The Enduring Conundrum of "Free" Porn

The internet has been a major contributor to the growth of problematic porn use, PIED, and similar issues.  But, here at PornHelp, we think another factor has been equally, and perhaps even more, significant: virtually unlimited amounts of porn on the internet are available for free.  As much as the internet made it possible to avoid the social stigma of being seen in public buying porn, free porn has enabled overuse and abuse by removing financial breakwaters to accessing vast oceans of porn videos.  Speaking from personal experience, we believe there’s a direct correlation between the ever-expanding availability of free porn on the internet and the intensification of a porn use problem, particularly among people too young to have a credit card or PayPal account.

Still, we’ve always wondered: why is porn available for free?  The bulk of porn (even so-called “amateur” porn) is produced as a commercial product.  It costs money to make even a low quality porn video, and that cost has to be recouped somehow.  So, how is it that enough porn is available to make it possible to binge on porn for years without ever spending a penny?  And, is there any hope of that changing?

Two posts on Quora, here and here, provide fascinating responses to those questions.  (Trigger warning: these Quora posts name porn sites and generally acknowledge the nature of porn content.)  One, written by Garion Hall, the owner of a popular porn site, explains trends in the industry at large.  The other, written by Sabrina Deep, a popular adult performer and writer, discusses what it really means for porn to be “free”.  Their conclusion, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, is that there’s no such thing as free porn…almost.  

To set the stage, we find it helpful to compare the porn industry to the music industry, which is in a period of massive transition brought on by internet connectivity and evolving methods of sharing digital media.  The music business has been very aggressive in tackling digital copying and sharing.  Yes, illegal sharing of music online continues to be a problem, but today it’s pretty hard to download a popular album from the internet “for free” without, at the very least, knowing you’re doing something you shouldn’t.  The music industry’s clampdown on digital sharing has managed to be pretty effective among average consumers because music distribution has historically been concentrated in the hands of a few large, well-financed players. The same is also true of the tv and movie industries, which have also pursued aggressive anti-piracy campaigns.  

In contrast, according to Hall and Deep, porn has historically been an industry of small producers who were not able, or willing, to mount an effective, coordinated response when digital sharing exploded and their content began appearing everywhere on the internet.  The industry has started to consolidate, notably in the form of the most popular “tube” sites coming under the control of the company Mindgeek.  But, says Hall, for the moment Mindgeek’s business model is itself based upon exploiting the weakness and lack of coordination among small porn producers   A significant portion of Mindgeek’s “tube” content consists of stolen videos, which it takes down only when asked.  Mindgeek’s idea, it seems, is to establish a dominant position as an online porn distributor, so that eventually any producer who wants adult content to reach a large market must pay Mindgeek for access to a “tube” site.  Deep also points out that Mindgeek controls two large porn production houses, making it “vertically integrated" and allowing it to promote its own content.  The upshot: someone is paying for that "free" porn, and it's probably the small-time porn producers whose videos are being pirated.

Ok, sure, you may be saying, that’s all well and good, but porn is still free for consumers, right?  That depends on what you mean by free, says Deep.  To begin with, pirating increases the costs of paid porn for anyone who opens their wallets to buy adult content.  But that's not all.  Porn sites - not just the “tubes,” all of them - earn revenues by bombarding users with advertising and mining users’ personal information.  Sites install cookies on consumers’ computers, and sell the information to aggregators and advertisers.  So, porn is “free” only in the sense that users are not forking over hard currency in exchange for pictures and videos.  But, those consumers are still parting with substitute currencies - namely, their attention spans and information about their erotic tastes, viewing patterns and buying habits. The same goes for porn found on social media platforms (which, if anything, have far more advanced analytics available to them, and more well-heeled customers lining up to buy their data).  And, of course, once porn users start moving away from “mainstream” porn and social media sites to more obscure corners of the internet, they risk malware infections and other nastiness.  So, says Deep, porn isn’t as “free” as it appears.

Deep and Hall predict more changes in store for the porn industry as digital sharing and a cumbersome digital copyright enforcement system continue to decimate the business model for small producers.  In time and in some ways, the porn industry seems likely to mature and come to resemble the music and film businesses.  At that point, perhaps producers and large distributors like Mindgeek will find a reliable way to charge for porn and prevent most users' access to pirated "free" content.  That development would certainly help prevent some problematic porn use, particularly in young people.

And yet, there is already an infinite catalog of porn out there, available for download by anyone comfortable with parting with their personal information and/or risking a malware infection (which is to say, just about any teenage boy alive).  The digital rights to all that porn are so widely dispersed, and its commercial value is so minimal, that it seems impossible the porn industry will ever want, much less manage, to retake control of it.  So, unfortunately, even if the porn industry installs effective controls on future porn videos, it seems unlikely the industry will ever rebuild financial barriers to accessing existing porn sufficient to make a meaningful dent in the growth of problematic porn use.