… not the fun kind.
Why Google doesn’t penalize MindGeek in ranking status is criminal.
Comprehensive Slate article here. (Pour yourself a drink before reading).
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GOOGLE has the same business model as MINDGEEK … a fortune built off information that doesn’t belong to them. 
it does amaze me at times who get’s away with what.
- jim “God’s Gonna Getcha For That” - GEORGE JONES & TAMMY WYNETTE
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Thanks for the link, interesting read, albeit nothing new really. The job reviews of people who work are Mindgeek (link in the article too) are a pretty interesting read.
Here’s what will happen to Mindgeek: the company will eventually over-extend themselves into some project or venture that will take them away from their core competency and it will suck up huge financial resources because the guys doing the over-extending will be unable to see past their egos to rectify said over-extension and the company will finally implode.
Do you remember UGAS? The largest gay AVS there was until the owner decided he wanted to run a bar. The decline in the AVS model and a failed bar = most of you saying, “What’s a UGAS?”
Do you remember Ounique? If you were a webmaster is the early aughts, you were buying pictures from these guys. They were the biggest porn stock content provider until the owner figured out that he could make more money selling t-shirts on eBay. Suddenly the Ounique office was overrun with boxes of tshirts and employees were so busy shipping out tshirts that no one was putting up content for people to buy.
There are dozens of examples of this sort of thing in the adult business, I’ve seen them come and go in my 13 years here. I’m fairly confident Mindgeek is just the flavour of the moment, even if that moment is last for several years.
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Very interesting and well written article. It does really explain the current situation well. Interesting too to note how it ends with these to observations:
- Mindgeek could collapse if Google went after piracy properly.
- Niche / Fetish sites still continue to do well because what they do is very different.
Both we have discussed and probably are both accurate. However as most of us said, Google doesn’t really care about porn so the piracy changes they are introducing now probably won’t effect tube sites. The more likely helpful part is that niche can survive and do better despite tubes. I think that’s maybe really worth focusing on, produce really unique nice content on a small scale and not spread it everywhere but also engage with users more closely.
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These two aspects really stood out to me.
We pretty much know that Google isn’t going to be touching porn with its new piracy efforts, because Google prefers to act like a Victorian housewife when it comes to this kind of content. Google’s piracy drive will be exclusively to placate Hollywood because they are paying advertisers spending millions of $'s, it will completely ignore the tube sites because it knows that it gets a hell of a lot of porn search traffic from millions of thieves, and they would not want to hand that traffic over to a competitor like Bing.
The only way this will change is if there is an adult media body set up to do what Hollywood is doing, pressuring Google to actually do something. As so much of the business is now controlled by pirates (Mindgeek), that isn’t likely to happen unless indy sites can get their shit together and form some kind of coalition for the benefit of all.
And that brings us back to the fact that the indy sites are the core of the modern gay adult business. Because they’re out of the influence of monopolies like Mindgeek they can be far more profitable for us as affiliates. We’re in a better position here, because (at least from my perspective) indy porn sites generate far more sales than larger networks, so we should be naturally inclined to support smaller sites than work with massive companies who are also the ones in bed with their own enemy.
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Can someone explain to me why it is so important for Mindgeek to feed the internet population with free porn?
- Streaming is expensive as a provider
- Probably very low conversion is achieved to any of their owned paysites when the full content is also available for free
They’d be like… “We get 90% of all porn traffic, and we only make about 10% the money we possibly could, but it’s cool, because we practically own all the market”.
Streaming combined with piracy hurts their business as much as everyone else’s. What am I missing?
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[QUOTE=Markus-Supergaybros;153813]Can someone explain to me why it is so important for Mindgeek to feed the internet population with free porn?
- Streaming is expensive as a provider
- Probably very low conversion is achieved to any of their owned paysites when the full content is also available for free
They’d be like… “We get 90% of all porn traffic, and we only make about 10% the money we possibly could, but it’s cool, because we practically own all the market”.
Streaming combined with piracy hurts their business as much as everyone else’s. What am I missing?[/QUOTE]
Their business model is different. They generate income by selling advertisements and they make money from those pop-unders that advertise live web cam sites. Any extra memberships they are selling is just pocket money, so conversion rates aren’t that important.
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When eight out of ten roads lead to Rome, every traveller needs to stop for a coffee or Pepsi or lunch along the way and then you litter the highway with billboards so people have something to look at.
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You’re right. I missed that aspect. But I still believe they could make more money themselves in the long run if they were more sales-focused, rather than traffic focused. And essentially giving away their traffic to a different type of business. I know that these cam sites have their own audience and the lifetime value per user can be much higher than it is for regular porn. But most people don’t get off to that. They need porn, not human interaction. So the money ends up in the wrong place, killing off the core product. It’s like the economical problem with tuna fishing. Not sustainable. Even some dolphins die as a side effect.
