How profitable is the porn streaming industry?

I'm looking to start a niched website such as pornhub.com. I was wondering what are the click-through rates and how do porn websites pay? Are they better or worse than adsense? Is there a big selection of advertisers? The porn industry seems like a whole another world. Does anyone have any stories to share on how they broke into it?

 

Traffic is cheap in the porn world. You can pay $1 for 1000 visitors usually, so don't expect much if you start building an adult site.

But porn streaming is a different market, that's where somebody creates their own videos and lets other paysites stream the content in their members area. Those companies makes a lot of cash, but they have to make 50+ new movies/month to keep their partners happy.

 

Thank you for your input. Do sites such as pornhub get their traffic mostly from click throughs or affiliates?

 

PornHub is run by an affiliate. If you browse the site half the videos are just teasers that click through to a paysite. They buy their traffic from TGP's and toplists mostly.

If you really want to get into the xxx world I'd suggest you head over to www.gfy.com (Go F*ck Yourself). It's the largest adult webmaster forum in the world, completely dedicated to this topic and it's owned by Playboy It has more people posting there than DP does, but it's strictly focused on xxx sites.

 

You can't start a PornHub or XHamster... First off these web sites are owned by major companies with VERY deep pockets. Secondly, most of the big tube sites are over seas. Third, They either heavily push their affiliate programs or their own paid services for money. If you don't have the deep pockets or connections you will never be able to afford the bandwidth and server resources that these HUGE sites take on. Don't be fooled... these aren't single server single man operations. These are BIG companies with a HUGE network of servers.

On a side note... even if you have the resources and financial backing this is one realm you don't want to touch. They aren't 2257 compliant and they often infringe on MANY copyrights.... You would be locked up before you even had a fighting chance..

 

I work in the adult industry. What you're referring to is called a tube site. There is a fair amount of competition there but it's also possible to do very well.

I don't like just contradicting anybody but NetStar is mostly incorrect.

1) There are many, many small businesses running tube sites. I have numerous clients. The size of their server farms is dependent on how much traffic they have.
2) The 2257 issue is handled under safe harbor-- since it's largely user-uploaded content on many of those sites, the 2257 requirements redound upon the uploader. That said, you would want to maintain very close scrutiny of what's being uploaded on your site. If you are uploading, make it content that you buy or shoot yourself, that way you either have the 2257s or have contact with the people who do.
3) Many tube sites do infringe on numerous copyrights. However, many of the uploaders are themselves the rights holders looking to advertise their material. Again, if the uploads are being done by a third party, you are under safe harbor protections.

Netstar, in a perfect world, unauthorized uploaders of copyrighted content would be forced to respond to cease-and-desist or be prosecuted. In this world, that is not the case and the rights holders are left playing whack-a-mole across numerous tube sites. This is not going to change any time soon because the adult industry does not receive the same police protection as everyone else and is not taken seriously in court. Even FLAGRANT, repeat copyright violators are often not prosecuted or even taken offline and it is next to impossible even to find them. If there is any penalty at all it will be a civil suit and the overwhelming majority of the time even a C&D won't stick.

That said, content can be very cheap and you can probably get content companies to upload samples and teasers, in many ways tubes have taken the place of TGPs.

Again, Netstar, I'm sorry to contradict but I've been in and around the industry since 1996 and tube sites are not nearly as policed as you seem to feel, in fact they are proliferating and have been a terrible blight on the industry.

To DBallerz: I am somewhat skeptical about the idea of putting up a tube site at this point but it can still work if you have a niche. If you have any questions get in touch with me, infrastruct at gmail.

 

This should be fun since I stated 2257 compliance, high bandwidth costs, copyright infringements, and the fact that Xhamster and Pornhub are owned by big companies with deep pockets... What part was incorrect?

Anyone can start a Tube Site with 3 videos and no visitors and it will cost less than $3.

Absolutely incorrect. You can list it in your Terms of Service but if someone uploads a video of an underage girl or someone who appears to be underage and you serve that video you're going to get in deep doo doo if you aren't compliant with 2257 and able to produce proof of age verification via 2 forms of ID. You of course can absolutely challenge it in the court of the law and most likely will win... However, remember what I said about having deep pockets? Yea.... Odds are you don't have your own legal team and will absolutely submit to the feds out of pure fear.

This is very misleading. You still can't distribute copyrighted material. Just because some clown decided to illegally submit a copyrighted video doesn't give YOU the right to continue to redistribute without liability. Try again...you're reponsible. Hasn't Napster taught us anything? Hasn't the strict Terms of Service of YouTube enlighen us at all?

If you are showcasing copyrighted material and you aren't slapped with a threat of legal action you obviously do not have a web site getting any kind of decent exposure.

Yea....you'll lose every time.

Cheap content = redistributed content that is saturated and all over the internet.

Tube sites aren't policed as I seem to feel? Uhh...yes. Yes they are. Adult web sites are absolutely policed. In fact, if noone is looking at your content it's because they have no idea you exist. Go a head make a Tube Site with Girl Gone Wild videos and have a friend also upload a video of an underage girl then start advertising it on Craigslist. Let's then talk...

 

We seem to have different views on this subject. I do think we are on the same side of the issue. Tube sites are the reason why the bottom line started to fall out of the industry in 2006 or so.

I meant policed from a copyright standpoint, NOT from a standpoint of illegal porn. But even so, I worked in a place where there were user uploads. The cops, and I mean *federal* cops, came by every month and we gave them a list of IP addresses of uploaders of illegal material. The owners of the company were not attacked by the law, and the owners of tube sites are likewise not attacked by the law as long as they aren't the ones uploading it and as long as they remove the shit and comply with police requests for uploader IPs.

