>As a result, there’s little obvious reason to produce new porn: everything has already been done, probably better, by somebody else, and is already freely available online.<p>Where does the author watch porn? Maybe it is just a curation problem, but I find the quality of most porn to be insufferable bad. Even the "good" stuff would be bad by the standards set by the mainstream film industry.
Relevant: Stoya on MindGeek (Text with SFW banner image): <a href="http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-piracy" rel="nofollow">http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethi...</a><p>It's worth remembering that the behavior of the market is essentially influenced by the stigma, and subsequent banning of porn (and sexually explicit material in general, art or otherwise) in many TOSs. For that matter, I wonder how iTunes-type availability of porn would even affect spam.
This article seemed to have a deceptively shifting focus, often conflating or confusing the incentives for studios with the incentives for performers. The ability to sell side services has limited impact on studios, for instance.<p>Also, in a very simple answer to the opening question of why new porn continues to be made, it is important to understand how much novelty impacts the porn industry. There are lots of types of novelty, even the improvement from SD to HD productions can effectively obsolete older productions. And there are production style novelties such as the rise of gonzo type productions. But the biggest novelty that customers pay for is the novelty of the latest young woman that enters the industry. The entire genre of so-called amateur porn is built on that.
Here's Stoya's epic rant against Manwin/MindGeek, including her plan to compete against them: <a href="http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethics-of-piracy" rel="nofollow">http://graphicdescriptions.com/28-tubes-vs-torrents-the-ethi...</a>
That's a pretty impressive monopoly, for some reason I always thought those "YouTube-like" sites were competing against each other. MindGeek may well turn out to be the Google of porn.
The article makes it sound like all company revenue comes from tubes sites. The company also owns hundreds of pay-to-access original content sites (ever hear of Brazzers?). This company was not the first to do tubes; they had to adopt the format because competitors did so first and their revenue suffered. Once again, a large part of the problem is users opting to not pay if someone else will illegally put it up for free. You want free tubes to go away? Stop watching tubes and go pay for a monthly Brazzers subscription.