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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
the answer is not economic, it's psychological.
other folks have touched on the answer (ahem) but it's quite simple: finding pornography on the internet, that is, seeking, judging, deciding, "consuming" is a proxy for sexual conquest.
whether you're in a relationship, or you have some detractor that prevents you from seeking sex in the real world, the seeking of pornography satisfies a primal urge.
it gets more complicated when you get into preferences/fetishes/etc. (e.g. how many women with red hair do you think are on that disc?) but even then, see above. it's the chase and then the catch.
Posted by: mike at Feb 15, 2007 12:24:10 PM
(1) Don't confuse the pornonomics of movies with the pornonomics of photos. Six dvds of pictures (that is an enormous number of pictures) have near-infinite replay value, and can be produced fairly cheaply; six dvds of movies have only medium replay value, and are not at all cheap to produce.
(2) Technical change seems to be porn-biased. A grainy film from the '60s is not nearly so... pornographic... as a film from the '00s. So we have not been continuously accumulating pornography at the rate that Playboy has accumulated back-issues.
(3) The mystery that needs to be solved is not "why do people pay for pornography" but "why do a very, very small number of people pay for pornography"? Explaining the existence of outliers requires less rigor than explaining the normal behavior; there will always be outliers. For example, someone perusing the last few decades of quantum physics literature might wonder, "Why do so many people cultivate an understanding of advanced mathematical analysis?" This isn't as large a puzzle when you realize that we are talking about a tiny tail of the distribution of porn-users.
(4) Storage costs for goods need to be calculated in a way that includes storage risks. Granaries are a cheap way to store grain only if no one comes and robs my granaries. CDs are a cheap way to store porn only if my girlfriends don't make me throw them out.
Posted by: asfqer at Feb 15, 2007 12:37:08 PM
All this focus on pornography might be missing the point. While "I buy Playboy for the articles" is a hackneyed old line, the fact remains that the magazine does run interesting and thought-provoking articles and interviews, albeit more in past decades than today. It's difficult to get access to past issues, especially since libraries rarely carry Playboy. These digital archives are very useful for anyone who wants to research past articles and interviews, though of course the cost of doing so is high.
Posted by: Peter at Feb 15, 2007 12:46:02 PM
I think the supply side question is also interesting: why is there so god-awful much out there for free?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 15, 2007 1:16:43 PM
I think people are missing the question about money. It's like real women, whether dates or prostitutes: the more money you spend the higher quality you get. So men who pay for porn feel like they are getting higher quality women who are exclusively theirs. The very act of spending money makes the women valuable.
Even if the free porn contains beautiful women, the fact that it's free makes the women cheap and easy, and men lose interest.
Posted by: palmer at Feb 15, 2007 1:33:21 PM
"Lesbian Motorcycle Bondage" 933,000 hits on Google!
Posted by: Tom at Feb 15, 2007 2:22:06 PM
1) I think the market for playboy material is substantially different than the market for wanking material. I suspect the people who buy these DVDs do so for much the same reason you might buy a coffeetable book about the beetles or other sorts of retrospective collectable material.
2) I think many men get a certain kick out of coming to possess new pornography. There is a certain objectifying thrill in gaining control of new pornography. I mean why do I save porn to my harddrive even though all the free porn on the internet means I almost never go back to look at it?
Posted by: logicnazi at Feb 15, 2007 3:04:43 PM
"I have very little direct knowledge of pornography."
"Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?"
Question answered, Question asked.
As others have mentioned, who the hell wants to watch the same porn over and over? I don't even want to see the same girl more than once or twice.
I am always a little surprised that so many people pay so much for it. There might be enough supply for free to cover 24/7 viewing of new material. I realize it's not trivial to get it, but it's not rocket science either. Well anyways, those people subsidize my free viewing so thanks to them.
Posted by: Reticent Man at Feb 15, 2007 3:30:35 PM
good article
Posted by: 312 at Feb 15, 2007 4:08:49 PM
1) When you want it, you *really* want it, you aren't rational at all, and care little about price.
2) When you don't want it, you don't want to see it or think about it. Bargain deals are unappealing. Also, keeping stockpiles of porn is extremely distasteful to many, even on unobtrusive discs.
3) There is no resale market for used pornography.
4) Usually people like variety and would get sick of a gazillion issues of one magazine. Also, if people had a huge amount of content in a convenient form (discs), they would binge, and consume it very quickly, which would negate the cost benefits.
Posted by: Giovanni at Feb 15, 2007 4:40:01 PM
very good.
