the buffet idea instead.

My perceived value as a consumer for the membership only grows as I watch more clips and "get my moneys worth", as it were. Would you be suggesting that I should watch fewer movies on a paysite so as to appreciate them more, "valuing" them individually higher? Again, this isn't how I consume adult media, nor is it how I understand others do either. It is, however, how music, movie and art producers in mainstream attempt to artificially inflate the perceived value of their goods (staggering releases, holding back release dates, limiting artist output).

Quote:

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.



Or, they could wait five months (or arrive on the scene late on month 5) and get all five scenes from the paysite for $30.

Or, they could get a $2.95 2-day membership to a paysite, and grab all five scenes on month 5, or get $2.95 2-day memberships, and grab them each month as they come out.

Or, the same company could do pay-per-clip and bulk paysites, and take money from consumers in whichever manner they desired to fork it over. A buyer's market -- who would have imagined.

Quote:

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.



I totally agree, we need better stats. However, the uglier girls often finance the prettier ones, as it were, just like in other businesses. PPV helps drill down the consumer's preferences for the marketer / biz owner, but from the consumer's side, I see it as less value for the money.

Quote:

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...



Possible, but likely more entrepreneurial than most consumers actually get to be. Recent download limit caps on the cheap consumer internet plans will also likely force consumers to start considering where they do their downloading from -- a 700MB bangbros scene may not seem as attractive if you only have 20GB for the month without paying overage fees to Time Warner.

Quote:

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



The potential for chargebacks is a risk (and cost) of doing business in any of the vice products (porn, gaming, etc), as well as in other markets selling intangibles online. I don't see PPV porn as any more immune to chargebacks.

Quote:

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'?



It's not even l33t-speak -- this type of side benefit to the site owner of less resources consumed is akin to an externality / spillover in economics-speak.

There are tons of sites and small authors that I would love to support or just send a $2 or $5 tip their way (be it software, how-to's, or media), but they don't have an easy way to donate to them.

Imagine how motivating it would be for Holly Randall, for example, if she was able to monetize goodwill by fans paying $1.72 here, $0.86 there (x10000) for little bonuses or surprises, or even for entirely unsolicited encouragement.

In part, this is a consequence of the payment systems -- they're all designed to ensure the credit card company gets paid first, then the vendor gets paid eventually. Those systems make small payments prohibitive. Prepaid systems like PayPal and iTunes help by letting you load a balance into your account and then make small payments if you wish, but none of them are a global standard yet for senders or receivers (and nor would you want them to be -- competition is good).

For musicians, for example, I think this type of idea has also been poo-poohed by the music companies, who don't want consumers paying the artist directly unless the record company is able to take a cut first. Selling merch at shows is labour intensive, so my guess is they stay out of that, but taking a slice of benevolence / tipjars online would be something they could stick their beak in (and likely eventually will).

Quote:


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.



My example wasn't meant to slam down your point, but rather to demonstrate alternate revenue streams possible from an existing single endpoint (web content) for some companies.

Also, if you're not already familiar with it, there is a "new" idea especially relevant for digital distribution called The Long Tail. When storage/hosting/distro is cheap (as it is for digital media), and consumer preferences are seemingly boundless, you can sell nearly anything ever created to any interested party with a (low) fixed maximum on operating expenses, and still capitalize on / monetize / personalize the purchase for every single consumer (lot of -ize words in there).