Louis C.K. cuts out the middleman and sells his performance video for $5, comments on torrents.
 

This is all from a reddit post btw.

That's enough I guess.

Seen it on reddit.

Bought it too. £3.30 well spent.

Never understood why porn don't sell individual DRM free movies like this. I don't get the subscription model.

So all we need to do in porn is cut out the fat and waste so we can slash the prices to the bone and then customers will flood back.

Great idea, I said this a year ago about adopting the "iTunes" pricing model.

Stocktrader, you do realise the first thing that wil be cut is the traffic expenses. So no selling traffic to anyone so they can filter it and send it to a site that pays them a lot of money.

Hang on. Thunderbolt just hit me. you have tons of cheap traffic. buy some content, it's very cheap, set up a paysite and sell $5 memberships for 30 days. Or 20 cents a scene. Adjust the prices as you see fit.

Go direct customer to product. :thumbsup

Mafia Man agrees with me.

Just don't expect anything but abuse from affiliates. And don't make a join link that doesn't work even if the other one did. :1orglaugh

But what people post on message boards and what they actually do are two different things.

Look at PC game statistics. A game will sell 1 million copies, but download stats will show over 10 million torrent downloads. Same with apps even, an app publisher recently put out a soccer game. Over the weekend they saw that 200K users were on the server, but when they got the sales stats on Monday, only 100 were actual paying customers, the rest were pirated. The article was on Techcrunch recently.

There needs to be a new model, but what people post on message boards is not proof or research data since it doesn't even come close to being in line with what actual statistics of what people really do.

$5 for one damn movie is not slashing prices Paul. How much content is in the average paysite?

Also, I have no interest in running my own sites. A $5 per month subscription would work great for a big ass company with a ton of content and you will see it in the near future.

Regardless of what your dinosaur ass says the pricing model for porn is going to change and is already changing. Whether it be per scene pricing, the netflix model, the steam model, the tube / selling of advertising model or something else entirely is hard to say but $29.95 per month paysites are and will continue to decline in sales overall. It's not like your ass is going to start up a site but those that want to be in this industry in the future are going to do something different or die out eventually no matter what.

"Back in my day we paid $1 to watch a movie at the theater and now they give them away for free on TV! God damned television stations are ruining the sweet deal we had, let's make more laws and try to go back there!"

No, they are not two different things. Sure some of them are lying and some of those buying didn't post shit but this has been done before. Steam has shown that people will still buy games and a whole God damned bunch of them IF they are delivered at a decent price and / or through a system that makes it easier on the end user. There have been similar things done and results posted.

Tell me this. If a popular music artist can spend $200,000 on recording then sell 7 figures in a similar fashion (pay what you want actually) then why couldn't someone do that with porn? $100,000 buys a whole hell of a lot of content for a one off sale and you will see people testing more and more alternative monetization methods over the next several years. In fact, some already are.

No $5 is for a whole months membership to a big paysite or individual scenes ate 20 cents.

To do this and make it work, you'll have to run a paysite or get out of adult. The first thing that will be cut. Is what you sell. Traffic.

My dinosaur ass though of $5 paysites 4-5 years ago.

Agreed, this is the problem with adult. All the dinosaurs who still stick to the same price we had 12 years ago so they can pay for the traffic. Agree with you 100% on this. cut out the most expensive parts of online adult and slash the prices to the bone.

Where will you sell traffic?

I just don't see why people sign up for $30 subs when they only want one scene. It's not worth it to them.

Pay by scene even at a slightly inflated price. Even limit the downloads like Louis CK has done here.

Why buy an album when all you want is 1 song?

yeah you have 'thought' of it all paul

haven't implemented jack shit but you've 'thought' of it all

made any sales today paul ? of course not paul

What you have never understood is that people like me can make money with anything online and a lot of us can do that offline as well. Traffic is inherently valuable regardless of what happens to the porn industry. You think people won't buy it direct even if they shut down their affiliate programs? I get offers all the damn time as it is. Basically, what happens to this industry will not affect me in any way except that I'll find something else to do. As someone dealing with traffic generation for 10 years I am already used to the constantly changing landscape, at times we've had to adjust on a month to month basis. How much real adjusting has the average paysite done in those same 10 years? I am fully capable of rolling with things while many here are not.

You keep on about $5 per month membership sites, why? He sold one video for $5. If I want to shoot a 1 hour scene and sell it for $5 I can, I don't have to get a damn recurring fee. Making a good product is sort of magical in that customers will pay you then willingly come back and buy more from you later if you don't fuck them. Most don't care about this. Take cross sales for instance, why the fuck would you risk pissing off your customer for an extra one time payment? Even if it were opt in only why the fuck would you send your rebilling customer to another program that is probably going to send that same customer to another site and on and on? It's shortsighted and stupid.

