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Why is pornography scarce?
"Playboy Archives Go Digital," so read The Wall Street Journal headline from last week. That's right, 636 issues, on six discs, $100 per disc.
Have you noticed that storage is really, really cheap these days? Have you studied the durable goods monopoly problem? Once you've accumulated a stock of durable material, at some point you will sell off successive units very very cheaply. Have you noticed that costs of electronic reproduction -- call it marginal cost -- are really, really low these days? Have you noticed there is a massive stock of accumulated pornographic images?
Hmm...try graphing that equilibrium.
Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography. But I don't understand why buyers demand such a regular flow of material. Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years? I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable. You don't need to see "the new porn" to know what you will want to get off on.
As I observe the sector, buyers cough up new money all the time, and they buy relatively small units of output, and at relatively high prices.
Please "splain" it to me, as they say...
One possibility is the neuroeconomics explanation that buying the material yields more pleasure than "using" it. Maybe porn and cookbooks have something in common after all.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 15, 2007 at 06:56 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
Coolidge Effect.
Posted by: Jacqueline at Feb 15, 2007 7:34:09 AM
Ever gone shopping when hungry? You buy all kinds of junk you don't need or even want. Same problem here, no one buys pornography in advance because they think they may enjoy looking at it some point in the future, it's a spur of the moment thing when you're not really in your right frame of mind. For reasons which should be obvious, price, at this point, is a secondary consideration.
Posted by: van gend at Feb 15, 2007 7:44:27 AM
I thought marginalrevolution was supposed to be a family blog? At least that's what TC said a month ago:
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/01/does_money_buy_.html
Inconsistent positioning is a dangerous thing...
Posted by: US at Feb 15, 2007 7:51:29 AM
I think porn is closer to clothing than to cookbooks: tastes change. A beautiful porn star from 20 years ago looks positively weird today. Those Playboy issues from the 60's don't look as hot today as they did forty years ago.
Posted by: Cisco at Feb 15, 2007 7:56:29 AM
Talk all you want about demand, there are two blades of the Marshallian scissors...and of course we would never *show* you porn in the post...surely little Junior can still contemplate why it is not scarce, even if he hasn't seen any...
Posted by: Tyler Cowen at Feb 15, 2007 7:57:01 AM
i suspect there is a difference in porn consumption in males vs females, and i would expect that males are the primary consumers. i think psychologically many males use porn and its ensuing activity as a simulation of sex, and thus may desire additional simulated sex partners (reflective of the desire for multiple partners for alpha male status reasons), and thus may buy lots of porn, in spite of the fact that porn is quite stable and predictable, as TC suggested.
Posted by: kid mercury at Feb 15, 2007 8:41:43 AM
Van Gend is right; the internet makes impulse buying easier than ever, and what impulse is stronger than sexual desire, especially in the face of such omnipresent and tempting ads?
As far as the regular flow of material ... why don't you just find one album you like, and listen to it over and over? Your libido doesn't even factor in, when explaining that $1k iTunes collection.
Posted by: Joe Grossberg at Feb 15, 2007 8:43:53 AM
Tyler,
Porn is free all over the internet. Playboy is expensive because they essentially have a monopoly on naked celebrities.
Posted by: josh at Feb 15, 2007 8:55:26 AM
A few guesses.
1) I can certainly understand the need for new material; you get used to looking at the old stuff. Someone who's been following Playboy for years might have felt they've seen it all.
2) Maybe the idea of looking at pictures of those who are older than you isn't much of a turn-on. Perhaps even a fear of seeing a relative.
3) It could also be the same thing with the condoms, see
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/01/assorted.html
with respect to link #2. Spending $5 at a time on a magazine is one thing, but $100 in one shot for a whole cd of images is another. Although, can you buy the discs individually?
4) There isn't as much desire for a tribute to Anna Nicole Smith.
5) Centerfolds aren't as good in on a cd-rom. Either you see it shrunken down, or you have to scroll.
***
With Playboy, a lot of people use the excuse that they got it for the articles. I wonder how many people will buy the archive disc that includes 1976 and say it's because of the Jimmy Carter interview.
Posted by: David at Feb 15, 2007 8:56:57 AM
"I believe also that fetishes are fairly stable and predictable. You don't need to see "the new porn" to know what you will want to get off on."
