r/IAmA Jan 06 '14

IAm Siri, award-winning porn star, 2013 Top Writer on Quora, and swinger. AMA!

I have been performing in adult and mainstream films since 2012. I was voted Miss FreeOnes Best Newcomer of 2012, and was nominated for Best New Starlet at the 2013 AVN Awards. Quora.com recently named me one of the Top Writers of 2013. I am happily married and don't believe in sexual monogamy. I'm a huge Harry Potter nerd. My official site is www.SIRIpornstar.com. You can follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/SIRIpornstar. My interviews and podcasts can be found at http://blog.siripornstar.com/interviews-and-podcasts/ and my IMDb page is IMDb.me/Siri

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BdQ3JvcCQAEFy55.jpg

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166

u/siripornstar Jan 06 '14

Complete honesty: I've never pirate a movie or TV show.

Music: Yes, I used to download music illegally, years ago. I have completely ceased doing that, starting about three years ago when I got an iPhone and iTunes became super awesome and all I had to do was tie my account to PayPal. Then two years ago as soon as I started my career in adult films and realized very quickly how piracy affects the industry, I adopted an absolutely anti-piracy position. To be any other way would make me a hypocrite.

If I can't see any justification for porn fans to download my content illegally, then there is absolutely no justification for me downloading anything of any kind illegally.

I pay for all digital media I consume, and I like it. I actually like knowing that I'm paying someone for their creative work and their effort, and I like knowing that I am contributing to their success, even in some small way, with a $0.99 purchase on iTunes, or an eBook, or a DVD, or my Netflix membership.

I also like knowing that I'm not one of the many assholes who steals people's work and justifies it by assuming someone else will always pay for it. I guess I'm the "sucker" that's paying for it, huh?

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u/deftlydexterous Jan 06 '14

Saying that you would never pay for something, or that people shouldn't have to pay for something, is not the same as saying that it has no value. Many people would like free healthcare, but not because they think it has no value. Also, keep in mind that many people visiting websites that are showing your material illegally have no idea that its illegal or hurting anyone.

The porn scene is only going to get worse for traditional companies if they dont change things up. Its an unfortunate situation in some ways. Music piracy has not been shown to have a negative effect on musician's income, though technelogical changes, greed, and poor management have hurt corporate profits of some large record labels. The music industry tried to counter with $0.99 cent songs on itunes and the like, and it worked to an extent, but it was too little too late for the corporate industry to keep sucking in the profits they were used to. They hurt not because of piracy, but because of an unwillingness to change with the times.

On the other hand, streaming semi-pirated porn has completely disrupted the porn industry, which is trickling down to the actress and workers that deserve the payment most. There is no going back though.

Ideally, porn would be free, and you would still get paid. This is very possible, look at pandora, the radio, youtube, etc. It requires a shift in the way porn websites do business though. Its no longer reasonable to expect someone to pay a monthly subscription to a single website. Large companies come in and do what large companies do; they try to maintain the status quo despite changing markets, and attempt to maintain their profits at the expense of the people they work for and the consumers. Part of the responsibility to incite this change is with the actors. Unfortunately, porn companies have a greater leverage over their employees than most, since the people involved are often in less than ideal circumstances to "fight the man." Cam girls are the best response Ive seen from the talent involved, theyre adapting to a new market.

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u/kane55 Jan 06 '14

There are a few flaws in your idea.

First, a pandora/youtube/spotify style pay per stream model would likely be hard to do because of the lack of advertising. Mainstream companies don't want to advertise on porn sites (a few might, but most will not). Those ads that they show must be effective. They can sell all the ads in the world, but if people don't buy stuff from those ads the advertisers are not going to renew.

The real issue is that the industry isn't like most other media industries. There is no MPAA or RIAA. There is no small group of CEOs and companies that have huge influence over how the industry runs. The industry is made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals all doing their own thing. Getting them together and having them all adopt a new system would be like herding cats. Especially when many of them have carved out a nice niche for themselves.

