Re: Where is the traffic shifting to?
[QUOTE=dzinerbear;119348]I don’t think Google is the problem necessarily. I just looked at my Google traffic for the year for one of my more popular blogs and it’s pretty stable.
Steve … I really think you need to modernize, put your efforts into a real blog with hot guys … just let Frisky Fans sit there and forget about doing DVD reviews, no one is buying DVDs and VOD has been dying about as fast as AVS did. I feel your pain … I’m in the process of retooling my premiere AVS site, this is the baby that made me gobs and gobs of money. But it’s dead and needs a fresh look and new idea. I hate letting it go, but sometimes you just have to move on and let your babies die.[/QUOTE]
You guys… you all cannot just keep thinking in one dimension here. Don’t think like a spreadsheet - let’s think like a relational database.
Obviously just picking up the phone and calling Google isn’t going to accomplish much. Set your expectations. Think a bit and figure out what incentives have to happen to get Google to change the way it presents search results for adult content.
One little bit of good news, I hope, is that the major US ISPs are supposedly now tracking people who download off pirate sites. What I see coming from this are situations where a customer of Time Warner or Comcast are fingered for pirating, and the customer will claim that whatever it is they were doing they didn’t realize it was inappropriate. In short, they will say what my friend said when he wanted to see more of Bel Ami’s Mick Lovell - “I didn’t do anything wrong I just did a search.”
So, now Google’s users will start asking Google why their search results are getting them in trouble. MAYBE THEN Google won’t rank the torrent sites so prominently. Whatever happens, it only will change when Google incentives are to modify their search results.
You know, I always thought we would have benefited from Congress passing SOPA. It would have opened Blogspot, Tumblr etc up to liability for publishing copyrighted material. Then there would be some new incentives - like Google must consider if it should be prominently showing Blogspot posts of embedded copyrighted movies so prominently in their search results when their customers - people searching for movies - find them so easily.
I specifically noted on my earlier list that piracy has always been a problem. Piracy, theft, shoplifting - that comes part and parcel with any business. What’s new now is that Google’s search results make it so that there are no property rights protections any more. This is why it’s so much harder for small time independent producers to earn a living from their work. There’s no legacy of royalties derived from their intellectual property because within days copies of the videos are freely available all over the Internet.
We’re not looking at a situation which “implementing the iTunes payment model” will solve.
Dzinerbear brought up my business model for friskyfans. Honestly, it’s no different from any video producer who’s created an original work and seeks to derive money from it. I was sitting here typing and saw that someone surfed into my site by searching for Matt Ramsey Rick Donovan. My problem is that people can read my snappy, insightful commentary on The Bigger The Better, and on the same page of search results reader discover that they can watch that entire 11 minute scene free on Tube8 and XVideos THANKS to Google’s search results. The guilty parties here are Google, Tube8 and XVideos, hand in hand. These parties are either stealing, or participating in racketeering.
Yes, Big Hollywood has a lot more lawyers who can send DCMA requests, but also, very importantly, Google doesn’t present results like this for mainstream videos. People cannot search Google and watch the opening of the ark sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark online like this. People shouldn’t be able to so easily find Matt Ramsey and Rick Donovan’s sex scene from The Bigger The Better either.
Steve
