Ms. Naughty On Porn Marketing And PR

I pretty much kept my mouth shut last week when the adult internet and especially sex-blogging Twitter blew up in outrage over the Bustle/Bellesa story. In case you missed it, Ms. Naughty has a good summary with the pertinent links; my perhaps-too-cynical summing-up is that a fairly generic “porn-for-women” themed tubesite got too successful in its traffic-seeking public relations operation, forgetting its fundamentally villainous positioning in the porn economy and winding up with some high-profile media coverage that exposed it to a blast of outrage it was ill-prepared to weather.

I am not myself well-positioned to inveigh against the tube sites these days; they are, like the banks Willie Sutton loved to rob, where all the money is, and in recent years I have done a variety of business with them, ranging from selling them sponsored posts and links through doing contract writing for their house blogs to continuing the affiliate promotion of porn sites that they bought with their profits. But I can’t deny a certain sense of schadenfreude at the recent spectacle: an instance of the tube site business model, which has done so much damage to the porn industry writ large, blowing up in its owners’ hands like a hand grenade not thrown on schedule.

But that’s not why I decided to highlight Ms. Naughty’s post. No, I thought her comments on the increasing role of public relations in porn marketing were fascinating, bringing together many things I have slowly come to observe without fully understanding:

[T]he thing that has struck me about this entire shebang is the growing power of PR within porn. Specifically, that becoming successful in porn now often relies on getting yourself into mainstream media publications. And if those publications happily repeat your slogans for you and present you well, you can build a big website in a very short amount of time. If you can sucker in some startup capital with those publications, you’re off.

…

It used to be that anyone, including me, could get traffic via Google and other search engines (ah, the good old days *shakes fist at cloud*). That doesn’t happen anymore because Google’s results for porn searches turn up two things: major tube sites like Pornhub and news articles about porn.

…

So if the tube sites are hogging the search results, today’s pornographers have to rely on PR to let people know they exist. The female director to most successfully do this over the last two+ years has been Erika Lust. I believe she has three PR people working for her and it has resulted in hundreds of mainstream media mentions for her. When I look at discussions around the web about porn that women will like, Erika Lust’s name is the one that comes up. Cindy Gallop of MakeLoveNotPorn is also very good with PR, especially because she was originally in advertising to begin with.

I would say that Bellesa’s PR campaign was also hugely successful. The site only launched in February 2017 and it clearly had a shirtload of traffic and recognition by the time this week’s drama happened. It’s a textbook example of the tech industry/startup culture top-down approach to porn: a flashy looking website that needs vast amounts of capital to begin, large offices, great PR, extensive “market research” and… oh maybe some porn in there somewhere. But not icky porn. NICE porn. Because you need to differentiate yourself from the mainstream and look vaguely respectable to avoid the inevitable stigma.

(By the way, I’m doing my best to keep the snark out of my tone but I suspect it’s creeping in. I’m old in porn, I’m jaded and I’m jealous. After 17 years I’m still running a porn business from my home office, doing everything myself, barely covering the bases but doing my best to create porn that I believe in, like I always have. I’ve been profitable because I stayed skinny. But If anyone wants to give me a wheelbarrow of cash or do PR for me, I’m very open to suggestions.)

…

It’s no wonder everybody piled onto Bellesa this week; for once there was a tube site with a real contactable person behind it and we could actually do something other than just send out endless copyright infringement notices.

Meanwhile, those of us who are actually trying to make ethical and feminist porn films struggle along, scrounging traffic from whatever source we can. The pickings are getting slim and good PR is gold but it’s hard to get. Getting a mention in a mainstream media article relies on networking, on knowing the right people, on sending out hopeful press releases. Or else it involves spending time writing your own promo pieces and submitting them for free, hoping the editor will take notice, hoping they don’t sound too much like blatant advertising. All of this requires time away from actually making porn and having a PR person is a privilege that only some feminist porn creators can afford.

I need to remind myself that this is the old world media hierarchy establishing its order on the previously-untamed, democratized internet. PR is the meatworld version of getting in the top 10 of Google results… especially now that Google doesn’t even pretend to be a level playing field anymore. Old websites without expensive security certificates have been scrubbed from the results. Media outlets get priority. Newer sites push out older, larger, established ones. Net neutrality isn’t guaranteed. It’s a bloodbath out there and I think I’m getting too old for this shit.

Indeed.

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The Curse Of The Vampire Tubes

If you’ve been wondering what has gone wrong with the porn industry, there’s an interesting article in Slate that may help explain the current state of porn affairs. The article is called Vampire Porn and its social media share-line is “There is a porn monopoly, and its name is MindGeek.”