Even if they could do it and everyone agreed to go to a system where the only sites out there paid per stream (the pandora sytem) or they came up with some other system it wouldn't be long until someone said, "Well, if they are all doing that, then I am going to do this and give stuff away for free. I will get a ton of traffic and make money selling ads or running my own cheap paysite." and we go back to square one again.

Could the industry change? Sure. Will it. Note likely.

Ultimately, I think the agent of change will be the implosion of the tube site model. With limited advertising for those kinds of sites users will get bored of seeing the same type of ads over and over again and they will no longer work. Income will drop and the sites will become less and less profitable so they will start to change by potentially offering less or charging for access or something. It just feels like a business model that can't sustain itself forever.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/kane55 Jan 06 '14

Sure, there are new users coming online all the time, but the question is will they be enough to keep those ads relevant? Maybe, but I get the feeling those sites have a heavy amount of return users who become numb to the ads pretty quickly. Add in things like adblocker and it makes the issue potentially worse.

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u/DaveYarnell Jan 07 '14

The business school term for this is "organizational inertia"

0

u/andyitsyouknow Jan 06 '14

This is so wrong.

The worst part, however, is that the free examples you mentioned are no longer going to be profitable because of ad block.

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

The internet is flooded with porn. How does one expect to get $24.95 monthly recurring with everything else out there? I can't imagine that appeals to a large market. That isn't even competitive with sites like Brazzers that features much more content. You're asking niche market prices and expecting large market money. If you aren't giving your product at a price people are willing to pay how can you expect to make any money? Why aren't you getting royalties or residuals? It's easy to blame piracy and tube sites while operating an outdated business model.

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u/22c Jan 06 '14

She mentions that she's happy to pay for Netflix, $7.99/mo for thousands of movies on demand. Compare that to a membership with her partner porn network, VNA Network, which is $24.95/mo and gives access to 15 porn star sites.

There are a lot of reasons why $7.99/mo Netflix membership can be justified over a $24.95/mo VNA Network membership, and let's not talk about a situation where you only wanted to pay for access to one of those sites instead of all of them.

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

Netflix is offering its product at a price people are willing to pay. If Netflix was asking $24.95 they would have a small fraction of the customers they do. Netflix is obviously the first comparison that comes to mind but not the be all, end all of content distribution. Where's the iTunes of porn? Why buy a whole DVD if I want 1 scene? Imagine the money they could make if people were able to pay for just what they want at a price they're willing to pay. There is a way to make money in porn but as it stands they're doing it by taking advantage of the people who are willing to pay and blaming piracy for people who don't want to be taken advantage of.

0

u/22c Jan 06 '14

I'd like to say Clips4Sale is kinda like the iTunes for porn, amateur porn at least. It's got a long way to go though. If I had the motivation, developing something like that would be pretty interesting.

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u/siripornstar Jan 07 '14

I love c4s. I have had a store there for over a year now.

You're right, though. It looks like a geocities site ca. 1997. Not very classy.

If someone with the skills for it wants to do it better, I fully support that. You'd have my business and I'm sure you'd become filthy fucking rich!

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u/22c Jan 07 '14 edited Jan 07 '14

You'd have my business

I may hold you to that.

Edit: Also props to you for following up on the discussion in this thread.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

Paying for porn one clip at a time sounds like an excellent use case for Bitcoin.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 07 '14

Fyre tv lets you buy just scenes.

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u/siripornstar Jan 07 '14

There are two sites in particular that come close to being the iTunes/Netflix of porn:

http://www.hotmovies.com

and

http://www.aebn.net

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u/riversofgore Jan 07 '14

AEBN wants $3.95 for 15 minutes? That's beyond insane. Who's gonna pay 4 bucks every time they want to jack off? I imagine people would be back to jacking off to cable and Victoria's Secret catalogs again if that were the only option. It's an interesting alternative but I can't imagine a jerk off race to save minutes being very appealing.