I think this is a false premise. And even though I've only read a few sociologial studies that explains the differences in Sweden, I think the trend is universal. Fetishes are not stable. Whether they are predictible or not will have to do with how well you know the market. In general, many of the fetishes (and hence the demand defined by them) follow changes in society. Interracial pornography, to take one example, is one category that has definitely increased its output since the days before the civil rights movement... I will leave the cause-and-effect-discussion to somebody else: If this means that the civil rights movement has spurred a fetish in interracial pornography or if the rise in interracial porn could have been fairly easily predicted to rise after the 1960ies.
Posted by: Joakim Nilsson at Feb 15, 2007 9:05:19 AM
I have no idea why people pay for porn, as opposed to downloading it for free. You don't even need BitTorrent.
The worst part is you never know before you try porn a few times whether it's going to continue to seem hot to you. If I bought that six-CD set I would copy it all to hard drive and delete/delete/delete until I had about 600 images left. And in a couple of years only 300 of those would be left, because my tastes would change. For one thing, the more porn you buy, the pickier you can be. I can open a Maxim and not even find it hot, because I know how much better you can do online.
I'd say I spend about 66% of my time with old porn and about 33% looking for new stuff. All depends on whether you're looking for familiar or novel, and how much positive reinforcement you got from your last porn search.
Also, porn is not just repetitions on a formula. New stuff comes around, like videos from Brazilian topless beaches and amateur webcams, that delivers porn in fresh and more lifelike seeming packaging. Heck, http://www.idonothingallday.com/ just goes out and films women walking down the street in New York, and that can be enough of a twist to make it worthwhile.
Posted by: Noumenon at Feb 15, 2007 9:16:20 AM
The eye is not satisfied with the seeing, nor is the ear with the hearing. The problem with buying porn is that it is very unsatisfying except for very briefly. Then you get bored and if you want to be excited, you have to seek more, more, more. All the porn in the world would not satisfy you, because it is not capable of satisfying you. But if you are convinced that if you just had enough of it, you would be happy, you will continue to seek it as long and as miuch as you can.
Posted by: pawnking at Feb 15, 2007 9:16:53 AM
For me, porn gets 'worn out'. What used to stimulate no longer does.
Posted by: Joe at Feb 15, 2007 9:17:41 AM
Re: this being a family blog, I think the Onion said it best, in response to a recent study showing that nearly half of children aged 10-17 viewed pornography on the internet:
"It's disturbing to realize that over half of children 10 to 17 are liars."
Posted by: Milk for Free at Feb 15, 2007 9:35:00 AM
"Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?"
I already have a sexual partner that I need to remain faithful to. Now you're saying that I should be faithful to a cache of pictures of women too?
Posted by: jp at Feb 15, 2007 10:13:38 AM
Also, w/r/t neuroeconomics: try renting Fassbinder's "Die Dritte Generation." It has one scene that speaks volumes on the topic.
Posted by: jp at Feb 15, 2007 10:16:53 AM
How is this puzzle different for porn movies/photos than for regular movies/photos? The marginal costs to replication are equally low. The "equilibrium" price (per DVD, etc.) is also similar for new movies, regardless of the rating. You can get both types of movies for free online. We know many people don't simply download these movies for free for a number of factors: copyright worries, it is time consuming, there's always the risk to get a virus, not everyone has the technical savvy. Why is this a "special" puzzle for porn flicks?
Posted by: anon at Feb 15, 2007 10:22:12 AM
There's a guilt factor, and a practicality factor, which makes people prefer obtaining small quantities of porn at frequent intervals over obtaining large quanitities at infrequent intervals.
Men feel more guilty about buying large quantities of porn than about buying small quantities, no matter how long they intend to take to "consume" it. It's also easier to manage smaller quantities of porn, and smaller quantities are more likely to reflect one's current tastes at the moment - most packaging of larger quantities will include material one is less interested in.
Posted by: Anthony at Feb 15, 2007 10:23:33 AM
I used to work in computer security, and one of my first gigs was monitoring Internet usage. Six months in that position and I fired a dozen people for habitually looking at porn while in the office. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that porn is an addiction for many people.
Posted by: AWHogan at Feb 15, 2007 10:24:36 AM
On the other hand, the title question has a different answer:
Information assymetry. Not everyone knows where to find free porn.
There are other factors there, too - finding free porn that excites requires a willingness to skim past a lot of material which does not excite, and sometimes, which actively repels. A person who knows where to find free porn may still choose to pay for porn, paying the producer to to the work of filtering content to fit the buyer's taste.
