The majority of the net is easily accessible porn. If there is anything here showing how easy it is to decentralize and stay alive, it is probably porn.
The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.
Most of the commerical porn on the net is run by very few companies with many many brands. It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company.
If you search for porn images on Google you get much more porn without ever leaving Google, than you could have dreamed on all of the specialized forums in 1997.
It remains to be seen whether a sustainable business can be built on OnlyFans; it came very close to getting destroyed last year. And almost every other name in the sector is owned by MindGeek.
> It's hard to run your own porn business if you don't rely on a major company
It's hard to run your own porn business even if you are a major company.
People act extremely sensitive about their fetishes and think they are connoisseurs. but the reality is that 1000 porn movies in the 70s and 80s could satisfy jackoff habits of the whole global population for the forseeble future.
The marginal value of more porn being produced is essentially zero
OnlyFans is very present in culture and has a monstre evaluation, but if you look at revenues you'd be looking at the sum of some 300 big gas stations. Also OF is not a porn website it's an online GFE service.
By this standard we don’t need any additional media of any kind. No new movies, books, or tv shows.
99% of everything is crap. Most new movies or books are awful or entirely pedestrian and completely unoriginal to boot, and most don’t turn much of a profit.
But people still make them for a huge variety of reasons.
We have new movies? I thought they abandoned that in the quest for reliable profit, dooming us to endless live action remakes, and and endless stream of remakes of comic book blockbusters.
Even porn websites are sanitized. Pornhub purged all their user content sometime ago and the parent company owns all the other major streaming sites. The only non sanitized stuff is torrents as it’s always been.
There is an immense gap between 'major streaming sites' and torrents. If you're a bit unlucky, you'll find stuff straight up illegal to create through rather innocent searches.
Whoever did the 'sanitizing' of the web should get charged a fine for doing a shoddy job.
Seems the main point of the article was that it is being made highly impractical to build any system that allows you to get paid for it, short of using crypto, which (15 years later) still has an abysmal UX.
Seems like an opportunity for some ShadyBank to make a new payment scheme, with KYC (not get busted), small transactions only (not attractive to money-laundering), and transfer from customers to vendors, but building the anti-fraud infra from scratch would likely kill it.
This isn't true, though. Porn makes tremendous money, using normal payment methods like anything else. All of the repression is on user-generated content hosting platforms, not porn in general. So sure, direct performer to consumer without a studio is difficult to monetize, but that has always been the case. It hasn't become harder. User-generated content platforms largely didn't even exist a decade ago. Porn on the classic Internet people are pining for was still mostly studio-produced and stars needed agents.
The big boys make it harder and squash the heads sticking out, but people are acting like you won't find ungodly things the moment you turn off the safety filters and pick your words a little recklessly.
Including Google.