The State of The Adult Industry – Piracy

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  • #3676 Reply
    naweed
    Guest

    Hey guys!

    There’s been a lot of chat on some other ofrums recently regarding the state of the adult industry, and what the next steps for some people are and how A should work with B ect ect… Well I want an open discussion on something that is effecting all of us Piracy! – I am not talking here about all studios, I am talking each and every affiliate, studio, affiliate network everyone!

    There are some great guys like PornGuardian and the teams who work within studios fighting to take down videos on a daily basis, but if I am being honest it looks like everyone is fighting a little bit of a loosing battle, since it takes less time to upload a video than it does to find and fill out a DMCA request for one to be removed.

    I honestly think a bit of the blame is we don’t work together at all on this issue, literally nobody does, If studio A finds its videos pirated with studio C,D,E,F,G,H ect’s videos, it has not got the time to alert each studio before moving on and reporting the next lot. (and that’s even if they have the contact details of the other sites).

    I think we need to find someway as a group effort (and I mean sponsors and affiliates here) to take a punt and actually try and rise up against this spurge of free porn.

    Here’s how i see it… if someone arrives on this site > eegay.com < they have access to hours and hours of free material from just about EVERY studio I can think of… That’s not just lost sales for the studios listed, its lost sales for all sites, that person will never buy with the amount of free content they have available here. So in this instance affiliates loose out as people will aim to get to these sites over blogs and ethical tubes, the sponsor who has been pirated looses out, and thirdly the other sponsors in the niche of that sponsor also loose out as they will have customers turning to long free porn instead. A sponsor might feel happy when 90% of their videos are removed online but with site B,C,D,E ect is still pirated sales wont increase as the porn is still free for people.

    So whats the solution?? Lets have some productive discussion…

    I see the solution as some form of webmaster reporting site where everyone including affiliates and sponsors can report known URLs for piracy and tag other studios that are pirated there also, maybe even with a auto DMCA sender or something alike, and a way to mass report DMCA to google to have offending URLs removed from search results. But that could only work if everyone was on-board.

    Can’t wait to hear from you all, but think we need to tackle issues as a group and this is one of the biggest facing us all right now!

    #3677 Reply
    parviz
    Guest

    I think that’s exactly the problem, there has never been a solid joint effort which could have funded a legal way of fighting back. Sadly the industry has always been very fragmented and never joined together.

    Has piracy gotten worse or better though?

    #3678 Reply
    DOC
    Guest

    Unfortunately, there will never be a solution to this when affiliates and studios are in a race to the bottom.

    Ask yourself this, are you willing to stop promoting a site that sells for you if you know they support piracy?
    Even though a concerted effort might make them change course and might lead to you making double that with them in a year, are you willing to lose out on a little cash in the meantime?

    Probably not.

    Our best performing site does so well for us because they actively chase down and take action against pirates. They watermark images, they email bloggers using something they don’t approve of and give them a warning, they cancel accounts (members and affiliates) when they find something has been shared. They probably spend just as much time working on fighting piracy as they do making videos.

    As a result of that, they sell more than any other, because their work isn’t already out there all over the Internet within ten minutes of being published.

    If we want to change things and start improving this business for us, we need to start being more assertive.
    We need to stop promoting studios we know are advertising on tubes they know support piracy, or give everything away, or are working in ways that damage the business.
    We need to stop making do with scraps from companies ignoring piracy – why promote a site when 60% of their videos are already out there for free?
    We really should be applying certain criteria to studios in the same way they make demands of us. This is a partnership after all, and without us they wouldn’t be where they are.

    Think about this… we agree to a long list of things just to promote these sites. Why are we not asking for anything back but the check? I think it’s about time we started making clear that if a studio is going to look the other way when they put ads up on pirate sites or abusive blogs, or refuse to invest any money at all in fighting something we should all be fighting, we’re not going to promote them.

