A Consumer-Protection Trick For Porn Subscribers
Friday, November 16th, 2012 -- by Bacchus
I’m slow but I learn. And what I learn, I try to remember to share.
One of the consistent and persistent minor frauds in the porn industry is the subscription porn pay site that isn’t actually producing new updates any more. But, you know, nobody is going to subscribe to a site where the last bit of new content has a 2011 date on it, are they? People who pay good money for porn (an ever-dwindling pool) want to see new stuff at least once a week, minimum. So there’s a certain stage in the life cycle of a porn site where the updates aren’t happening any more. But rather than admitting up front that a site is “mostly dead” (and, say, charging a one-time flat rate for access to the moribund site’s archives, as sometimes happens) the site operators decide to use automatic scripts to pull old updates (from, say, 2002 or whenever) and put current dates on them. So you land on the front page of the site today and it says the last update was October 12 (last week), but you (if you are a porn old-timer) might realize the picture was actually shot ten or fifteen years ago. (Yes, some sites out there really do have archives going back into the 1990s that they are presenting in dribs-and-drabs as “new” weekly updates.)
There’s a sense in which this does not matter. (Call this “lies pornographers tell themselves to sleep better at night.”) If a site’s “new to you” and the archives are so very deep that you could subscribe for a year and would never view all the content, the faux weekly updates are just another content-discovery and presentation tool for you to use during your membership, as you wallow in years of yummy porn that you never saw before. But if the actual amount of content on the site is limited, you’ll swiftly be disappointed when you realize that (1) you’ve viewed all the photoshoots and videos of interest to you and (2) the fresh-looking dates on the tour (that made you think there’d be new stuff coming every week) were bogus. And then when the automatic rebill hits your credit card, you very rapidly start to feel cheated, because what are you getting for that money?
Since ErosBlog has historically (again, not so much these days) been supported in part by affiliate links to paid porn sites, it’s always been something I paid attention to. But for many years there was no good easy way to tell when this was happening. Until recently. The rise of decent-quality image searching and the ubiquity of porn on Tumblr have combined to make porn-dating quite easy.
It works like this. You’re looking at a porn site tour, trying to decide if it’s worth paying for (or, if you’re a porn blogger, worth linking to). There are, at a minimum, several pictures (and usually a video clip) presented as a recent update with last week’s date on them. You pick whichever picture you like best, on the assumption that what’s most pleasing to your eye is probably most likely to have been reblogged all over Tumblr. You image-search that picture. The dates visible in the snippets in the Google image search results will have your answer. If they are all as recent as the alleged recent update, the update date is likely to be honest. If you find this picture all over the internet with dates going back years, you’re being lied to.
Easy-peasy!
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