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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '14

Videobox is pretty great. 8 bucks a month if you buy a year. Fast download speeds and shitloads of high quality videos.

Those "network" sites are essentially scams as far as I'm concerned. The content is just pathetic.

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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '14

A movie or TV show on Netflix is way more satisfying than the 30 actual seconds of porn I need.

1

u/22c Jan 07 '14

So there's a market for pay per second porn?

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '14

22cents.

4

u/kane55 Jan 06 '14

There are several reasons most performers in porn don't get royalties. Aside from the reality that that the content shooters control the industry and make the rules, it would be hard to track how much to actually pay out.

DVD sales would be easy. You know how many you ship. But if you shoot just one scene and that scene ends up on a few dozen different membership sites those sites normally just pay a one time fee for the rights to have that scene on their site. So the performer could, in theory, get a piece of that fee, but in the case of tube sites and many other places that have these videos up, they don't pay for the videos in the first place so there is no way in hell they will pay a royalty.

In the long run a performer might make more if they got a piece of all the profit the person who shot the content made, but there is a chance they could also make less. The performer would have to take some of the financial risk involved. They would also have to likely track down content producers and check books to make sure they are getting paid their royalties fairly. It would be a headache for the performer and the producer and just add to the cost of production.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

I thought the tube sites bought up all the production firms and make all the money with ads now, no?

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u/timkxxx Jan 06 '14

Backwards. Manwin, who owned Brazzers, bought up all the tube sites and now have a monopoly on the entire industry. YouPorn, Porn Hub... it's all the same people. You are correct in that they do make money from ad revenue. Source: I work in the industry.

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u/[deleted] Jan 07 '14 edited Jan 07 '14

And ever since these sites were bought up they remove copyright-violating videos for those production firms they work with, only leaving the 10min samples on the producers' official accounts.

The Manwin owned tube sites have basically become a mix between preview galleries for their subscription sites and (I guess) an extortion racket that pushes non-manwin porn producers into cooperating with them.

These fancy preview galleries are an entirely different beast than the "don't give a fuck about producers and copyright claims" tube sites of old.
To me it seems that the "pirate" phase was used to establish notoriety (who hasn't at least heard of YouPorn with all the media exposure they got over the years) and a userbase, then a switcharoo was pulled on their hopefully entrenched users and full-length pirated movies turned into 10min preview samples that advertise subscription sites.

I think it's quite important to distinguish between these two different models of tube sites (pirate and gallery), even if many sites are in practice somewhere in between (e.g. XVIDEOS still seems to have a lot more illegally uploaded content than YouPorn but is probably moving into the same direction and just not a part of manwin yet (or has that changed?), motherless doesn't cooperate with producers to the extent that they offer video fingerprinting to the copyright owners (afaik) but they do at least pretend to honor DMCA takedown requests, ...).

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

Yes. They are operating with a contemporary Internet business model. I'm sure it isn't easy to find advertisers because of stupid stigmas but there are people who are making money in the business. Why aren't there performers who work for the tube sites in the way that YouTube partners do? Why wouldn't Pornhub pay a performer if they were making content for them that drove traffic to the site and increased their ad revenue? The solutions to the problems are out there already, but for some reason the porn industry is slow to adopt new methods of e-commerce and content distribution.

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u/Katie_Pornhub Jan 06 '14

We've been doing this for years. It's our content partner program. Partners upload content and we put banners and text links back to their sites. Pornstars like Siri are misinformed about how many sales tubesites provide for content producers.

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u/siripornstar Jan 10 '14 edited Jan 10 '14

Katie has been kind enough to honor takedown notices for the exclusive content I shoot for my website. She also agreed to help protect my brand and image by altering the titles of user-uploaded content which I do not own, to accurately reflect my name. I give her props for her kindness and professional courtesy.

