It’s a cloudless, mid-January day in Los Angeles, and I’m in a cramped, dimly lit hotel conference room off the Sunset Strip getting scolded by the star of Gang Bang Darlings 8.
“I hope you all feel really guilty,” Vicky Vette tells me and the 30 or so porn professionals gathered here for a piracy panel at the XBiz360 Adult Digital Media Conference. Vette is dressed in a tight but tasteful pink tank top with distressed flared jeans and peep-toe flats. Just moments earlier a man dressed in a flame-kissed bowling shirt à la Guy Fieri asked the crowd to raise our hands if we’ve ever streamed porn for free online. All hands, most of them white and male, went up. Now, after Vette's admonishment, he asks how many of us have shelled out for a $30 monthly subscription site.
I see one, maybe two, sheepish hands from men slinking in their seats. Even at porn industry conventions, nobody seems to be paying for porn.
XBiz360
The discussion is about how porn’s top directors and producers are coping with the scourge of piracy brought about by tube sites — the free, user-uploaded streaming porn video sites made in the image of YouTube — and tempers are rising. Midway through, an audience member wearing a golf shirt tucked into khakis adorned with a cell phone holster asks if the industry folk feel like they’re losing out to the glut of free porn on the internet, and a panelist cuts him off quickly: “No doubt. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.” One of the industry men on the panel tries to interject to extol the virtues of now-ancient-sounding DVDs, likening them to comic books as collectibles for the porn crowd. But as anyone who’s ever typed a risqué term into Google in the past 10 years knows, the kids aren’t buying and collecting dirty DVDs.
Colin Rowntree, one of online porn’s cadre of founding fathers, sporting a salt-and-pepper beard, friendly, sunken eyes, and a Tommy Bahama print shirt, rattles off bleak stats from memory. “Since 1998, there’s been an average of 70% drop in revenue on standard pay sites,” he tells the room. “You simply need to diversify. If you work 10 times harder than you did in the ’90s, then you can get close to getting back to the old revenues but not quite.” The room nods solemnly in agreement.
“Well, what the hell are you going to jerk off to when we stop producing?”
To an outsider, this is a brutally honest portrait of an industry in crisis. How can the porn business, which has squeezed performers and studios so far to the financial margins that it has become openly hostile to new entrants, innovate and survive? As an art form? I summon the courage to ask the panelists this very question. But before they can respond, a performer in the front row turns to administer my second scolding of the afternoon. “Well, what the hell are you going to jerk off to when we stop producing?”
According to some estimates, 36% of all internet downloads are of pornographic material. And while there’s no way to truly confirm these ever-changing figures, some observers have suggested that roughly 12% of the internet contains at least some pornographic content. In 2012, YouPorn told Extreme Tech that the site pulls in 100 million page views per day; at peak that’s 4,000 page views a second. And in PornHub’s 2014 year in review, the sites boasted 18.35 billion total visits and 78.9 billion total videos viewed. That’s 11 videos viewed for every person alive. A casual observer would probably assume that the internet has been great for porn; in one sense, it has been. Never before have so many people had immediate access to this much adult content.
But inside the industry, porn’s relationship to the internet is fraught. The adult industry is credited — quietly — with frequently building and shaping new technologies, and technology has long been credited with creating the porn juggernaut. A 1986 Merrill Lynch study, dredged up by adult industry scholar Jonathan Coopersmith, shows that “X-rated tapes constituted over half of all sales of pre-recorded tapes in the late 1970s.” It took until the mid-1980s for the rest of the market to catch up; in the meantime, Deep Throat racked up nearly $100 million, most of which came from sales of tapes.
Major architectural foundations of the internet also owe a debt to porn, which helped to pioneer e-commerce and credit card billing through adult pay sites in the 1990s. Coopersmith cites “cybersex promoters” in the ’80s and ’90s with leading the development and distribution of CD-ROMs, noting that Penthouse’s Virtual Photo Shoot software “won praise for being one of the most interactive games then manufactured.” You can also thank porn for the popularization of webcams, which began their boom as early as 1995 in adult online forums.
But if porn helped to conceive and nurture the modern internet, the internet has turned its back on porn. Major internet companies like Instagram and Tumblr have hidden adult content from internal search, and Google has removed porn while de-prioritizing adult sites in its search algorithms. Facebook, arguably the internet’s most important destination, has banned adult content outright since its inception, and mainstream billing sites and financial services firms have shut their doors to adult companies, citing them as “high risk” clients.