Posted by: 123 at Feb 15, 2007 4:43:19 PM
I would say that storage costs are a significant feature in answering why pornography isn't bought in bulk.
If your girlfriend/wife/mother(!) finds your collection of 30 images, you will have some explaining to do. If they find your collection of 32 000 images, including all sorts of wierd fetishes that were included in the bulk purchase that you haven't sorted out yet... let's just say you may have more of a problem.
Posted by: doctorpat at Feb 15, 2007 5:12:21 PM
I have to admit that I'm another male who doesn't get the economics of porn at all. On the net, the problem seems much more in avoiding it than finding it. And do people really give out their credit card number to sketchy porn sites?!?
Posted by: Slocum at Feb 15, 2007 5:13:49 PM
I watch the same 5 or 6 porn clips over and over (have for years).
But there is something about the quest for something better, sometimes I browse new stuff, it's sort of like new music, why do I spend all this time downloading and screening new albums and bands when I should just wait for the top 100 lists at the end of the year and that would cover about 95% of the good stuff?
I don't get guys spending all this time watching porn. For me, if I feel compelled to masturbate it's just something I want to do quickly and efficiently, two minutes tops, and get it over with.
Posted by: Eric Dorfman at Feb 15, 2007 9:15:48 PM
"And do people really give out their credit card number to sketchy porn sites?!?"
Is that as opposed to the ones that have a good reputation? ;)
But seriously, I'd say there's a certain level of irrationality involved in pornography, particularly for those people who devote not only their time but also money to the stuff. To some extent, there is a level of irrationality that's no crazier than going to the polls (or for that matter comparing pornography to voting). But the very nature of pornography suggests a continual dissatisfaction with current practices. Thus new girls, new scenes, new fetishes, etc.
As for why there is so much of it available for free, my guess is that there is genuinely a lot more in those members areas, and they figure that someone will manage to get hooked enough to even pay for the stuff. Maybe they've managed to trick young girls into doing it for free? Or porn makers don't mind losing a bit of money because they like what they do, and it's not a full-time job? Maybe it's like the newspaper industry, and having their influence out there is worthwhile as more people use web advertising, and the pay sites are the equivalent of the Times Select. I really don't get how the industry works.
Posted by: David at Feb 15, 2007 9:19:20 PM
As others have stated, pornography is far from scarce.
Giovanni says:
3) There is no resale market for used pornography
but that is dead wrong. As my gf just sold 6 19th century postcard sized pornographic lithographs at ~ $250 US each (you think it might have been used in the last 125+ years?) illustrates.
Top quality mags run above cover price (but not necessarily above in constant dollars). Large pieces retain value. Most depreciates significantly, but much remains in trade.
Posted by: rluser at Feb 16, 2007 2:49:39 AM
"Why don't they just buy a single dense disc of images and keep themselves, um...busy...for many years?"
Actually, enough people do exactly this to constitute a major headache for credit card companies. A common model for porn sites is to have weekly or monthly updates and charge some small amount/ month. But when you subscribe, you get instant access to all the archives. So for $20, you get maybe 5 years worth of the site's material. Your next $20 only gets you one additional month.
Many people would sign up for a "free trial" at a site--your money back after a week if you're not satisfied--download all they could, and then cancel. This angered both the sites and the credit card companies, which were then stuck with large chargeback costs.
I read about this quite some time ago, so I'm not sure what solution was worked out. I think epassporte (a paypal like service) is part of it.
Posted by: Nathan Benedict at Feb 16, 2007 3:01:32 AM
Can someone explain why comments on this topic are so abundant? I have not done a relative count but would risk a small wager that the number would be amongst the highest Tyler has got to date......
Posted by: Brent at Feb 16, 2007 3:37:26 AM
I agree with Blowhard: the similarity to our taste for fats and sugars is a helpful way to see it. The self-control required in this era of sugary, porny abundance is almost unbearable.
Propriety prevents the MSM from declaring these the years of porn. Youtube and Wikipedia are comparatively small parts of the web.
Posted by: Lee at Feb 16, 2007 4:41:55 AM
One who speaks of "porn" as a single presumably-fungible commodity is by definition one who is unfamiliar with the dynamics of the market.
Porn is not fungible. Material from one supplier is not a substitute for material from another supplier. Material from a previous era is not a substitute for material produced more recently (nor vice versa). And although in many markets a great deal of material is available for free, it is not a substitute for that which requires payment.