Posted by: Anthony at Feb 15, 2007 10:28:24 AM
I have to agree with several of the posters here: there is no question that porn, like any other addictive activity or substance, builds up a "tolerance" in the user, such that more and more--or, in the case of porn, more and more extreme--forms of it are needed to produce the same "high".
In this sense, Playboy (or, perhaps, the Victoria's Secret catalog) is the equivalent of the "gateway drug": it leads to the racier-but-still-mainstream Penthouse and its equivalents, then on to Hustler, and so forth.
There are studies that document this, though I haven't seen any lately.
I hasten to add that--as a good "small-l" libertarian--I have nothing against people consuming porn in moderation (so long as they do it with the blinds down and don't frighten the horses...): it's no different in that regard than booze. But porn addiction is very real, and extremely destructive.
Posted by: David Hecht at Feb 15, 2007 10:35:20 AM
Porn is a safe way to experiment.
Let's say you walk into some random store one day and you see a magazine called "Lesbian Motorcycle Bondage". Chances are you just ignore it.
But sometimes you wander about for days thinking "maybe that would be hot". So you go back to the store and you buy it. Nobody has to know. If you don't like it, you just chuck it in the shredder. If you do, hey, cool!
And let's ask the other question: why is sex scarce? We all have half of some sex. We all want the other half. Why aren't we all happily copulating three or more times a day with whatever partners are available?
Posted by: Caliban Darklock at Feb 15, 2007 11:16:17 AM
Single DVD + repeat viewing = marriage
Posted by: Joseph Heath at Feb 15, 2007 11:26:54 AM
Pornography is scarce? I feel like I must be missing something, or misunderstanding something. Because what the web has done is make porn, which historically always had been scarce, available in endless easy ways. Where porn's concerned we've gone from a situation of scarcity to one of superabundance.
Which is interesting, in a psychological/sociological and maybe even economic sense. It's like food. Shifting from conditions of scarcity to conditions of ease and superabundance creates whole new parameters and vectors and puzzles.
Once upon a time you cherished and protected your porn stash. These days there's no reason to, since, if you're ever bored, you can just do a fast web-sweep and turn up tons of free and new stuff. This seems to mean that where, in the past, people kind of protected and catered to their tastes and fetishes, these days people are more whimsical. You try stuff out, you're curious, you look into things. Maybe you stumble into something that you find alluring that you'd had no idea about before. ("Waterbondage" -- who knew?)
Anyway, it's a whole new relatioship to porn. I suspect the analogy to food is a useful one. In the past the challenge was getting enough to eat. Plus we're biologically programmed to search out sweets, salt, and fat, and to gorge when we get the chance. We're biologically programmed to contend with circumstances of scarcity. When that changes -- when we're in a world of cheap superabundance instead -- it's great, but it's also bewildering. We aren't really biologically equipped to deal with it. We'll gorge, search out sweets, and then do it over and over again -- and then wonder what's going wrong as we bloat up and become unhealthy. You can't trust your instincts any longer. Yet that's hard. Instead of applying yourself to finding nourishment, you find yourself applying yourself to the near-impossible task of managing your instincts.
Same with porn, I suspect. Guys especially are programmed to sniff around for arousing material. When it's scarce, that's easy and fun to do -- there are always barriers to encounter and overcome, which guys also seem to like. When the barriers come down and the flood overwhelms us, we flail. It's what we crave, but it's everywhere, it's too much, yet we can't help ourselves. And as a consequence some guys grow addicted. Other guys contend by semi-blanking out on it. And even if you enjoy the whimsicality of it, nothing seems to count or matter the way it once did. It's there, it's easy, but it isn't special any longer. It's even a little un-manning. We like encountering barriers and working our way past them, after all. I gather from young guy friends that they feel almost impotent in the face of all the easy porn.
So, to bring the system alive again, off you go looking for some new hit ....
Anyway, the economics of this are obvious. The web has made porn a very tough business. Since so much of it is available for free, how do you induce guys to spend any money at all on it? And since there's so much competition, profit margins for those trying to make money have almost vanished. How to keep up with the latest fads? And there's a lot of pressure to push boundaries -- to feature anything that will snag attention for a few seconds.
Ferocious!
Posted by: Michael Blowhard at Feb 15, 2007 11:47:26 AM
Call me clueless, as I have very little direct knowledge of pornography.
Well this explains how TC gets so much reading done in a day.
Posted by: Josh at Feb 15, 2007 12:01:39 PM