If online porn was built by technically proficient, big-dreaming smut innovators, it's now under siege by, essentially, technically proficient, deep-pocketed, shell corporation–constructing scoundrels. Consumed and overwhelmed by the fruits of its own technological innovations, the adult world must once again return to its entrepreneurial, iconoclastic roots if it wants to reclaim its industry. If anybody has any clue what we're going to jerk off to in the future, it's probably these guys.
Brad DeCecco / Redux for BuzzFeed News
It’s a cold February night and I’m driving along the pitch-dark, blind-curved back roads of southern New Hampshire as Colin Rowntree tells me how he inadvertently went from being a classically trained orchestral conductor to a BDSM website proprietor. Rowntree's tastefully furnished New Hampshire McMansion serves as a set and editing studio for Wasteland.com — it has that classic unlived-in model-home feel, but with fewer canyon views, more Keurig instant coffee machines, and a friendly old golden retriever who looks like he’d unwittingly lope into the shot during a particularly vigorous spanking scene.
Colin, 56, and his wife Angie, 54, are both in the Adult Video News Hall of Fame, but after 10 minutes talking to them, a stranger might guess that they own a burgeoning Adirondack chair business or run an artisanal scented-candle operation. Instead, this founding father of online porn has a plan to take back at least some power from the tubes.
“It’s the culmination of our entire careers in this industry.”
Boodigo.com is their ethical porn search engine, a chance for them to regain some control of the adult internet. “It’s the culmination of our entire careers in this industry,” Colin says with a smile. He spent the last year building it with a couple of ex-Google engineers, and its premise is simple: a safe, secure search engine for adult content that doesn’t track users or mine any user data, algorithmically de-prioritizes free tube content, and actively weeds out deeply offensive and illegal content like child porn.
Boodigo is a direct response to Google’s tightening restrictions against adult content. In March 2014, Google eliminated adult advertising in its search products and largely cut access to the helpful Google employees who specialized in takedown requests from the adult industry. It’s also an attempt to curry favor with the growing legion of average porn consumers who are weary of having their most private browsing behaviors tracked. “Google is very, very good at what it does but it's not what you want if you're looking for something sensitive. Porn, fireworks, firearms. You want something naughty? Come to us and we won’t track your shit," Colin says.
Colin explains how online porn has changed since he and Angie posted a few images of women in leather fetish gear on the web as part of a promotion for a hodgepodge direct-mail catalog site in 1994, accidentally launching one of the internet’s first adult pay sites. Since then, Colin and Angie (who runs the porn for women site sssh.com), have experimented with all styles of content and technologies to keep their niche sites afloat. There’s “This Old Dungeon,” which teaches people how to build bondage furniture, and BDSMPad, a tablet porn app, which launched the same day as the iPad with the tagline “We flagellate, you masturbate.” But for all the innovations, gimmicks, and decades of experience, the Rowntrees have watched the tubes destroy porn’s middle class and technological edge.
Colin and Angie have managed to make a sturdy living thanks to the niche nature of their sites, but the glut of free tube porn has squeezed margins. "I've seen members inside Wasteland download 20 years of movies in their trial period, and I know for a fact those all go on the tubes," Angie says. As suspicious as the bulk downloads look, there's little the Rowntrees — or other adult producers — can do to prove it. "We've tried to search user names inside Wasteland to see if they're also there on PornHub, but they must have different names."
Essentially, the Rowntrees' proposition is that concerned internet users will eschew the convenience — and zero-dollar price point — of the tube sites in favor of privacy and peace of mind. So far it’s working, albeit slowly. Colin says Boodigo had 2.5 million unique daily visitors and 7 million queries at launch in September 2014. As of mid-August, the site was pulling in over a million more unique visitors per day, with 39% of visitors returning to the site. This past August, the site received 3.5 million uniques daily. “As long as the porn’s still there, they keep coming back because nobody is watching them,” Colin says. If it continues to take off, Boodigo could cut off some of the tube sites' revenue by stanching the flow of traffic to pages that make money from traditional banner advertising. Given the dominance of the tubes, it’s more of a first strike than it is a finishing blow, but it’s one that could extend a lifeline to porn’s more niche subscription sites.
Only a week after launching Boodigo’s equivalent of Google's AdWords module in January, Rowntree says he received his first five-figure ad buy, and since then Boodigo's advertiser base has consistently grown to now over 400 advertisers. The organic search results have surpassed over 10 million adult sites. As porn producers look to reallocate some of their Google ad funds, Rowntree sees an enormous opportunity. As we pull into the three-door garage he recently used to film a food-fight orgy scene for Wasteland, Colin says, “I think I might be able to retire off this one someday."