    There are studios out there working hard to fight for themselves and us and aren’t just interested in making an extra $100 this month at the cost of everyone else in the industry, we should be prioritizing them over others.

    MRA, can I suggest perhaps creating a sticky thread in the way you have for affiliate cookie length etc?
    I think it would be useful to know which studios are supporting piracy and in which ways, perhaps then if people know they’re unlikely to make any real money with them they’ll stop trying?

    Everyone knows that a certain company I don’t need to name is renowned for supporting piracy, giving stuff away, advertising on the worst blogs and promoting through the worst avenues damaging to our industry, but no one here is willing to stop promoting them for a year to show them they need us.

    Until affiliates are ready to do that, nothing is going to change.

    #3679 Reply
    Pyewacket
    Guest

    I agree. Let’s promote those studios that play fair. I don’t care how big or small they are. If they are not supporting the piracy, I will be supporting them. It’s isn’t just a matter of what is legal in all these different juridictions. It’s a matter of what is morally correct. (odd to use that with porn, but this is marketing, not porn.) It’s simply good business and honesty. Sign me up.

    #3680 Reply
    naweed
    Guest

    We would definitely say worse from our end with our adult site, but saying that we are a growing studios, but in the last week we have submitted 700 DMCA requests daily, and that’s on top of the mountain of stuff that PornGuardian removes. It takes hours and hours of manpower, and really I know this sounds crazy (or paranoid) but if we stop for a few days sales tank to very scary low levels, we go on a new piracy sweep and sales return, so in our eyes yes its increasing. And it takes around 1 hour for our videos to end up everywhere after releasing a new scene (and its very same timeframe with others. Biggest problem is finding a way to stop pirates creating a new account to get the content again when they use VPN’s ect to mask who they are.

    DOC I actually do not promote a lot of sponsors on my personal network for this very reason.

    Small problem with this one… as much as I agree, every ad network provides ads to the pirates, and sponsors need to be able to but traffic from somewhere, i.e. if I buy ads for my site, they will somewhere be shown against the side of a pirate video, but I have no real say in where they are shown, and 90% of the time I do not know exactly what domains are showing, no matter whats on those pages. Some sites are worse than others for this.

    I really do see your point, but also, I feel that while killing piracy is partly on some studios heads, the most money is being made by pirates on selling file hosting sites memberships as affiliates, we remove 10x the videos from filesmoster.com as we do from tubes, and the tubes that we do mainly are the ones we know will never remove.

    My biggest point is there is a lot of closed studios in the past 5-10 years, and all thier content is no longer being actively removed by them, in addition to a bit of a boycot that you mention I honestly think we need to actively work together to remove all this shit thats currently online. I was at a site recently that was 100% pirated videos on a private tube, a lot from closed studios, and a lot from active studios, based in ukraine, it had 10,000 videos there, and Host / pirate wont answer to DMCA… it has more videos than most of the biggest gay porn sites (maybe all??) so why would anyone every buy a membership anywhere if there is all that there for free, including some of the latest work from all studios.

    I have been thinking on this and googles DMCA system de-lists from thier index when URLs are reported, maybe if we created a group, where all studios agreed they would allow the group to act on thier behalf, and terminally delist whole pirate sites from google, we can royally hit pirates where it hurts, in the traffic department, because sadly unless sites are 80% of URLs in the google remove database google will not fully delist.

    I know everyone loves to blame the PornHub/Redtube group for everything, but believe me there are much worse out there, mindgeek will remove a video within hours to a day of it being uploaded, other sites which are literally 100% quality free gay porn which never answer to DMCA ect are the biggest problem in my views, and I am talking the sites that rank pages 1-5 in google for “gayporn”.

    Since this page isn’t indexed in google I am happy to list here the main pirates we deal with on a regular basis (mainly going to filesmonster, which we are slowly winning against) a lot are not pirate sites but tubes we need to remove from regularly, but others are 100% pirates.

