Fighting fire with (free and freely-contributed) fire
Susannah Breslin of The Reverse Cowgirl notes a fairly interesting watershed
Portfolio has an interesting article on the rise of YouTube and what it means to the adult movie industry, "Obscene Losses," by Claire Hoffman... The story focuses on YouPorn, the adult video sharing site where porn that wants to be free can be, and the challenge YouPorn and its cousins, like PornoTube, present to the adult movie industry's increasingly thwarted efforts to turn a profit in an era in which free online porn is everywhere. There are plenty of interesting facts and stats--according to the piece, YouPorn is the number one adult site in the world--and it follows Hoffman's hunt to find the man behind the dot-com that's giving Porn Valley a run for its money. While YouPorn has its problems--2257's among them--a visit to a porn set in the Valley makes it clear why the adult industry may fall to an entity that can't even figure out how to sell itself profitably.
Let's just say right up front that that most uploads by the almost exclusively anonymous YouPorn users seems to be clips from domestic and international industrial porn, and the bulk freelanced uploads are derivative of industrial stuff. But the trick is that none of the producers appear to benefit and even the host benefits only to the extent advertisers are willing to pay for the servers, bandwidth, and otherwise extremely low overhead costs that's all it really takes to operate such a site.
And here's another (admittedly sophmoric) trick: with nearly six billion people in the world, if only one in six thousand was exhibitionistic enough and otherwise had the means to participate in one clip a year for personal gratification and no compensation, and if all such clips were uploaded to YouPorn that would be nearly a million clips a year or one new clip approximately two times a minute, every minute, of every hour, of every day of the year.
Now lest that seem as ridiculous as, well, it *actually is,* the point isn't to guess how many uploads arithmetic could arbitrarily extrapolate, instead it's to bring home the point that if maybe 30-75 largely regurgitated uploads a day (if the last week is at all representative) is enough to teeter the porn industry's base (and, possibly, meet the porn "needs" for a substantial fraction of the online population) then an even mildly concerted effort by entirely willing amateurs and performance artists could pretty quickly crush what's been, frankly, a rustbelt/dinosaur/sunset industry. [*]
And in its place? Well, not surprisingly while there's still plenty of clips of "height/weight/age proportional" and otherwise idealized people engaged in ritual/stylized/fad porn antics there are substantial numbers of not-at-all proportionate people who are just not there to make a statement, or not to be a sideshow, or to accommodate "specialty" audiences but because they're enjoying something that the inventors of the Polaroid camera noticed almost immediately: capturing images of themselves and, where possible without repercussions, sharing them with others for personal gratification rather than economic gain. Or, put a little more bluntly, for some fraction of the population that is far *less* than my hypothetical one in six thousand recording still or moving images of one's self or one's partner makes sex more exciting than not recording them.
Anyway, I'm neither recommending nor requesting that anyone do so *but!* If one was already erotically disposed to make amateur images of themselves and/or their partners *and* one wanted to inconvenience those who make low-budget, cliche-ridden, worker-unsafe, performer-degrading industrial-style porn...
(Via Viviane of Viviane's Sex Carnival)
(Note for those who prefer to avoid such things, there's another voluntarily made and non-financially-compensated image of a nude torso with erect penis below the fold.)
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