I'm sure we completely agree about the importance of 2257s.

Again, I'm just talking about reality. If you receive DMCA requests, and you respond to DMCA requests by removing the offending material, you do in fact have safe harbor protection under the law. [see the actual law I quoted in the post below.]

This is WHY there are so many tube sites that are full of copyrighted material and nobody can do anything about it.

That said, I personally would not run a tube site unless I owned all the content and uploaded it all myself or had TGP-like submissions from content providers. I do NOT advocate doing anything illegal, especially when there are perfectly legal alternatives. I would never run a public upload site of any sort simply because of all the hassles, but they absolutely do have protection under safe harbor as long as they can demonstrate that it's not the owners of the company doing the uploads (and it's very difficult to detect if they do.)

^ That's why there are no tube sites.

Back in reality, flagrant offenders keep on doing it, and keep on and keep ON AND ON, and nobody in the industry can do anything about it even though it's just murdering their bottom line. If you were correct, and tube sites hosting copyrighted information will "lose every time," there would be no tube sites.

Again, I completely disagree with you, and the huge number of tube sites-- how many are there, ten thousand? A hundred thousand?-- is more than ample evidence.

You want to know what the new thing is? People hacking into sites, or subscribing on fraudulent card numbers or giving chargebacks, downloading all the material and uploading it to tube sites. The industry cannot stop it.

I don't know what industry you are working in. In the one where most of my work comes from, and where most of my money has come from since, oh, 2000 or so, it's a huge problem that nobody can seem to do anything about.

 

Now, here's the Safe Harbors section of the DMCA bill, bold added:

Basically what this means is that if you comply with injunction orders under the DMCA, and comply with police requests under 2257 violations or possible illegal material [because a similar legal doctrine holds true in that case], you have a substantial degree of protection as a "user-directed content host." In the case of illegal material, the police WILL go after the uploaders but will leave the hosts alone unless it is something totally egregious (like not surrendering uploader IP addresses, or the appearance that the site operators themselves are uploading the illegal material). In the case of copyright infringement, good luck getting anybody to help. Half the time we can't even get their ISPs to shut them down which they are technically supposed to do in cases of repeated extreme violation, and that's with lawyers.

This is just reality. Aside from DMCA requests, which infringing tube site owners basically just laugh at, you have basically no recourse unless YOU have a huge legal team, and if you spend the money necessary to take it to court, you are very likely the one who is going to get laughed at, the courts simply will not help because it's the porn industry and nobody cares. Or, at the very least, it's very, VERY hard to get any traction. I'm telling you first hand, I have had many friends and business acquaintances go straight out of business because of these people, they had no legal recourse, they spent money on lawyers, the courts didn't give a shit, the tube site operators laughed and the infringement continued.

Again, I wouldn't recommend being involved in any user upload site because of all the potential problems and the competition for tube sites is getting more and more extreme, similar to TGPs in 2005 or so, but I still know people who make money on them. How? They have niches and they do it legit. The others are just bottom feeders and will never be anything more than fly by night but they are still proliferating enough that it's basically destroyed the entire industry.

 

Liability limited does not mean free of liability. You can't run a web site legally and redistribute copyrightd material even if it's submitted by a 3rd person. That's just common sense. Otherwise, let's all start a warez site and charge $10 per general download and donate money to people to upload "their" own software which coincidentally happens to be owned by Microsoft.

 

In theory. In practice, if you practice due diligence to respond to injunctions, and you're not the person uploading the copyrighted material, your liability is right around zero. In fact, even if the site owner IS the person uploading the videos, it's very, very difficult to get any sort of substantial civil penalty to stick. Look at the trouble Hollywood and the music industry have had over the last 15 years with copyright infringment, and they have extremely well funded trade organizations and some of the best and best-funded intellectual property lawyers in the world. In comparison, porn companies have no power and even the largest and most established content producers (like Hustler, Vivid etc) have had a great deal of trouble getting their material taken down. They pay lawyers to get it removed from one site and ten other sites pop up. Or the site just removes it, claims someone else uploaded it and keeps right on rolling without any civil penalty.

See above regarding due diligence. That's just reality. Reality is the ultimate in common sense.

We're not talking about Microsoft. We're talking about an industry that's much more mom-and-pop in which the overwhelming majority of the businesses don't even have fifty grand in revenue, much less to throw away on pointless legal adventurism. Moreover, enforcement of more general piracy has been performed by ICE, Interpol and other federal police organizations with international reach. I wish you luck getting them interested in some tube site guy who uploaded your intellectual property "Gaped Granny Gangbangs 17."

Again I don't know what your experience or industry is but as someone with almost 20 years experience in the adult industry, I can tell you that there is almost NO police or court protection. The courts simply do not give a fuck and that's just a fact.

Also, I think if you checked into the availability of pirated microsoft products on pirate sites, you would have used another example because it doesn't support your position. Even MICROSOFT has been able to do very little about the problem and it has indeed hurt their bottom line hugely even as a multi-billion dollar company.

You seem to be discussing what should be. I'm just pointing out what actually is.

 

Where do I sell my porno's to? You make it sound pretty easy to get money selling your own porn!

 

It's not. It's extremely competitive and cutthroat. That said, there is always a market for new faces and I think content production is one of the most reliable parts of the business if not the most lucrative necessarily-- but then, what part IS lucrative? Obviously content production has other benefits too...