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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

I think the problem is that it's too difficult to pay for the porn compared to torrenting it. Nobody wants their credit card company to know they're looking at porn (as though they care), and nobody wants to deal with the shady auto-renew-every-month business model.

99c-per-video paid for with some generic account (paypal or google checkout -like) would make everyone's lives much easier. No strange charges for your bank to see, no remembering-to-cancel hassle, and cheap enough that you don't worry too much about the price. (And, nobody will pay the $30 for a one-month subscription, rip all 10 years of archives from your site, and post it to Usenet. If you want all 8000 back episodes, you pay $8000.)

They're still doing a lot better than Hollywood, though; at least there is no DRM.

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I think paying for porn is easier than torrenting it if you have any discrimination at all in what you're after.

How would a generic account be any better than a credit card? How about a pre-paid credit card? Unless the account is usable for purchases other than porn, it will look just as odd on a credit card statement / bank transfer etc. Paypal is a mess as it is, and even still Checkout is doing a poor job of competing with it.

I also suspect 99c videos wouldn't be competitive with current products. If we're talking impulse purchases here, such that free porn clip sites aren't doing it, I think there's something else going on. Porn vendors have to walk a tightrope: show enough of what's available to encourage the purchase, but not so much that the customer gets satisfaction too early. I think the way they prod the customer over the line is by promising a lot in return for the commitment. And of course, they're betting that the commitment lasts longer than is in the customer's best interests.

Most porn companies are registered (and listed on credit card statements) under innocuous-sounding names anyway, partly to prevent wives/girlfriends from finding out and partly so you don't remember to cancel your subscription.

I barely recognize most of the companies I purchase from on my CC statement, and they're non-porn. I always wondered if that was intentional, but it's definitely annoying. Of course companies like Amazon don't obfuscate their name, but many others do.

> I think paying for porn is easier than torrenting it if you have any discrimination at all in what you're after.

You sound like someone who has never used BitTorrent effectively!

I think bittorrent is most effective towards the head end of the distribution spectrum, rather than the tail, where you're more likely to see dead torrents with no seeders, presuming you can find a torrent at all.

Also, with BitTorrent, you can generally only search by name and not by genres or tags.

> Nobody wants their credit card company to know they're looking at porn (as though they care),

There's an interesting and testable hypothesis hiding behind that offhand remark: is there a legal market for information about who buys porn? Are people who buy porn differently creditworthy than people who don't? For example, maybe they have more money (more creditworthy), or poorer impulse control (less creditworthy), or less intelligence (makes it harder for them to pay but also harder to declare bankruptcy, dispute collections, etc.). Maybe there are other customers who would be interested in this data as well: health insurers, or auto insurers, or private investigators, or political or religious opponents. Or, obviously, competing porn merchants, who would love to have a list of leads who are already known to be willing to spend money on porn.

I have this vague memory of an article about how it turned out that people who bought "responsible" products like, I forget, in-wall house insulation or vinyl siding, were much more likely to pay their debts than people who spent money in strip clubs --- even when they were matched for income, age, and gender. Unfortunately my vague memory is not enough to retrieve this from a search engine.

People pay for porn? If there's one thing you can get terrabytes of for free on the internet with only the most rudimentary search skills, it's porn...of all flavors.

Right-click and save-as is the easiest way to get it. FLV extractors get the rest, and if anything is even slightly harder it's not like there aren't hundreds of thousands of other sites.

There's also the concern of just how securely these sites treat your credit card data. I know of one that ignores your "forget my card after this transaction" preference, and has you type your password in normal text field, and may possibly have led to fraudulent charges. Maybe this experience isn't typical but cough the user in question was hesitant to pay on other sites after that, even when the price would be totally reasonable.

You don't torrent porns but you go to porn version of youtube to watch it.

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