The type of miscellaneous porn featured in mainstream mags like Playboy isn't my thing, so I wouldn't presume to speak with pretended authority on the market for it. But I have no trouble presuming that its consumers are at least as segmented as consumers in the porn markets I'm more familiar with. And just as what they sell is not remotely a substitute for what I sell, nor is what I sell a substitute for what they sell.
It's not so much that free porn is necessarily of inferior quality (it isn't), as that it's simply _different_.
I'd be happy to go into details about how and why...but this is, after all, a family blog, and a precise answer would not be appropriate for such a forum.
Posted by: Matt at Feb 16, 2007 5:26:17 AM
I have to agree with many posters here that Playboy is not the same as porn in the modern sense of the word. Playboy is really just the NC-17 version of Maxim. Each magazine probably has an equal number of hot women in it, the difference is really in the fact that Playboy shows a little more of their goods.
So for that reason, I would suspect that potential customers for Playboy's CD archives are not porn hounds, but Playboy collectors, and thus much more willing to shell out cash money for a nice handy substitute to bookcases stuffed with back issues.
Posted by: Christina at Feb 16, 2007 1:07:00 PM
I have to agree with many posters here that Playboy is not the same as porn in the modern sense of the word. Playboy is really just the NC-17 version of Maxim. Each magazine probably has an equal number of hot women in it, the difference is really in the fact that Playboy shows a little more of their goods.
So for that reason, I would suspect that potential customers for Playboy's CD archives are not porn hounds, but Playboy collectors, and thus much more willing to shell out cash money for a nice handy substitute to bookcases stuffed with back issues.
Posted by: Christina at Feb 16, 2007 1:08:51 PM
Tyler Cowen, you are clueless.
Are you asking the same questions about music? If you can understand why people still compose new songs, and other people will pay to hear them, you have your answer.
As for the rest of you, you're working to hard. It's just porn.
Posted by: Warren at Feb 16, 2007 5:27:38 PM
I don't get guys spending all this time watching porn. For me, if I feel compelled to masturbate it's just something I want to do quickly and efficiently, two minutes tops, and get it over with.
Gee, if it took me two minutes each time I would never get any work done!
Posted by: Mike Hunt at Feb 16, 2007 6:52:52 PM
"I think the supply side question is also interesting: why is there so god-awful much out there for free?"
For the reasons mentioned above: people develop a tolerance for it, and at least for some people, there is an addiction associated with it.
At least when I was young (like 18, 19) the floodgates of porn had just been opened. I found what others have found--that where bare breasts had been very stimulating, soon it required showing quite a bit more. (Those of you who were raised as part of the porn generation may find this amazing--but once upon a time, naked breasts were so rarely seen by teenaged boys that it was profoundly stimulating for most.) Then it needed to show sex--but I reached a point at about 20 or so, like much of my generation, where the next step up was stuff that wasn't stimulating at all (at least for me): rape, bondage, and fetishes that I will not name. Some people don't stop--they keep going into really disturbing stuff that I wouldn't mind seeing banned.
As to why there's so much for free--some people get addicted to porn. They will find the need for more and harder material so powerful that they can't stop, even when they are spending hundreds of dollars a month on it.
Posted by: Clayton E. Cramer at Feb 16, 2007 8:59:12 PM
"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."
Er, um, you're observing the small fraction of the market that's buying new porn.
Porn is a BIG market with lots of market participants. I sell porn for a living (actually, I'm a middleman, a professional porn affiliate) and I can tell you for sure that the people who actually PAY for new porn are a tiny tiny minority of the people who like to look at porn.
Many of the rest have assembled their own substantial collections, and can't imagine (as commenters upthread have indicated) why anybody actually buys porn at new retail price. Others are too guilt-ridden, lazy, or otherwise constrained by storage problems or a hostile storage environment, so they rummage through the nearly infinite free porn on the internet and also marvel at the folks who pay.
The porn consumers who DO demand novelty -- despite being a minority of porn enjoyers -- demand a LOT of it, and are willing to pay for it. I don't think that's a sign of addiction, any more than insisting on fresh vegetables (rather than eating out of a pantry full of cans) is a sign of food addiction. It's merely a market preference, like any other.
If there's a question here, it's "Why don't more porn sellers sell in bulk to the collectors / hoarders, the way Playboy now does?" I can think of several reasons, but at the end of they day, I think it's a market failure; there's an untapped market there.
Possible reasons:
1) When you're in the business of selling new stuff, there's a fear that selling huge piles of old stuff could cannibalize your business.