And you keep talking about slashing prices. Many here would love to see $5 for each one of their movies, absolutely love it. They don't try it because they are scared, nothing more. It's not even like they'd have to get rid of their paysites to get some new payment methods in. "Buy this video for $4.99 or see all of our videos for only $29.95 per month!"

I know that one is so far out of the box that most won't understand it but a few will catch on one day.

In the end, adult is such a minuscule drop in the fucking bucket in the online world. Every single one of the monetization methods that you are bitching about have been tested and tweaked to perfection in mainstream. There are sites that sell your data, sites that are free but sell ads, sites that charge per episode / clip / download / file / whatever and sites that have subscriptions ranging from $1 per month to thousands per month. Watching you talk about how this, that and the other won't work is extra hilarious when I know God damned well that each of them have been working on a huge scale for years and years on sites that are not adult.

Content production costs for porn are negligible as well. Sure $100,000 is a lot of money, but not in mainstream where tens of millions are spent to provide customers with a product that they are happy to pay for. Billions are made while you argue about how to make more pennies by doing things in the same way they've been done forever.

I'm not really comparing anything to porn. Porn really is in a boat all by itself as far as piracy and pricing models and the available free streaming options. You can't compare it to music or mainstream movies.

But in the soccer app example I gave above, the publisher did everything the pirates claim they want. Easy download and pricing under $1. Yet it was still pirated at a rate 100X the rate at which it was purchased. Whether or not you want to believe the comments is one thing, but several people who claimed to have pirated the game said it was the publishers fault for not allowing in game purchases by pirated copies, if they did that, the pirates claimed the publisher could make his money back. That is a common argument among those who claim if they simply get the access the want and the right pricing, they will stop pirating. Yet when they get what they ask for, they then find another excuse to continue pirating.

But my whole point is that people applauding moves like this even though the results don't line up with the stats. Sure, Steam sells game and is successful, but the ratio of pirated copies to sold copies can be as high 1000:1. If more of those games were sold, the publishers would have more money, more budgets to try new games, and the ability to put out better games. Same with the music business, in the days of big money, they could build artists and take chances on bands that are out of the mainstream. Now, there is no room for that anymore and we get copycat bullshit.

That's the biggest price to pay when intellectual property rights are as loose as they are, it's not the money, it's the loss of overall quality. Nobody takes chances or takes risks on trying new things. Look at China, no intellectual property rights and everything they produce is copycat garbage because there is no reason to try to innovate or try something new.

I think it will break down something like this in the end:

80% --scum that just take it for free.
10% --cheap bastards that pay one penny
9% --people who understand the idea and want the artist to get paid, so they do about 5 bucks
1% - people that overpay anywhere from 10 bucks up to 100, because they really love Louis CK.

You're right, the facts don't add up. You keep speaking for publishers that use Steam but ignore how many publishers openly support Steam, agree that it makes them money and talk about it all over the fucking place. You will not get rid of piracy. You will increase your sales by adapting to what is going on around you instead of bitching about it with no results.

I think its just a generation of people who have lost sight of the basic good/services payment concept. They think someone else will pay for their theft, and have pretty much convinced themselves that they're "shifting a paradigm".

so out of the box it was done years ago with clips4sale and many others.

Porn has been selling pay per scene for a long time. Clips 4 Sale and other sites like it let you browse, get a few sample screenshots from the video and buy it if you want it. No subscription no recurring cost, you just buy the movie you want.

This is nothing new.

Here is why people join paysites. If it has a cheap trial they get access to a ton of content for just a few dollars. Even if the site doesn't they pay around $30 and can get access to a ton of content. They then download it all and end up paying just a few cents per scene then cancel their membership. It is still a good value for those who want access to a lot of stuff. There are many networks out there that will give you access to a few thousand exclusive scenes. That is a lot of porn for $30.

It costs $5. There is no penny option nor does it matter.

Here is one that let them pay what they wanted.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

$780,000 collected but those poor developers didn't get $20 / month from every user. :(

I agree. You can look at Radiohead when they gave one of their albums away and let you pay whatever you wanted. While the band never released the actual figures, their guitarist later said that they made more than they would have if they would have gone about the normal distribution method. Many people paid nothing, A decent number of people paid about what they would have paid had they purchased it on itunes or wherever and a small number paid a lot more as a way to reward the band. It still worked out for them because they had enough people who did buy that they made up for the tons that didn't

I am fully aware of clip stores. That is not the same as an established, large site offering their content in chunks as an option for all viewers. And yes, they do join on trial download and cancel because they don't value that porn at $30 per month.

