I got an email over the weekend from someone who’d been to my site Feminist Porn Guide. They were unhappy that there was no free porn to be had on that site. “Everything is pay to access. I am concerned that there is nothing available for free,” they wrote. “There are numerous Tube sites offering standard porn. Are there sites like that out there for people?”
I replied to that email but I thought I’d also blog about this as well because it needs to be addressed.
I’ll say it up front: Porn tube sites are the bane of this business and they are slowly killing it. Porn tube sites provide entire movies for free to anyone who wanders by, without caring who is watching them or how old they are. Many of the major tube sites were built primarily using pirated content until they got so much traffic they were able to demand that established content creators give them movies for free in exchange for exposure. Sites like Pornhub actually make a shitload of money from paid advertising; the sites have plenty of users and people now pay to get their ads in front of all those eyeballs. But Pornhub doesn’t really care if the content they’re showing is licensed or not. Indeed, they’ve just set up a system that makes it much harder for owners of content to get pirated stuff taken down via DCMA forms.
I recently undertook an experiment with For The Girls on Pornhub. I thought I’d see what would happen if I put a video up there. Pornhub has a system where commercial sites can upload their own videos as promo and put up related advertising – but they take their cut via affiliate programs. Thus, I get to upload content to be viewed for free by Pornhub’s customers, they put up advertising next to it and they take 50% of any sales made. Pornhub demanded I upload 3 movies a week, at a minimum of 8 minutes per movie. 8 minutes.
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Let me come in here and say that from the beginning, internet porn has operated on the idea of giving consumers free samples. But it was always considered to be a form of advertising and the idea was to keep the good stuff for the paying customers. Unfortunately, the desire for increased traffic saw this idea get pushed by the wayside. We went from softcore tease to full-on hardcore, low quality pics to massive jpegs, 30 second videos to… 8 minutes. That can easily be an entire scene.
Anyway, I had no intention of giving this tube site any of my good content. Why would I, it’s a free tube site? Thus, I uploaded a relatively old, low quality video. We got massive amounts of traffic – like tens of thousands of visitors – and made about 2 sales.
People who visit tube sites don’t buy porn. And tube sites seem to have made people think that all porn should automatically be free, all the time. Because it’s only porn and it’s not like it’s art or anything, right?
Funnily enough, this craptacular business model has not been embraced by people who make feminist porn.
Wondering why there isn’t a feminist porn tube site is kind of like wondering why the supermarket isn’t giving away more free food. The simple fact is, it’s commercially stupid. Why would any feminist porn producer be in a hurry to give away their films that they’ve spent a lot of money and effort to create?
How can a porn producer make money if they just give their work away for free? How can they pay their performers in an ethical way when there is no money to pay them? How will they pay their crew and make a living from it? How will they afford to make more positive, feminist porn if they don’t get a return on their investment?
On top of that, feminist porn is often a boutique industry. We’re not churning out videos daily like some of the major porn companies. It can take time to craft a good film and we can’t afford to just throw them away by putting it up on a tube site for free. At Bright Desire, I’m only managing to make and edit one video a month because I’m a one-woman business. In theory, I could have every one of my videos up on a tube site in a few weeks. So then… why would anyone join Bright Desire? How would I get the site into profit (it’s still in the red)?
I’ve written about this before. See:
Why paying for good porn helps everyone
and
The commercial realities of feminist porn
This isn’t about the ins and outs of copyright law and what constitutes “piracy” or “stealing”. This is about realizing that porn is a commercial product that costs money to produce and that employs people in its production. And if a product makes a loss, the product won’t be made anymore and people lose their jobs.
If you believe that sexually explicit videos shouldn’t be bound by this commercial reality, by all means go and enjoy amateur porn. There are a lot of exhibitionists out there who are happy to share their sex lives with the world and good for them. But if you want to see well-made feminist porn and you believe a product is worth supporting – like fair trade coffee or organic vegetables or locally made crafts – then support it with your money.
Lecture aside, feminist porn creators DO provide sample galleries and videos to those who are curious about their work. You’ll find samples on the tours of the major paysites and they also create promo pages with some free content. Visit my Free Porn Fiesta category for some examples. Or you can check out the various categories in the linklist section (hint: it’s under the “free porn” section in the menu at the top of this page).
So go ahead and enjoy the free samples. Just don’t expect to get the whole thing for free. And if you want better, more realistic and ethical porn, be prepared to pay for it. That’s the ethical and polite thing to do.
Pic: Pirate flag of Stede Bonnet from Wikimedia Commons. And the film Pirates – the most expensive porn film ever made, It came out just before the tube sites got going.
Edit 8th Aug. I’ve just realised that there is 1 feminist porn tube site: Courtney Trouble’s Queer Porn Tube. This site does offer a lot of free porn but it’s different from the usual tube sites because most of it is user-submitted amateur content with some promo videos added. The purpose of this site is to encourage the growth and diversity of queer porn from a community perspective. All the ads are for Courtney’s own sites.