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Everything else in the world seems to have gone up in price over the last 6-12 months so why havent porn membership prices raised also?
Do you think prices for porn site memberships should be raised based on what is happening in the 'real world' or do you think the fact that porn site pricing stays the same is what keeps the industry booming in times of economical pressure?
Regards,
Lee
Entertainment is one of the first things people cut down on when in a recession. Raising prices would be fiscally irresponsible for a program, but please LET THEM DO IT! more money for me :D
One thing I like about the recession is that the price of models has gone down. Every cloud has a silver lining I guess :sunny:
I think that the inflation in physicall goods has been driven by hikes primarily in transportation and energy-related costs.
Porn, on the other hand, hasn't seen much in the way of increases in hard costs, and as Squirt points out, model fees, one of the largest expenses, has actually gone down a little bit due to increased availability (people out of work, more people willing to do porn, etc.)
Additionally, the market pressures from increased competition, both in the DVD world and in the online world, have forced prices to stay the same or even decrease.
I agree with Squirt that it would be near-suicidal to raise prices. I would suspect that even the largest and most popular sites would simply see their customers go to the competition since porn is getting so close to a commodity.
On the other hand, I do think that innovative pricing strategies, variable pricing, and so forth (sort of similar to the capacity-based pricing the airlines use) might be interesting to try.
Supply and demand....Demand is stable, but supply has increased dramatically! You can't raise prices when supply is flooding the market.
I personally think online porn prices are going to drop dramatically over the next several years. If LaLa.com concept catches on everything is going to change....
Before the internet, there was a huge financial barrier to entry into the porn market. Making movies required expensive cameras, developing, stages, and distribution into a very finite network of hardcore movie theaters. Newcomers were not welcome.
Print porn was not nearly as hard to break into, but still the costs of getting photos with a camera of decent quality into a magazine on a rack was high.
The costs of production plunged as technology made film making cheaper and much easier to get images from studio to magazine cover. A small start up could slop together a DVD that fought for shelf space with titles from decades-old studios. Older studios had to cut production costs (and quality) to compete with the newcomers. "Porn Star" no longer meant someone who appeared in a porn film because there were 15,000 films released the previous year and not everyone in those films is a "star"
The internet brought a new market and a huge boom. The internet marketers were making extraordinary profits in the early days. These huge profits brought starry-eyed dreamers to believe they too could make huge money with little work. The hobby-operators with low costs and low expectations chipped away at the market, each one taking a few members a month but with hundreds to thousands of small operators the porn market pie becomes sliced into thinner and thinner pieces. Pirates who steal bits and give it away ( I was just offering your customers a free taste so they would come back and BUY from you! -bullshit- ) cut into profits.
With so much porn available and so many forces working against the producers, many are working much harder just to earn a reasonable profit, some are struggling to break even and many have thrown in the towel.
In a market like this, raising prices would not result in an increase in revenue.