egafd.com

Howdy folks,

I'm something of a "long time listener, first time caller" and I extend my humble apologies if i'm going over old ground here.

Now this delightful credit crunch we all hear so much about seems to be affecting all of us (I for one ever made a brief, ill-advised switch to a supermarket's own brand cheese spread, rather than the brand stuff for a while). Obviously, what with porn being further down on the list of essentials behind, mortgage, food, oyster card, cheese spreads etc some folk would obviously go without.

However, it seems it is stonkingly easy to obtain porn without subscribing to sites, thanks to numerous forums and rapidshare etc. Myself, I'm a capitalist pig-dog, so i'm none too keen on this approach, as i appreciate the work etc put in by performers, producers et al in order to put out your products. I'm never going to work for free, so why the dickens do these folk think it's ok to rob from the pornographically rich and show the world, like some smutty Robin Hood (hmm, maybe the Robin Hood analogy wasn't apt, he was a good guy wasn't he? And to think, he did all that despite being a fox)

I guess what this rambling is trying to say is, do these evil sites do lots of damage to the industry, and are there a band of merry men (alright, stop it now) that fight to prevent these things.

Would love to hear some thoughts.

Cheers

Myself and an accomplice managed to get a couple of places shut down. We also collated enough info to get a couple of huge places shut down if other webmasters would have joined in at the time, but alas they seemed to think having an whole site rip on these places was good advertising for them.

Given how time consuming it was, and the lack of effort other webbies were prepared to put in, we got to the point of fuck it, we'll just lookout for our own stuff.

You can't stop these places existing, a new one pops up all the while, but some resistance was better than none.

I'll add the webbies I refer to were mostly in the US.

Yes I think in the long term the sharing of porn stuff will do enormous damage to the industry. To repeat myself from a previous post, the problem is we don't have the merchandising potential that the Music and Film industries have, to screw extra money out their product. We also haven't the legal clout to attack the pirates effectively.

On the other hand, I still believe there are consumers who want to be "Part" of something, eg be a member of a proper site for example. The reality may not be as bad as it first appears. In my opinion there are 3 "Meercats":

1/Millions of adolescent boys, who no credit cards or money, but form a large amount of so called, "Traffic" to porn websites. Like a huge swarm of locusts they strip bare any trailers, freebies, pics before moving onto the torrent sites and busily downloading everything they can find, including key registers,viruses,trojan horses,root kits, foolishly believing their "Norton Antivirus" will preserve the integrity of their parents PC.

2/Millions of people WITH access to forms of payment, who simply refuse to pay for anything on the internet, whether it be songs, software,tv shows or porn.

3/ A growing market of normal people who use the internet like any other shopping experience and accept that they must pay for whatever good or service they require. These people wouldn't be caught dead on a torrent site, if for no other reason that their computer could be compromised.

These people represent the future for membership websites and I believe their numbers will grow and grow (Hopefully)

I agree with what has been said here but you seem to forget about all the honest consumers who have been conned over the years.
I was conned several times before the internet was born so now the majority of porn I buy is over the counter stuff that I can physically see.
Just as there are pirate users there are also dodgy traders/websites.

You are absolutely right! I was conned too. It makes me really angry because this was the norm some years ago. I remember I joined a porn site in 2002 and the bastards kept debiting my card, in the end I had to cancel the card to stop them. I never joined another site. I expect there are millions of people who've had similar experiences and it reflects on all the honest sites that exist now.

As usual a few greedy crooks ruin it for everyone else. I have to say now I think things have greatly improved, throughout the internet including in the porn world.There was a time when people were worried about buying ANYTHING on the internet but it's changing for the better.

I almost agree Jim.

The trouble is a quick look at the posts here complaining about sites going tits up, not being updated, etc. etc. shows that there are still some who see porn as a very quick way to earn a few quid and fuck off not giving a toss to the damage they continually cause.

The other thing to note is that when complaints are made there are some here who instantly jump to the defence of the industry, supporting the con and I am getting more and more convinced it's not just through ignorance.

If the industry are prepared to support the con how can anyone trust that the supporters, who have their own sites, won't take the same con option themselves further down the road?

All the UK sites I can think of who went tits up owing people outstanding subscription time didn't fuck off after making a quick buck...they either went broke, their wife found out, their boss found out or they got separated from their tame model!

In this business, if you make some money you carry on updating or you sell the business on to someone who will. No one makes a quick buck - too much up-front expense.

There`s greedy bastards on both sides. I`d rather pay a decent price for a web site and get porn I can download quickly without risk of a few hundred virus but then I`m a silly bastard who`s joined a few sites that`re listed here and got things like

An blog that hadn`t been posted in for 6 months, promising new content, instead of a members area.

Galleries with the right mouse button disabled so you can`t download the pics in the members area, and movies lasting a whole 90 seconds. This wasn't a trial, this was the fucking members area.

And a members area that had been abandoned and consisted of galleries of
[x] s
May only seem like about 20 quid a month but when you`re getting fuck all for it......