Hi guys!
I’m currently writing an article on porn piracy and how it’s affecting creators in the industry.
I want to hear if you think it’s a good or a bad thing, how it’s affecting your income, your mental health and what you’re doing to prevent it.
If you’re interested in telling me your experience, please let me know 
I want to hear how you imagine a case where it can be a good thing
hahah fair point 
I only say that because I have interviewed creators (mainly Onlyfans creators) that have seen benefits to their content being pirated and published to places with more reach and a bigger audience than their personal accounts.
I was wondering if the same “benefit” is experienced by studios.
I’ve had a model tell me after her site got scraped that she ended up with a bunch of new signups in the following month, allegedly generated by interest from the torrents the content was put on… That was once though, counter to 100s of cases of it causing issues for business… so yea, it might theoretically be possible that a short-term positive effect may be seen, but the long-term result is negative either way.
Piracy - any kind of piracy - has a negative effect on the creators. The studios, production staff, talent, support staff, and even down to the website that hosts the scenes all have a monetary interest in that content. When people pirate it and put the full scenes/pictures up on the torrent sites, they remove any incentive of sales. Why spend money for what you can get for free? Even your tube sites offer the complete scenes for free. Is that good for the ones who spent the energy developing that video? For the handful that seek out the paysite and join, there are thousands that freeload. I have seen some content out there that has the watermarks removed, further diluting any return. Years back, there were affiliates that help promote this content by making galleries or blog posts and then submitting them to link lists and gallery sites. That model is still there, but on a much smaller scale.
It isn’t just porn that is pirated. Music, movies, fashion, accessories, even the designs for car parts. Most of the non-porn piracy suffers from lack of quality. Porn is one of the few areas with active theft of top quality content. I cannot even imagine one example of it being positive. If it is positive for one person, it hurts hundreds of others.
This is an interesting take, and I suppose it makes sense for independent creators.
It’s similar to the reaction channels on YouTube. When it comes to music, there are so many labels and artists who slap down these creators for playing their songs or videos and reacting to them for the first time, but when you think about the reach a lot of these creators have (new, younger audience perhaps exploring outside of their usual genre) it most likely brings the label and artist a net benefit.
Some of them get millions of views.
No one is repeating that reaction video on loop. They’re not adding it to their playlists. It’s the parasocial equivalent of someone playing a song for a friend in their car. But a lot of people are finding this music for the first time, then going out and buying the albums.
There are a few examples of bands actually understanding it. Slipknot, for example, invited one of those creators to their gig when Corey Taylor found out about how much of a fan he’d become from reacting to their music from back in the day.
Another creator was invited to a metal festival and has interviewed band members on her channel, making it even more of a symbiotic relationship.
I can see why such piracy would potentially bring benefits for a solo creator, but I don’t think this analogy can be easily applied to piracy as a whole, as it pertains to studios. This comparison is closer to what most of us do as affiliates - “reacting” to the content and promoting it to our audience.
This is why I try to talk about the studio and the other work the models have done when I’m writing content, rather than just focusing on the video. The goal is to entice the reader in to see more, so I often use an affiliate post more as an excuse to talk about the studio and the performers etc.
IMO on this topic, there are two types of consumers: Those who will pay for what they like, and those who never will (sorry for the dichotomous statement but to a large degree I think that it’s true).
In a perfect world, paywalls would be fully infallible method of controlling access to content, but I dont think that has ever really incentivized people to pull out their credit cards at the end of the day if they are in the later group. Those people will never pay, however, getting more exposure out there will expose people who will to what they dont know they like yet. These are the same people who used to go to the record shop and buy an album because of a song they heard on the radio. It’s the same in porn. They buy because they like and want to support the person or brand, and they want to hear / see all of what there is to offer. The rest of the people will just keep listening to the radio and turning the dial until something comes on that they like in that moment.
I can’t agree with you Simon. There is something to your statement about 2 types of customers, but it is not as firm as you seem to believe, we see time and time again that people will buy if they cannot find something that they want elsewhere. We (as a business, and as an industry) do need to work on making it easier and less painful for them to buy it than to consume the stolen version, and part of that has to be making the stolen versions harder to get, not just throwing up our hands and thinking these people would never buy anyhow.
The analogy of the music industry is fundamentally flawed though… Listening to the radio is still earning revenue for the artist… Watching stolen porn is not.