Sure, Clips 4 Sale is different than a bigger company doing the same thing. Say for example a company like Bangbros and Reality Kings opened up their member's area and let you pay $2 per scene for the scenes you wanted. They might make a lot of money.

I also understand that many people get the small priced trial, download like crazy and then cancel because they don't value the product and they are cheap and want to get as much as they can for as little as they can. You just hope, in the end, that it balances out and you get enough that stay members for a while that it offsets those who cancel fast.

So I wonder. If Reality Kings offered you the option of buying any of their scenes at $2 each or you could buy a membership at $30 per month and get unlimited access. Which one would end up making them more money? If you presented it like that there would be a bunch of people who would just want a couple of scenes and that is all they would buy, but I have a feeling when given the choice more people might see the value in buying a membership.

That was my point, notice you spent $60 this month and just opt for the membership. I don't think $30 is the sweet spot for most sites but some monthly fee would keep people around for a very long time.

Sure, $30 was just an example, but I think if sites gave people the option an really showed them the true value of the membership and gave option more would buy the membership and they would still make money off single sales.

A site like Reality Kings could easily pitch it as: We have over 2,000 exclusive scenes you can buy any of those scenes for $2 each and keep them forever. Or, you an pay $XX per month and get full access to all of them, plus we updated every single day with new scenes. When shown the value in that way it makes it seem like a good deal.

When Avril Lavgine first came out you could buy her single "Complicated" for $1, but the label really wanted to push her so for a limited time they offered her full album for just $5. A lot of people opted to spend the other $4 and get the full album.

People post whatever thing they can make up to justify what they do.

Dogfart has $1.99 trials, so how easy and cheap is it to sign up to get a few
full sceens? Too easy!! Too cheap!!

Yet people still search all day looking for free full scenes.

Thieves have the type of mind and conscious to where they can justify anything
they want to do and that's why they grow up to be thieves in the first place.

Just listen to what they are really saying : "I deserve this and you made it hard for
me therefore it's right to steal it".

Every site I've seen with that kind of setup want some minimum top up before they allow you to download.

They're heavily restricted. DRM up the arse. Overpriced (clips for sale is like a dollar a minute).

To be honest I think the biggest obstacle from somebody doing this is accepting micropayments.

Yep, I have heard for a long time that the solution to piracy is to make stuff easily available at a good price. But that is bullshit. Look at music. $1 for a song that will last you a lifetime is a fair price. There are 100's if not 1000's of albums on Amazon and iTunes for $5. Those are fair prices and the product is super easy to get, yet millions still download because they don't want to pay even $1.

Like you say, pirates are pirates and they always will be. If the day a movie came out in theaters it was available on DVD, Pay per view, and pay per download so you could pay to see it no matter where you were at a reasonable price, there would still be a ton of people that downloaded it because they are just freeloaders and don't care.

There's always going to be a group of people that won't pay no matter what.

If somehow magically you managed to stop people pirating content then these people wouldn't buy it either.

Best not to beat yourself up over it because they're not really lost sales. The market you should be targeting is people who pirate because it's easier than buying.

Sure, it is a system that doesn't work perfectly and has its potential flaws. I was just pointing out that the pay per scene model has been around for a while in porn.

It isn't anywhere nearly as smooth as say an iTunes, but it is there and has been for a while. It would take someone with some serious cash or assets to take it to that next big level.

and while the ones that didn't pay suck, at least there's an awareness of your product in them -- and if its a good product, they'll tell other about it. That's one bright spot in the freeloading group.

actually your totally wrong again

radio head averaged more money on the FREE people then they did if they had sold the album under the studio deal

why because they sent people who downloaded the album for free mailer advertising their tour, and enough people bought thru the affiliate link to ticket masters that they actually exceeded their total royalties for an actual sale.

I don't even believe you need the cash.

Some business savvy coder is going to come and cleanup all these sites members in one swoop. They'll tie a nice payment system to a iTunes like solution and make deals with decent content owners and distributers.

And with 4G on the horizon, mobile porn is going to get more and more popular.

the itunes "solution" owed much of it's success to the ipod and people wanting tp fill up their new toy with music. it's not as transferable as other people think.

can't really compare porn scenes to music tracks as well. people don't like them for the same reasons.

Someone will come along and swoop it for sure. Then we'll see a collective "WTF, that easy huh?"

you really think manwin, rk pimproll etc. have not already looked into that model? or already tried it?

Porn will require a totally unique model different from what works in mainstream. The reason being the streaming from big tube sites. Comparing mainstream ideas to porn is apples and oranges.

