Porn tube sites like GEXO and YouPorn are a double-edged sword because they are proving to be wasted pools of immense traffic. On one hand, some speculate that porn tubes are leading the way to the future of porn because they are quickly dominating the industry. Compare the staggering difference between the Alexa graphs for The Hun (the most popular thumbnail gallery portal) and YouPorn (the most popular porn tube) over the past year to see the trend:
Even with these impressive metrics to show, YouPorn’s creator Stephen Paul Jones isn’t kidding when he says that he doesn’t know what to do with all the traffic. Porn tubes are difficult to monetize because the profit model is solely based on advertisement revenue. That’s the catch for creating a portal of user-generated or pirated content. Some sites are trying to fight this limitation by incorporating dating, DVD, and sponsored content (going the legal way).
The emerging trend of porn tube sites is not a matter of porn becoming “2.0″ because now it becomes a profitability issue. Porn will never reach the “2.0″ phase if tube sites continue to steal copyrighted content from the studios who create it and, along with it, offer free content which removes the incentive of money from webmasters by cutting subscriptions. Where would the adult industry be without fresh content being pumped daily through the system by studios and webmasters?
Ironically, porn tubes are not just affecting the profit margins of content producers but also of themselves. The cost of bandwidth to support the massive traffic is overwhelming the relatively less-than-impressive revenue from the ads. You can try to strategically place the CPC ads as best as you can on these tube sites, but they will not persuade the web-savvy or disinterested visitors to click on them. This explains why one of the top porn tubes Redtube is for sale and GEXO is changing its business model.
GEXO no longer offers private locks on user-uploaded videos to store your personal porn collection online. We learned that GEXO cannot afford the tremendous amount of bandwidth and storage costs to offer what is simply a nifty feature. Furthermore, videos from sponsors like VideosZ and Bang Bros are now being emphasized because they are of predictable length (3-5 minutes) and they offer a stream of affiliate revenue. The lesson here: Web 2.0 is all nice and fun, but it’s all about the money, baby.
So will porn tubes never reach their full potential until bandwidth and storage become a mass commodity? Cheaper information technology is a certainty in the near future, but by then the wind may have already blown by for the tube phenomenon.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I would personally say the problem is the shithole CPMs/CPC payouts. There is no reason whatsoever why porn sites should not be able to serve ‘regular’ ads. By restricting the industry to feeding only itself, everyone is being hurt.
As soon as advertisers get their heads out of their asses and learn that porn traffic can be just as great as any other traffic, this will be a huge market.