In the early aughts, when the internet was still new, pornography was a pretty easy way to make a comfortable living. If you were okay with sacrificing a bit of respectability and dealing with the headaches and stress of working within a stigmatized and confusingly structured industry, it wasn’t that hard to make a comfortable living — or, in many cases, to get rich, and do so pretty quickly.
College kids were able to turn access to a camera and a love of porn into a thriving career, founding companies like Burning Angel and Bang Bros. You didn’t even have to create original content to tap into the flow of cash. Even people who just bought packs of thousands of photos and set up their own curated collection of smut could make a decent salary off of XXX content. Because at the time, people loved paying money for porn.
But a little over a decade after the founding of free porn sites like Pornhub and Youporn, the economics of the adult industry look quite a bit different. Porn consumption may be more popular, and more normalized, than ever, but even the most avid of porn fans are often unwilling to pay for the videos they enjoy — a significant change from an earlier era when people paid a premium for porn DVDs, often shelling out two to four times the cost of a non-porn DVD for the chance to enjoy four or five scenes.
Although porn companies are private and revenues aren’t publicly shared (a reality that makes it difficult to track how hard companies have been hit, financially), the past few decades have seen companies shutter, performer pay rates plummet, and major trade shows shrink in size — all indicators that suggest the money isn’t flowing in like it used to.
Porn isn’t the only media industry that’s suffered from this precipitous drop in revenue. As the internet has transformed consumption habits and enabled easy piracy, other industries have had to adapt to a shift in consumer expectations.
In the early aughts, Napster rocked the music industry by making it possible for consumers to freely share and distribute MP3s with one another, a shift that depressed the market for CDs and left the industry scrambling to figure out ways to attract more consumer dollars.
Film and TV suffered a similar fate once internet connections became fast enough to make pirating video a breeze — and the journalism industry is still in the process of figuring out how to make money if no one’s paying for print. (You are, notably, reading this piece for free on a website.)
Yet even with the monetization challenges they’ve faced, and continue to face, other industries have largely begun to rebound, pushing back against the expectation that their content be free with subscription services like Spotify and Netflix, and paygates for publications like the New York Times and Washington Post.
Yet porn — which, as a pioneer in online commerce, was paygating its content long before the Wall Street Journal decided to — has yet to recover from the expectation that its content should be free. Will the pendulum ever swing back in favor of paying for porn?
When I put out an ask for stories from people who’d gone from regularly pirating music and movies to paying for their content through services like Spotify, Netflix, iTunes, and Google Play, I heard a few common themes. People made the switch from piracy to paid services because legally consuming content suddenly became the easier option: As crackdowns on piracy killed off popular file-sharing services, leaving increasingly sketchy and difficult to navigate services as the primary option, paid services were becoming much simpler and easier to use. Paying a small fee to get access to high-quality content was a more appealing option than sifting through the dreck to illegally download a file of dubious quantity.
Others noted that a sense of responsibility to artists and content creators pushed them to start paying again. Ripping off a faceless corporation might be one thing, but when your theft starts to feel like it’s taking money out of the pockets of artists you adore, it doesn’t feel quite as justified.
But while some of these arguments can also be used to encourage people to pay for their smut, there’s a major factor that separates pornography from all other forms of media — and it’s one that pushes the odds heavily against the possibility of paying for porn becoming de rigeur any time soon.
Unlike listening to Drake or watching Game of Thrones, porn consumption and the porn industry are still heavily stigmatized, a reality that hampers people’s willingness to pay for XXX media. If you already feel uncomfortable with your interest in porn, actually taking out your credit card and paying for it can feel like a bridge too far.
That stigma can be a major deterrent for potential paying customers. In one conversation, a woman who’d once considered (and then decided against) launching a porn site noted this kind of shame as a primary reason that women in particular are reluctant to pay. In her preliminary research, she found that many of the women she’d spoken to dealt with “extreme denial over accessing [porn],” and were likely to keep “porn habits a dirty little secret or something they wanted to access passively” — a habit that’s far easier to uphold when you’re covertly watching porn for free.
Another person cited their discomfort with some of the tropes they find arousing as a reason for not paying, telling me over DM that, “it may get me off but immediately after I’m deeply ashamed of participating in/perpetuating sexist tropes and don’t want to give them my money!”
But stigma also has a broader impact as well: It hampers the porn industry’s ability to fight back against piracy. Paying for music didn’t become more appealing just because of the rise of all-you-can-eat style subscription services like Spotify and Tidal. Piracy also suffered a major hit as the music industry rallied together to get the government to shut down services like Napster, Kazaa, and Limewire, forcing would-be pirates to ever more complicated, and ever more sketchy, services on the fringes of the web.
In contrast, porn has never had a heavy hitting lobbying group like the Recording Industry Association of America to take on the fight against illegally downloaded content. While some pornographers worked hard to fight against the rise of free content, it was always a piecemeal effort, with individual creators or groups like Takedown Piracy sending out DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices to get illegally uploaded content taken down — a strategy akin to attempting to empty the ocean with a single bucket.
Instead of crushing the major players of piracy the way the music industry was able to, porn got coopted by them: Mindgeek, the parent company that owns Pornhub, Youporn, and many other popular free porn sites, now owns Brazzers, Digital Playground, and other properties that were created by its one time competitors. (Mindgeek was reached for comment but did not respond to interview questions by press time.)
And as power within the adult industry has consolidated in the hands of a company that built its name on free, and often pirated, porn, the very people who are most capable of — and should be most motivated to — persuade consumers to pay for their content have, instead, become more invested in promoting free porn.
Jiz Lee, a longtime performer and affiliate manager for Pink and White Productions, is something of an evangelist for affiliate programs, which, in lieu of a royalty system, are one of the best ways for performers to continue to get paid for their content long after their first check has been cashed.
Lee routinely educates other performers about the potential of affiliate commissions, running workshops about affiliate programs and tweeting out screencaps of their own affiliate commissions using the hashtag #PayForYourPorn.
But lately, Lee has noticed that many of their peers have found a different way to make money, preferring instead to get registered with Pornhub and receive a cut of the ad revenue any time someone views one of their scenes for free. In the short term, it’s a strategy that makes sense — why hassle your fans to pay for porn when you can send them to a free scene and still get paid? — but in the long run, it merely reinforces the idea that porn isn’t worth paying for, an attitude that hurts performers in the long run by depressing industry revenues and, as a result, their pay rates.
Lee strongly believes that with enough education, performers can be won back to the side of promoting paid porn; and that, in turn, those performers can educate their fans and impress upon them the importance of shelling out for smut.
And there’s reason to believe that Lee is correct in seeing performer advocacy as one of the best ways to make porn a profitable product again. The 13 people I spoke with about the motivation for paying for porn — a mix of queer women, nonbinary people, and men who mostly leaned heterosexual — offered a number of reasons for paying for porn, including a desire for high-quality content, easy access to content tailored to a specific or niche interest, and a wish to avoid scammy sites full of malware and popup ads.
But the biggest reason people pay for porn? A sense of responsibility to performers and other people involved in the porn creation process as the reason for opening their wallets. “I consider porn to be an art form. I’ve always supported the arts,” said one respondent; another noted that “finding a discussion on Twitter about how nightmarish it can be to remove a stolen video from Pornhub” pushed them toward being a paying customer.
If porn is going to turn back the tide against free content, it’s likely to be because consumers see porn performers as people worth supporting — a shift that will radically change the porn industry’s place in society as well.
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