how do porn companies make money when their product is free?
In: Economics
How does Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, make money when their product is free?
You are the product. Your data is brokered and you are served advertisements based on what you’re likely to buy. The “free” platform is valuable because it has this data (that you give it by signaling to the platform that you like certain things), and it has your attention—both of which advertisers pay the platform for to place ads in front of you.
What data does a porn site have? It knows where you live (hot singles in your area!), it knows what your gender preferences are (hot gay singles in you area!), it knows what your specific attractions are (hot gay blonde singles in your area!), etc. And all of that data is used to serve you ads.
In Jon Ronson’s podcast The Butterfly Effect, they discuss how most companies and producers are commissioned by silent investors who pay big money to have a scene specifically catered to their interests, down to minute details. These help finance other productions for mainstream customers. The podcast has interviews with producers who use this business model.
Same way Fortnite does.
Sure, you can enjoy free porn and most people do just that but there are always whales with very particular interests and more dollars than sense.
You’re first of all making the assumption the product is free
A large volume of the “free” porn out there falls into a few buckets:
1) Promotional Material: Usually it is a shortened clip or a limited display of images (free samples). The idea is that if the viewer wants to see more, they’ll pay for the content. This has been around for a very long time – back in the day, there were lots of specialized ‘TGP’ sites where producers would host previews in the hopes of attracting customers
2) Ad Supported: Most common on “legitimate” tube sites – ads play and they get a cut. Or they get rewarded for “clicks” on ad links.
3) Pirated: Most of the “free” porn out there is just stolen content
With #3 they aren’t making any money and this has been an issue for decades. This hurts niche porn producers the most, since they have a smaller audience to begin with and that audience is more likely to buy porn overall than ‘vanilla porn’ consumers (think fetish content). While the internet expanded the consumer market, it also vastly expanded the piracy market due to the ease by which it can be done and distributed
The product isn’t free, it’s just stolen. These days the model is to monetize videos within a few days or a couple of weeks at most because then it’ll be pirated and uploaded somewhere for free.
Porn is a low budget/fast turnover business. As long as you can recoup production costs plus profit in a week or so you’ll be good, after that it’ll be pirated.
Some shorter clips are uploaded to pornhub by studios just to drive traffic to their premium content where they have the high quality stuff. More people pay for porn than you think so monetizing isn’t a problem.
Porn sites do not data mine users, there’s literally nothing useful to mine.
I’m not a major gooner, but there is actually a pretty big difference in the quality of women in the paid content. Hot girl, full length, over 1080 resolution – pick one if you’re consuming free stuff. You don’t really know until you actually sub.
So ads, obviously, like everyone else is saying.
But my question is. Pornhub, they run ads. These ads are served through traffic junkie. These ads come from sites like brazzers. The thing is, the ad host, the ad server, and the ad source… are all owned by the same company. So they just pay themselves in circles. Where does the money come from? I get some people pay a lot for porn, but it can’t make up that much of thier income can it?
As someone famously said, “If you aren’t paying for the product, YOU are the product.” Websites make money from “free” services by selling your data to other entities like advertisers. Trafficking in personal information is a big business. You aren’t the customer, you’re the product being sold.
A customer of mine started his own busty focused business. He says the most profit comes from small meet and greets and convention work. He hosts big boob boat rides with some of his stars and guys pay YoY, thousands of dollars, just to be around them.
I think ads-based free porn websites are barely profitable… it is a very complicated and high pressure business. As no advertiser really wants to advertise their stuff on a porn website.
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