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It still works like Retail Stores. Advertise a sale on items, get the people in the door (traffic) and then make your money on the other miscellaneous items they purchase while there.
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[QUOTE=Markus-Supergaybros;153813]Can someone explain to me why it is so important for Mindgeek to feed the internet population with free porn?
- Streaming is expensive as a provider
- Probably very low conversion is achieved to any of their owned paysites when the full content is also available for free
They’d be like… “We get 90% of all porn traffic, and we only make about 10% the money we possibly could, but it’s cool, because we practically own all the market”.
Streaming combined with piracy hurts their business as much as everyone else’s. What am I missing?[/QUOTE]
The way I see it, the “adult entertainment business” is more like a front for companies like Mindgeek. It adds an element of legitimacy, giving the impression that they’re just making money from creating adult media, when in actual fact they’re generating profits through advertising which is directly supported by piracy.
They know that they can get more money by offering free porn videos and selling ad space on that page, than they can by making a video for a membership site. The problem is that so many companies out there are spending that advertising money on incredibly shit traffic, people who have no intention of ever paying for anything.
The only way this business is going to change for the better (in my opinion) is if businesses within it STOP paying for advertising on tube networks. It makes absolutely no sense to do so - and that’s probably why you’ll rarely see indy porn sites doing it. There are only a few I have seen that mistakenly think supporting tubes in this way is in any way beneficial to them, it’s generally the larger studios who don’t seem able to control themselves.
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The job of an affiliate is to get as much traffic as possible.
Not that expensive - especially when you buy a lot of bandwidth. The bigger they are the less each visitor costs them.
I seriously doubt any of their own content is “pirated” on their tube sites. They’re in a unique position to make sure that never happens.
I think they monetize the traffic pretty well. Before the tube sites it was the torrent sites. I think they’re clearly making more money than the torrent sites.
And because they own most of the traffic, they don’t pay affiliate commissions for most of their sales. That’s huge. That at least doubles their revenue off the sale - possibly more than that (depending on how much they have to pay for the content or share with the producer).
Given how things were going with torrents a few years ago, it’s safe to say someone was going to find a way to offer free porn on a large scale. They just figured out that it’s better if they’re the ones doing it.
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There’s the money shot. That encapsulates the entire nightmare.
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Is this a fact or opinion?
It seems to me that you don’t see indy sites advertising on tubes because they can’t afford it. Can a site that’s making 10 or 15 sales a day, or less, afford tube advertising?
And if they have advertised, they’d quickly learn that they blow through the budget pretty quickly with little results, so why repeat it?
And looking at Pornhub’s homepage, two adds are for Reality Kings, one for Brazzers, and one for MOFOS. Doesn’t Mindgeek own Reality Kings and Brazzers? So those wouldn’t even really be paid ads, they’re just sending traffic to themselves.
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I wondered about that too. Who exactly is paying for advertising on tube sites? (Consistently, not just trying it out).
Again, agreed⦠What I’m seeing isn’t advertisers but ads for properties owned by MindGeek. I wonder how much of Men.com’s or Juicy Boys’ sales come from ads next to pirated full-length videos?
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The tubes are affiliates just like everyone else. They’re, for the most part, posting the same affiliate clips made available to everyone and putting an ad above/below and in the post roll.
If Tubes are posting full videos that aren’t homemade/member submitted then its my opinion that business shouldn’t be done with them. Of course, I don’t manage my own sites nor my affiliates so my opinion doesn’t really matter 
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I don’t believe a company like Mindgeek is making money off of advertising either.
The real money is being made off of buying and selling companies - not from selling content or even advertising. They are mimicking Wall Street formulas. Buy up a bunch of under valued companies, fire most of the administrative staff, and recycle content, models, etc. over several sites. Then they choose one property to artificially pump up by buying massive amounts of traffic to make it look profitable, then borrow against it to buy more distressed properties. It doesn’t even matter if the thing they’re trading is porn sites or dry cleaning shops, it’s all about moving money around. Like dzinerbear wrote earlier, they could easily just move on to a completely different industry next.
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Who exactly would Mindgeek buy traffic from? Don’t they have most of the porn traffic already?
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They are probably not “buying” traffic, just re-directing traffic to their other sites for various reasons. For example, if they want to make a site look popular enough to borrow money against it’s supposed “value”, they will put up ads for it on all their sites funneling traffic to all one place. Suddenly, the stats look fantastic and the site appears to be popular enough for investors to want to buy it or loan money against it’s value.