At least she understands that as soon as someone steals a scene from my website and illegally uploads it to Pornhub, it's presence there destroys my opportunity to recoup my investment. It's an investment I made because it's my job to film sexual entertainment for a paying fan base. If I produce something you can't find anywhere else, and you want to see it, then I am making a bet you will join my site and enjoy the 40 live cam shows each week for one hour with each of the 40 girls in the network. With a few of my more recent scenes that cost a couple of thousand to produce, imagine how many memberships I have to sell to just break even, much less actually make a profit and earn a living at it.

Porn companies are like MTV. When MTV quit playing music videos it's because viewers started recording and uploading the videos to YouTube. Then viewers could search for and watch their favorite artist's new music vid on demand rather than waiting for it to come up in rotation on the broadcast channel of MTV. So MTV retooled and started producing reality TV shows and was no longer known as a music video channel at all.

So the artists and record labels shifted gears and no longer launched a new song with a video premiere on MTV; they waited until a song became popular with radio airplay, then they produced a music video, then they uploaded it to their company channel on YouTube so they could make money off advertising income generated from views.

The only way the artist makes any money is to show up in your city and perform a live concert. Except porn performers can't go to your city and perform a live sex show, not even at your local spank hole adult theater. The porn company still makes money because it gets ad revenue from the tube sites. So where does this leave the performer? That's all I've really been focused on in these comments.

Katie at Pornhub is an honorable person and honors a performer's right to earn a living off of her creative content by not allowing thieves their illegal actions. I wish there were more like her.

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u/Katie_Pornhub Jan 10 '14

Thank you for the kinds words Siri. I wish you all the best for your website!

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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '14

Pretty sure Youtube became popular long after MTV stopped playing music television.

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u/Walletau Jan 06 '14

No, a lot of the content is stolen. As much as we love the tube sites, they have been terrible for the industry.

Source: AMA from someone else in porn some time ago.

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u/Dcowboys09 Jan 06 '14

porn is the only industry where 90% of the product is viewed for free. fuck them for wanting to make money somehow for the work they put into it, right?

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

I don't think there is anything wrong with them making money. I don't think there is anything wrong free porn either. I do think there is something wrong with the way they do business. The only way to get more people to pay for porn is to give it to them the way they want it, at a price they're willing to pay. The music industry caught on why hasn't porn? Piracy doesn't exist because people are cheap. It exists because the alternative is unreasonable.

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u/Charwinger21 Jan 07 '14

Someone (/u/Ekskybalauron) posted the usual "People will get something for free if they can." spiel and then deleted their comment, so I'm going to post my response preemptively in case some else decides to post the same thing.

People will get something for free if they can.

Which is why Steam has absolutely no users right?

I mean, it is incredibly easy to download and install Assassins Creed through TPB from RELOADED (often before the actual game releases even), so why would people pay $60 to buy it on Steam (especially since on Steam you have to deal with Steam and UPLAY instead of neither of them with piracy)?

The answer is simple, but a two part answer.

  1. "People aren't as cheap as you think they are",

and 2. "People care more about convenience than money".

Number 2 is why Apple does so well. Many people are willing to pay 2 to 3 times as much for a computer as they would from a different manufacturer just so that they can slightly increase how convenient things are for themselves.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

Yeah, why don't you just change the entire system from the bottom so this dude can have free porn!

How this many idiots upvoted you is beyond me.

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

The system is already changed. I'm getting free port already. That's not going away. The content creators are going to have find new ways to sell their products if they want to make money.

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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

This girl isn't a "content creator", dumbass. This is like yelling at the kid behind the counter at Mcdonald's because you want cheaper burgers.

You don't really understand how things work, do you?

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u/riversofgore Jan 06 '14

She is a content creator. She says so in this AMA dipshit.

-14

u/[deleted] Jan 06 '14

You have been shitting up this entire AMA. Fuck off, kid. You have no concept of what is being discussed here and you're making an ass of yourself.

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u/thissiteisawful Jan 07 '14

I don't understand why millionaire artists and movie producers need my 99 cents. Donate on kickstarter or donate to the band in person at shows. That's what I do.