    #3681 Reply
    Jem007
    Guest

    We’ve found fighting this from the take down end only is fruitless.
    For over 2 years now we have been watermarking all our videos to trace the original downloader, and it does tend to give us some breathing space (instead of videos being pirated in hours we now sometimes go weeks at a time before another user comes along and downloads a ‘catch up’ batch and shares them all at once) This has almost eliminated the casual sharing, and now we are left with the professional sharers who always join using stolen card details… meaning we now need to bring the processing companies into the fight against piracy as well to try and cut off that supply.
    I would highly recommend autograph.xvid.com/ to anyone wanting to limit piracy at the source. The cost is not much higher than normal CDN costs and they supply the CDN and the watermarking…

    #3682 Reply
    Maxsi
    Guest

    It’s a good point and PornGuardian also offer a “Digital Fingerpint” system, but unfortunately when you discover the pirate your video is already in the pirate market and duplicated 100 times… Some also re-encode video they pirate to add their own logo covering yours for example and the new encoding destroy the fingerprint.

    We are working on our side on a “members behaviors analysis” tool to prevent pirates to download our videos… It’s in “beta” now but basically we know a pirate never like / comment / read text / visit models page / faq etc… So we flag some members as “suspicious” because they only login when a new video is release and only download as much as they can…

    #3683 Reply
    naweed
    Guest

    I know digital fingerprinting ect can work to help, but I have found multiple videos in my current search across many domains, mainly from the “pro pirates”

    But to give the affiliates and other sponsors who are not aware an idea of the current situation, I have been databasing working pirate videos from pirate tubes, (not porn hub ect) but tubes that rank in the top 10 pages of google (for major search terms i.e. gay hunk, gay porn, gay twinks) and are tubes with what I assess to be 80% pirate content with videos anywhere from 15 mins to over an hour of length, and I currently have a database of over 2 million URLs that have a active pirated video on them. Not only this but that’s what i have found in the past 48 hours, and only from a selection of around 10-15 sites, and I still have around 65 to database just from this list.

    I will of course contact all sponsors after I have completed the current list and if in support will (if studios support) submit mass DMCA requests to google on thier behalf (via their tool, and surely via an outsourced team from india) to get these sites at least de-listed from google.

    My biggest point to both affiliates and sponsors is these people are stealing your sales (in lost sales) + YOUR TRAFFIC! If we all act as an industry and these people do not appear in top 10 pages of google then we will all see more organic traffic from google as the pirates loose theirs, the good bloggers will see some more traffic coming in.

    I have no intention of taking on Mindgeek et al. I know a lot of people think they are the worst thing for the industry, but honestly there are professional pirates on their own networks of sites with 1000x the pirate content of pornhub, and unlike pornhub they are un-contactable to remove the offending material.

    I am donating a full week of my time at current to completely database the offending material that is in the top 100 results in google, I know that wont be enough, but I feel that it could be a good start as a test to a system for actually fighting back, at least from a mass delisting from google is concerned. In a small fragment test on 1000 URLs from studios I have agreed with to test this method 988 URLs were removed from google within 40 minutes and DMCA was listed in the relevant public databases. So as an initial proof of concept it has a 98.8% success rate… If the same result can be achieved on mas It could change the face of the industry!

    These pirates rely heavily on google traffic to make money from ads and files monster refferal incomes ect, if we can at least cut this off it is a good start.

    #3684 Reply
    jim
    Guest

    I don’t know why this topic made me think of CHATURBATE but not all competition is illegal , the state of the industry? , keeping that regular 9 to 5 job and learning to make your own meals at home instead of eating out!

    I contact studio’s when I see something suspect but often times it’s the studio themselves passing out samples to generate traffic … meanwhile VIRUSES are at an all time high!

    most of the piracy I see going on all seems to lead to FILE SHARE SITES so if there was a way to POLICE uploaded content better?

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