Streaming video, which was first introduced to the web in 1994 by the Dutch porn company Red Light District, enabled MindGeek — formerly Manwin and before that Mansef — to build the first tube sites, allowing users to upload scores of pirated porn videos. The company's origins, much like its legality, are murky. Some link the beginnings of the MindGeek dynasty to early 2007, when Matt Keezer, one of the founders of the major online porn studio Brazzers, bought the PornHub domain for less than $3,000. It quickly grew thanks to revenue from banner ads, launching new brands like Mofos.com and acquiring tube sites like ExtremeTube and Tube8. The company consolidated under the name Mansef, but after a Secret Service raid and asset seizure of nearly $9 million, the founders, suddenly paranoid, sold the business off to Fabian Thylmann, a German programming prodigy, for a reported $140 million.
Under Thylmann's management, ad revenues soared, and the company — renamed Manwin — nearly doubled to 500 employees by 2011. A New York magazine article suggests that Manwin's pretax earnings nearly doubled between December 2009 and December 2010. While Thylmann made overtures to clean up tube piracy — Mansef, under the Brazzers owners, had been accused of allowing its users to upload troves of illegal clips to the porn sites — adult producers found it nearly impossible to stop their content from spreading illegally onto the tube sites. All the while, Manwin aggregators made fortunes from simple display advertising, which, in turn, allowed the company to buy up bigger tubes like YouPorn in 2011, and major mainstream adult production studios like Babes.com, Digital Playground, Reality Kings, and Twistys.
In 2012, Thylmann was extradited to Germany for tax evasion; Manwin has changed hands once again and is now operated as MindGeek. According to some reports, MindGeek owns eight of the top ten tubes sites, creating, essentially, a monopoly. As such, the company has the financial resources and the reach to force studios, producers, and performers to cooperate in any number of partnership deals. In many cases, they join up and give MindGeek tube sites HD preview content for less-than-optimal affiliate traffic kickback deals rather than compete with the monster sites. MindGeek declined to address the company's checkered past, noting, “The current management cannot comment on alleged operations that took place years ago under previous leadership and owners.”
Even when worked up, most porn folks will admit the number of pirated clips on MindGeek-owned tube sites has decreased since the company bought many of the major adult studios. But the scourge is far from eliminated. In fact, there’s so much illegal material online that it’s created a cottage industry of copyright takedown entrepreneurs.
Nate Glass, owner of Takedown Piracy, removes thousands of illegal clips a week in his quest to right the piracy wrongs wrought by the tubes. His company just built a digital fingerprinting tool that identifies and flags stolen clips for copyright infringement takedown notices. He has eight studio clients on board and is confident that if all studios cooperated, he could drastically decrease the amount of pirated porn. “We took down 12,000 videos almost immediately for those eight clients who signed up,” Glass tells me, noting that the program has also identified 200,000 illegal videos as well as their copyright holders.
“When you sit down to rub one out, you're not engaging in critical economic thought.”
Glass worries that the viewer has no idea that their favorite, secretly bookmarked, banner ad–laden free porn repositories are contributing to the shrinking of the adult industry. In this way, the internet has ushered in a lost generation for porn: millions of young users who don’t just think paying for porn is for suckers, but don’t realize that porn isn’t free by default.
Recently Glass, along with adult performer Jessica Drake, went on a U.S. college tour to talk to students about stealing porn. It was dismal. “Many don't even know that the porn they're watching on PornHub is there without permission,” he told me. “When you sit down to rub one out, you're not engaging in critical economic thought.” Glass says he sees fans tweet to adult performers with messages saying, "I love this scene of yours on PornHub," only to have the performer tweet back that the clip is up illegally. “It doesn't even enter their minds. It's a different generational mind-set.”
Even some of porn’s established names sound weary describing the grind. “People think I make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, which I don't,” Stoya, the raven-haired 10-year industry veteran best known for her near-ubiquitous internet presence, tells me over coffee on a snowy February afternoon near NYU. Stoya blogs frequently about the adult industry — on her own site and for The Verge, Refinery29, Vice, and occasionally for the New York Times — and is as exhausted with the state of the industry as she is eloquent about its shortcomings.
Like their production counterparts, performers often need to diversify by performing in cam shows, auctioning clothing like their bras and panties, making molds of their orifices and appendages for licensed sex toys, and interacting with fans through paid texts, snaps, and even online video games. Performers are increasingly required to book scenes without royalties and are subsequently required to promote them relentlessly on social media. “I’m just tired,” Stoya says. And yet she sees a business opportunity amid the chaos.
Stoya.
Courtesy Stoya