MindGeek is a porn provider. Or more accurately, the porn provider. MindGeek has become the porn monopoly, putting industry members in the paradoxical position of working for the very company that profits from the piracy of their work. The MindGeek hydra exerts so much force that people in the online-porn industry are scared to talk about it for fear of blacklisting. And MindGeek’s dominance should serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of consolidating production and distribution in a single monopolistic owner.

Specifically, MindGeek owns a large number of porn aggregator “tube sites” (so named because they mimic YouTube’s format) such as Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube, which serve up huge amounts of free porn funded by ads. According to porn-industry blogger Mike South, MindGeek now owns eight of the top 10 of these aggregator sites (the exceptions being xHamster and Xvideos). These sites, whether owned by MindGeek or not, notoriously host a lot of pirated content. While each individual tube site responds to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests, most porn producers do not have the resources of movie studios or record labels to monitor piracy; according to adult film star Siri, MindGeek’s sites “force copyright holders to jump through hoops to get our content removed.” South told me that consequently, production of porn films is down 75 percent from where it was eight years ago, and DVD sales down 50 percent in that time. The general sentiment is that the porn business crash around 2008 was due to the rise of widescale piracy on tube sites and torrents, an increase in amateur porn, and the Great Recession.

All those tube sites (which I am hereby dubbing “vampire tubes”) make their money selling ads against the pirated content uploaded by “their users” — although there has been rumor and speculation for years in the adult industry that the big tubes hire shadowy employees to do most of the pirate uploading. Google, for reasons known only to itself, gives the vampire tubes top billing in its porn search results, while banishing most independent porn site operators to the impenetrable depths. Don’t believe me? Do a search for “prostate milking porn” on Google. It’s vampire tube results all the way down the front page:

I even scrolled through ten pages of Google results looking for a direct link to a porn site like Divine Bitches that actually makes prostate milking porn:

But did I actually find such a link in the first ten pages of the Google results? Let me cut the suspense: I did not. (However, you might. Google results differ with every refresh these days.)

Vampire porn is so profitable (bringing in porn surfers from Google, showing them free pirated porn, selling ads to advertisers desperate for that huge mass of horny eyeballs) that MindGeek has bought up a big chunk of the porn industry with the profits:

The crash in the porn business provided MindGeek with the opportunity to purchase high-profile porn content producers, including big names like Brazzers (in 2010) and Digital Playground (in 2012) at discounted rates, each of which themselves operate dozens of sites. Alongside names like Hustler and Vivid, MindGeek effectively came to control a huge amount of the mainstream “traditional” porn industry–the Hollywood-like production scene based in California’s San Fernando Valley, which has given us Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey. As Adult Empire director of business development Colin Allerton told the Daily Dot, “every major studio and star is now partnered with MindGeek or has worked for a studio that MindGeek purchased.” Since then, industry workers have been in the difficult situation of seeing their work pirated on sites owned by the same company that pays them — imagine if Warner Brothers also owned the Pirate Bay.

Even content producers that MindGeek owns have trouble getting their movies off MindGeek’s tube sites. The result has been a vampiric ecosystem: MindGeek’s producers make porn films mostly for the sake of being uploaded on to MindGeek’s free tube sites, with lower returns for the producers but higher returns for MindGeek, which makes money off of the tube ads that does not go to anyone involved in the production side.

There is a sense in which all of this sort of works for the average porn surfer, if by “average porn surfer” you mean someone who is looking for a few short fapping clips. But in the longer run, you gotta pay for your porn if you want anything but generic (and mostly old) least-common-denominator stuff. How long can independent porn producers keep producing high-quality, innovative, artistic, and most importantly new porn, if it primarily appears for free on the vampire tubes and Google won’t even show the producer’s links to people who are looking for their stuff?

Are you now, like Vladimir Lenin, wondering “what is to be done?” If so, all I can say is “Welcome to the club.” You’re not the only person wondering. The porn industry has been wrestling with this problem for years, and all that’s happened is that the vampire tubes have gotten bigger while everybody else in the ecosystem has gotten smaller and poorer.

One deus ex machina solution would be for Google to stop giving top billing to the vampire tubes for every porn search result. This is mentioned in the Salon piece:

As for the porn industry, will anyone survive? South said that vertical sites catering to specific fetishes such as Kink.com are far more immune to MindGeek’s vampirism (“There are riches in niches,” he says), and South hopes that Google will eventually crack down on tube sites in general and derank them for mass piracy, shaking MindGeek’s lock on the industry.

Your breath, do not hold it.

2019 update: I hope you’re not still holding your breath…

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