2) Paperwork and copyright issues. When you're not Playboy, when you're in a traditionally fly-by-night industry, there's a risk that you don't have all the paperwork you need to sell thirty year old porn in today's hostile regulatory environment.
3) Fear of piracy. The content industry is notoriously afraid to release large libraries of content. I suspect everyone here knows the ins and outs of that argument and has an opinion on the merits of this concern. But be aware that piracy is traditionally a big issue in the adult industry -- bigger than for music -- and adult content producers tend to take a very un-relaxed view of it. Also, being always on the cutting edge of technology, adult producers understand better than the music industry that DRM does not help, much.
Posted by: Bacchus at Feb 17, 2007 10:08:35 AM
Here's a related question: Why don't Matt and Bacchus start a blog about their work? I for one would be very interested in learning about how the business side of the current porn industry works.
Posted by: jp at Feb 17, 2007 11:02:23 AM
I have a related question too: Why don't Matt and Bacchus give a fuck about women?
Posted by: jo at Feb 17, 2007 3:03:10 PM
"Why don't Matt and Bacchus give a f*** about women?"
Can't speak for Matt, but Bacchus does indeed. And Bacchus also blogs, extensively, though I don't see much about his work there. His blog seems more to _be_ his work.
Posted by: Fz at Feb 17, 2007 5:00:19 PM
Bacchus, thanks for the comments.
1) I think your 'Possible reasons' are very likely to be actual reasons.
2) That's a good point about why people buy new porn, and how they are a small portion of the market that none the less keeps it afloat.
3) In response to the person above who says that free porn is different than paid for porn: If you have bittorrent and know where to go, you can access just about any porn that exists in digital form. It doesn't not take long for someone to pirate the newest non-free porn. I would not be at all surprised if it were possible to right now to access enough porn for free online to watch 16 hours a day for 60 years.
4) That sounds like a brutal business Bacchus. I bet there was a time not long ago when self-imposed barriers to entry made it quite profitable, but now you make it sound so super competitive. And with all the piracy, it's like you have to produce 1000 cars just to sell one.
Posted by: Bill at Feb 17, 2007 8:07:01 PM
I agree with Warren above insofar as porn is analogous for to music. There's demand for both classic, familiar songs, and new undiscovered artists. The Playboy CD is analogous to a big boxed set.
Posted by: Anon at Feb 18, 2007 11:52:09 PM
The demand for pornography causes massive exploitation of children, women and men (in that order). None of you need it you know.
Posted by: jo at Feb 20, 2007 7:36:53 AM
Naturally, as the author of the blog Reflections on Playboy, I've put my two cents in.
Posted by: brian423 at Feb 21, 2007 8:25:51 PM
Can't speak for Bacchus, but the reason I don't start a blog about it is because my sub-field is unlikely to be of much insterest to people outside of it, and virtually everyone inside of it got tired of hearing my stories (and in many cases experiencing them) sometime around 2001.
As for jo...well, I suppose it depends on how you define "exploitation". I happen to be a firm believer in freedom of contract...whatever takes place between two uncoerced adults is fair game. I can't speak for every producer of every variety of porn, but none in my sphere have ever grabbed women off the street and held them down at gunpoint to force them to perform in front of a camera. I know I certainly haven't. And given that I'm paying girls between $50 and $250 per hour to sit in my studio doing things that they've been doing for years for free, I don't exactly have to intimidate anyone in order to get them to participate.
These girls are mostly college kids, and they can make more in a single two shoot weekend than they'd earn in a month of full-time work at any other job they'd be able to get before graduating. And not one has ever been asked to do anything she was remotely uncomfortable with...indeed, if they were uncomfortable with the details of my sort of content, I'd never have recruited them to begin with.
Posted by: Matt at Feb 21, 2007 9:41:33 PM
大家好，我是臺灣人，從臺灣一個人搬家來到美國，環境很陌生，感覺很孤單。以前在臺灣幾家知名的徵信社工作過，我是一個優秀的徵信工作者，希望早點找到適合自己的工作。希望通過貴站，認識更多的朋友。
Posted by: 謝文豪 at Apr 1, 2008 10:46:55 PM
College girls huh?
As a former artisan in the sex industry, your meager $250 dollars placed in MY hot panties would guarantee your face endure an iron mask, strung up by your balls affixed a swinging crane, in the event that I neglect my wooden spear for impaling you spread eagled, atop a roasting fire, and cast your body in a ditch thereafter three days pending your consumption ;)
Is that fair game?
Posted by: Adolf at Jul 8, 2008 10:57:32 PM