If an Alexa top 20 website was streaming Louis C.K's video, his method wouldn't work at all. Even the most honest person wouldn't finish watching a free version of his video then go buy the paid version, especially if when they searched for it, the free streaming version was number one in all the search engines.

If porn wasn't streaming in nearly 10 of the Alexa top 100 websites, some of the things you guys are talking about might work. But porn will require something totally different that has yet to be invented or thought of.

I'm NOT defending the current porn business model as it is obviously flawed, I'm just saying that mainstream ideas such as the one by Louis CK don't really compare.

Same with Hollywood movies, if several Alexa top 20 websites were streaming full television shows and movies, Netflix would go out of business in a few weeks.

On a side note, does anyone watch his show on FX, it's fucking hilarious.

People dont recall when adult.com came up with an entire list of 10 dollar a month sites?

That lasted what.. 3 weeks?

Figures that this thread was derailed by Paul Markham in less than 5 replies.

Did you read my post? No you didn't because had you read it you would have seen that I put in it how the band actually made more money distributing it this way than than they would have had they gone through their normal distribution network.

Yes, they did a mailer, they also did this as a way to draw attention to the retail distribution of the album which sold pretty well and included a collectors boxed edition. I just didn't include every last little detail in my post. GFY.

I love the show. I first saw it when they released season 1 on Netflix and then watched season 2 on FX. It is one of the funniest shows on TV.

you know things like this are pointless and can't generalized. the reddit, boing boing and free culture crowds will go out of their way to buy it to prove a point that torrenting doesn't hurt sales and the next guy who tries it will literally sell 10 copies. this scenario has repeated itself many many many times for awhile now.

You have a great point. That would be a hell of a business if you could do it. Imagine being able to offer all the content from the biggest sites out there in one location at a pay per scene price. That could be a very lucrative deal for all involved.

For sure, part of iTunes success is that they had a huge built in Apple fanboy crowd so they already had a bunch of traffic. They are also brilliant and branding their products. I have friends that used iTunes and never had an iPod or an iPhone. They just used it on their computer. When I told them Amazon was better because it had no DRM they didn't care they liked iTunes and were sticking with it. Now, of course, they have iPods and iPhones so it is one big branding success story.

Sure they have, they just haven't implemented it yet. In fact, they went straight to free with upsells / ad spots which was another previously ignored business model.

Everything the man does is on YouTube. Is that not an Alexa top 20 website these days? If you have a price point that is reasonable and don't make people bend over backwards to use your content they will reward you.

Yes, nowhere near the same. On a paysite, especially one that is pretty damn small, $10 is about the same as $30 to a customer. Why take $10 rebills when only a few % less would pay $30?

There will be a cheap recurring paysite in the next few years. It will be loaded with content and have the best retention this industry has seen. Even if it weren't exactly a cheap recurring membership there will be some sites with unique monetization that pop up to fill that void.

NetFlix
Steam
iTunes
Hulu
Television
Red Box

Every one of those aside from Red Box sells a product that costs infinitely more to produce than adult content. Every one of those offers a price point that is much cheaper than adult content. No, it's not black and white but it's not apples to oranges either. There are some things adult could take from successful mainstream companies that would allow them to prosper. Maybe not every single adult company could do so but the first one to really put something useful out there will be rewarded for it. Or are we assuming $30 per month memberships are the way of the future even with Tubes and piracy?

A few things first 30 bucks a monthis very cheap when you consider you get everything someone ever produced. When at one time one 4 hr porn dvd was 70 dollars for a couple hrs ofcontent. Secondly mainsream and music have licensing opporunties porn doesnt have.So the movie for redbox for a dollar has been licensed seven different ways. Cost doesnt matter, songs are less than a dollar on itunes and still pirated.

Red Box buys every single DVD they rent, they didn't license shit.

Im talking about the people who made those movies.

I only mentioned Red Box because it's success shows that people will pay money for things they like if you make it easy (Wal Mart / gas stations) and don't fuck them on the price. A paysite will always be worth $30 to *some* people but for the bulk of the population it is overpriced and has been voted as such. How can Twisty's be worth the same price as somegirlwith20sets.com? It's not. It's worth $30 a month to not have to shove all of Twisty's content onto your hard drive, the same can't be said for the vast majority of sites out there. Those sites still have value but their overpricing limits them on customers.

Just wait until a real solo girl goes to the free method. Cute girl, free content, ad deals and alternative merchandise will turn her into a superstar. It's worth 7 figures if played right, of course some webmaster will probably get in the way and fuck it all up but at some point someone will figure it out.

There are still piles of money to be had in adult. Most are focusing on plugging leaks and complaining about what they can't stop instead of trying to evolve and it shows.