The online magazine Mashable has looked at the porn trends of recent years and comes to the conclusion that a generation of consumers that have grown up with free porn might be the very generation that will rescue pornography as a business. Digital natives have become the largest group of paying customers for the industry.
Drawing on the experience and insights of VENUS partner xHamster, Mashable magazine has analyzed the current situation of paid content pornography. The result was that precisely those who grew up with the idea that they did not have to pay for pornography are now the most willing to pay for their porn.
Alex Hawkins, VP at xHamster, clearly states: »A few years ago there were predictions that Millennials would be the death of the industry.« But that assumption has changed radically: digital natives, who grew up with file sharing and tube sites, have become the largest group paying for porn – though they do often opt for new types of distribution and sometimes new types of content as well.
It is true that a large number of people – especially men – are completely satisfied with free content and hence don’t look any further. But among those who pay, millennials and women are the most generous group.
The Mashable author tries to understand the reasons behind this, and in the course of his article he also briefly tells the history of online pornography over the last 20 years. Before the emergence of tube sites like Pornhub and Xvideos and amateur communities like xHamster and Imagefap, the annual turnover of the US porn industry was estimated at $10 to $14 billion. In the meantime, it has collapsed to about 5 billion. An immense loss.
But why is a counter-trend setting in? Why do people still buy at all when everything seems to be available for free? Mashable speculates: Is it because older customers are still buying? Do many of the remaining buyers lack technological skills? Or are the sales essentially purchases from fetish fans who obey their dominatrixes on femdom sites? Or are they highly customized fan site concepts particularly effective?
According to Mashable, all this may play a role, but more importantly, it seems that there is a fundamental trend away from the freebie culture on the web. Due to the large subscription-based streaming portals such as Netflix and Spotify and the changed business model for apps and software, which are also often perceived as easy to buy and renew via the Playstore or iTunes, Internet users have become accustomed to the convenience as well as the pricing policies of paid content. Dating apps like Tinder, games such as Fortnite, design software from Adobe, spellchecker programs such as Grammarly – everywhere, millennials have become effortlessly convincible to make purchases. Even the newspapers, which have been struggling for years and lost much of their value, have by now often found business models to turn their readers into paying customers again.
Mashable also points to a Forbes investigation that found that digital natives are generally less price-sensitive and are more willing than older generations to pay a premium for content they care about when it served to them conveniently and immediately.
At xHamster, the Millennials already provide half of the paying premium customers. At its major competitor Pornhub, the age group is even said to account for two-thirds of the paying customers. According to Mashable, porn sites such as MYLF and Team Skeet also report a similar age structure among their paying customers.
However, due to the increasing number of independent producers and clip artists, it is becoming more difficult to obtain an overview of sales, target group sizes and similar data. It is therefore difficult to say whether these trends only apply to the larger platforms with sophisticated subscription models.
So the Mashable article also concludes with voices that are skeptical about whether this development can really be identified so clearly. After all, data collection is basically not easy in an industry where customers traditionally value discretion and maximum anonymity.
What remains clear, however, is that pornography today is much more diverse and varied. The trend away from the classic studio model has led to a strengthening of performers who build on their own name as a brand and create increasingly individual porn content. Clip and cam sites offer numerous opportunities to build up a following and to find or expand this following in the so-called mainstream via social media accounts. Free movies of these performers on Pornhub or xHamster are therefore often only a hook, after all, the product is not the individual film, but the promised closeness to the star. If you, as an artist or producer, understand this phenomenon well, you can expect immense sales, far away from traditional structures.
And so there are many who have now come to terms with piracy and tube sites and are using the formerly harmful market participants to their own advantage in order to appeal to a larger audience and win them over. Although only a part of the viewers can be converted into paying customers, at least a significant proportion of the digital natives seem to be using this strategy.
You can find the Mashable article here.